What the Buddha had to say about killing
Re: “Humans are natural-born killers – deal with it”, Have Your Say, February 4.
I found Michael Setter’s latest letter disquieting. Earlier, Michael revealed that he is a Buddhist practitioner. Yet now he dismisses as “naïve idealism” Jenny Moxham’s contention that killing our fellow humans is wrong and killing animals for food ought to be considered wrong. He affirms that we are the single biggest murderers of our own species, and admits that killing our fellow humans is wrong, but then goes on to list exceptions – war, punishment, self-preservation, etc.
Well, if we are the single biggest murderers of our own species, maybe we ought to stop. And once you start listing exceptions to any rule, sometimes the list never ends.
So far as the Buddha is concerned, maybe Michael and I are reading different versions of the Dhammapada, but Narada Mahathera’s translation includes the injunction: “All tremble at punishment. Life is dear to all. Comparing others with oneself, one should neither kill nor cause to kill.” (Verse 130)
Notice that the Buddha does not specify whether he is talking about killing human beings or killing animals. He simply prohibits killing. In the Buddhist texts he comes across as an extremely articulate individual. If he had intended to qualify this prohibition, I suspect he would have done so.
Michael affirms that “life is an inherently sacrificial process, and our world will not become a John Lennon-like paradise anytime soon”. This is true. Humankind has always been evolving along a moral continuum that starts with savagery and ends in moral perfection. Right now we seem to be stuck somewhere in the middle, and the end is not in sight. Michael Douglas summed up our condition perfectly in the movie “Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps”: “We’re all mixed bags.”
Moral perfection is a distant dream. Both as individuals and as a species, we are unlikely ever to attain it. That doesn’t mean we should stop trying. If we do, we’re bound to slide backwards. We may not be able to make ourselves perfect, but at least we can make ourselves better than we used to be. On the issue of eating meat, the vegans are on the right track.
Ye Olde Theologian
