Eating

The Zero-Sum Game

The need to kill to survive complicates the kindness game

Compassion and Loving Kindness are two of the pillars of Buddhism. They are the Bodhisattva’s very bread and butter. But here’s my question:

Even Bodhisattvas have to eat, and eating — even if we assume a vegan such — involves some degree of killing: plants are life, too. And once we abandon the vegan for the carnivore, well, eating amounts to planet-wide slaughter, doesn’t it?

You can pat the cow on the head and even kiss those cow lips as you lead her to her death by butcher gun or club or knife depending on where on the planet you reside (and eat), but that certainly does not add up to loving kindness and compassion in my book.

The very first step along the loving-kindness and compassion path would be to stop eating meat. Kick the meat habit. Anything else would amount to hypocrisy of a particularly pernicious kind.

That, however, would only return us to the ongoing mass slaughter of plants. That said, I am pretty sure that plants don’t feel pain like animals and humans do, just not wired that way. But I’m not quite as sure to what extent plants are not actually, on some level, sentient, and, again on some level, in love with their own life. A life they wouldn’t mind hanging on to, thank you very much.

Not so, however, should the Bodhisattva like to eat and survive in order to free all beings (including the plants) in the universe?

A bit of a paradox at this.

I’ve pointed this out before: life on earth is a zero-sum game: someone or something has to die in order for someone or something else to live. That, to put it succinctly, sucks.

If God created heaven and earth, he would have had all the pre-time time in the soon-to-be universe to plan this thing and get it right. But methinks he rushed things and didn’t think things quite through and as a result we have a mess on our hands — rather, God has a mess on His hands, or should have if He’s anywhere near ethical about this issue and responsible for his acts of creation.

Or, and this is the image I get the as yet unformed Universe is a seething, swirling porridge of unbridled energy of nearly unimaginable proportions — well, it has to be imaginable to someone or something, i.e., a creator, but for all intents and purposes unimaginable (as in infinite) to the rest of us worker bees.

This said creator now gathers an equally infinite swirl of undifferentiated (as in unfragmented, unseparated) life and pours the entire lot into the seething, swirling universe and starts stirring to mix life into this thing really well.

Colliding with this mass of impolite energy, life tries to divide and conquer, i.e., atomizing itself in to bits of sizes equal to the porridge bits to set up an infinite number of one-on-ones and so fight its way out of this Universe soup (creator observing, interestedly, hm…).

Well, the first few rounds clearly to the porridge, the soup making some minor headway in certain areas: forming stars here and there, for example, and planets here and there, and — big win — single-cell organisms in places. Not sure how this is going to get life out of this mess, but apparently this is the way to go, so thinks life.

Fast forward a few billion years (just an afternoon, if that, for the creator) and we have today’s Earth, eating each other for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

I don’t see how this is ever going to get us out of here, to be honest.

Okay, back to the Bodhisattva: shouldn’t he or she be kind to all life? Should love not be universal? I’m sure it should be, and I’m sure that love would be the thing to get the soup out of the porridge intact, but as long as you need to eat, I don’t think love will be pure enough to do the trick.

How then?

I don’t know, I just finished lunch and am thinking about a nap at this point.

© Wolfstuff