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| Subhadramati |
This blog post is part of the Blogging Carnival for Nonviolence.
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On
our last winter retreat, a woman told me about a moment of
realization. She began by saying she’d never been able to
understand why Triratna Buddhism emphasizes vegetarianism. She had
been adamant that she was not going to become a vegetarian in order
to be a ‘good Buddhist’, and of course she could reel off
examples of eminent Buddhists who are not vegetarian.
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| Not about Being Good |
But
then, in meditation, she had a spontaneous vision of a flock of wild
geese flying overhead. They were so beautiful and so free. It
suddenly seemed appalling to diminish such freedom and beauty by
shutting those creatures in a cage, then killing them and eating
their flesh.
Simultaneously
she realized that in some way the geese were part of her, and she was
part of them. She said, 'I knew that to hurt them would be to hurt
myself'. I can still remember the radiance of her expression as she
spoke. She had had a glimpse of the deeper truth that the practice
of vegetarianism is trying to point to, the truth of the
connectedness of all.
It
was a concrete experience of the fact that, the more you resonate
with other
living beings as living beings, the more you’ll become unable
to
harm them. It will be more natural to help them, and, in doing so,
you yourself will realize your humanity more deeply.
However,
if, through a lack of this resonance, you negate the lives
of others,
you will negate your own humanity – as do certain of the
characters
in Martin Amis’s, God’s Dice.
The hero of the story is Bujak,
who is endowed with super-human
physical strength. He arrives home
to find his mother, daughter, and
granddaughter all brutally murdered –
and the two murderers still
on the premises. He could easily kill them
but doesn’t. ‘I had no
wish to add to what I found’, he says.
'I
saw that they weren’t human beings at all. They had no idea what
human life was. No idea! Terrible mutations, a disgrace to their
human moulding.'
Here
the murderers, by their violent act, have absolutely negated the
solidarity of one human being – as a human being – with another.
They
have become, in Bujak’s term, ‘mutations’ – although in human
form – because they are so destitute of the fellow feeling that is part of
the nature of being human that they have deprived their
fellow human
beings of the thing that was most precious to them –
their very lives.
Killing
may be the most extreme form of violence. But violence
can be
defined as ‘doing
to another person, by whatever means, what he
does not want us to do
to him’. This means you are violent every time
you try to assert yourself at
the expense of another.
The
Oxford English Dictionary tells us that being ‘inhuman’ is being
‘destitute of natural kindness’.
Being truly human then must consist
in being able to recognize and act from that sense of natural kindness,
that sense of solidarity
between one living being and another.
That
means that every time you breach that solidarity, you are going
against something that is natural to human nature. You are in fact
negating your own humanity. In contrast, becoming more deeply
human
means learning to affirm others. You’ll tend to affirm others
where
you have an imaginative identification with them, and you’ll
tend
to negate others where you lack that.
