________________
Tulsa Jain Sangh Pratishtha Mahotsav 2004
everyone for his greed. To satisfy his yearning he engages in violent acts like hunting, killing, confining, or taking the life of freely roving innocent creatures and ignores their right to live happily. In this way, not only does he abuse the living creatures, but in turn abuses him self by doing this. He forgets that he too is part of the planet and cannot remove him self from the universal law of vibrations of the living which is, that which you throw out comes about.
To kill someone one has to be callous inwardly and then take a life. When one acts from a state of hard heartedness, one is gradually erasing the goodness in the self and reaching a point of hating everyone including the self. If one does not have reverence for one's own self, how can one have reverence for other living beings? So in this way the act of brutality perpetuates and the vicious circle of hate and violence continues.
One never stops to think that eating meat for taste involves much pain and torture to a lifel A life that cannot be created in the laboratoryl A very precious life with a strong will to livel A life that needs time to unfold its own destiny on the earth, for a premature death breaks the cycle of natural expression of that life. The philosopher Plutarch said, "But for the sake of some little mouthful of flesh, we deprive a soul of the life and time it had been born into the world to enjoy."
Very often people ask the question, "Why then, kill vegetables if not animals?" The Jain school of thought answers this question precisely. According to Jain philosophy, all life is divided into five categories: one sense, two sense, three sense, four sense, and five-sense beings having the sense of touch, taste, smell, sight and hearing. Vegetables are one-sense beings having only the sense of touch and animals are five-sense beings having all the five senses. The more the number of senses the more evolved the life is and more the feeling of pain. Life has to go through a laborious and strenuous process to evolve from one sense being to five-sense being. By slaughtering an animal one destroys completely the evolutionary progress of that life, which it has attained through suffering and pain. The vegetable kingdom has not yet reached the blood "consciousness" which the animals and humans have. So the degree of pain is less. Where there is blood, there are more feelings, more emotions and greater possibility of feeling deep pain.
Here I would like to quote the views of Roshi Philip Kapleau on the above subject. He says that, " Flesh eaters often say that if you eat only vegetables you are also taking life. What, then is the difference between taking the life of, say a pig and that of a vegetable? He answers: all the difference in the world. Does a potato cry out when it is taken from the earth the way a calf does when it is taken from its mother? Does a stick of celery scream in pain and terror when it is picked the way a pig does when it is being led to slaughter and is having its throat cut? And how sad, lonely, and frightened can a head of lettuce feel? We don't need a polygraph to demonstrate that plants have consciousness of a sort, but this consciousness is obviously of a rudimentary kind far different from that of mammals that have well developed nervous systems."
Jain Education Intemational
For Private & Personal Use Only
www.jainelibrary.org
