Life

[apothecary]

Do not waste life.

Life is destroyed all around us. Each of us has the ability to destroy life. However, the essence of life is immutable and pretty much entirely cyclical.

No matter what you destroy, it merely changes form and begins life as something else. Each thing that is destroyed is renewed again and is part of a cycle.

Atomicity proves this, that essentially all matter is composed of the same material at the lowest building blocks, and these building blocks are as said before, immutable.

However, life is easily wasted. Wasted life is lost to the void forever, it is unrenewable and each utterly unique nanosecond of life is more precious than any rare jewel.

Do not waste life.

[bsm2wr]

Would you also hold to the buddhist principle that all life is sacred, and to avoid killing any organism where possible, even a lowly horsefly that was biting your elbow or a tick that had bitten your dog?

Not so easy to adhere to but worthy.

[apothecary]

Just because something is difficult, it doesn't mean it is also worthy.

There is a buddhist story, that a bodhisattva on the path to true nibbana had finished his morning meditation, and noticed a rock which had escaped his sweeping.

He threw the rock from the garden, and it flew over the hill and killed a bird. The bird was reincarnated as a boar, and several years later in the hill above the bodhisattvas home as it was scrounging for food, it unlodged a boulder which fell and crushed the bodhisattva.

To me, this fable represents the fallacy of Buddhism.

Karma is meant to be a levelling of the forces of nature which are neither inherently good or evil. What irks me is that sometimes it is simply part of the cyclical nature of reincarnation, sometimes it is an immediate (as in this fable) levelling of the score, and sometimes it's both!

The bodhisattva did not purposefully murder the bird, nor was it simply a matter of survival. In fact, the bodhisattva had no idea of the birds existance! If he had continued living he may have helped many people begin the path to nibbana.

What I feel Buddhism fails to take into account that just as life is sacred, death and destruction of physical entities should be just as sacred, as they are huge parts of "life".

I bet you there are plenty of Buddhists (if not all of them) that have unknowingly killed flies or ants as they live.

The point of my post was exactly that. Life is destroyed, and there should be no seriousness in the issue.

Natue conservation, war, murder are serious issues, but none of them should exist. These are serious issues by mans own doing!

All should eat, drink and be merry. The spirit of gravity is not the natural state of man, nor should it be the state of mankind to come!

One must accept death and decay as the yin of lifes yang. However both are lost forever if either is wasted.

[reptyle]

I think the point of that story is less about the retribution that karmic forces seemed to exert than the cyclical nature of life and death. Which is what you said. also, assuming that he did not "know" the bird was there is superficially correct, however, it could also be said that his mind placed the bird there in agreeance with the bird choosing to be there. Being unconcious of an event in reality does not negate you having taken part in creating it, as there are many subtle level of mind which form the perceptions of time, space, relative position to other entity's, form etc it is possible for your subtle minds karmis influence to effect the concious existance.

In truth it could be said that death is simply one of these agreements your concious mind makes, for if you ae able to percive the transition between "lives" then have you actually adhered to the concept of death?

And who is to say that the bird agreed to being dead?

The realisation that all these things are percptions created by your mind based upon metaphorical interpretations of the self is the key to being free from the "apparent" (it is apparent because it does exist as a perception, but is in "" because it is not ultimately true.) cyclical nature of human existence.

maybe