This is a true story that happened in Japan.
In order to renovate the house, someone in Japan tears open the wall.
Japanese houses normally have a hollow space between the wooden walls. When tearing down the walls, he found that there was a lizard stuck there because a nail from outside hammered into one of its feet. He sees this, feels pity, and at the same time curious, as when he checked the nail, it was nailed 10 years ago when the house was first built.
What happened?
The lizard has survived in such position for 10 years! In a dark wall partition for 10 years without moving, it is impossible and mind boggling. Then he wondered how this lizard survived for 10 years without moving a single step-since its foot was nailed! So he stopped his work and observed the lizard, what it has been doing, and what and how it has been eating. Later, not knowing from where it came, appears another lizard, with food in its mouth.
He was stunned. For the lizard that was stuck by nail, another lizard has been feeding it for the past 10 years...
Such love happened even with this tiny creature ... Imagine? it has been doing that untiringly for 10 long years, without giving up hope on its partner.
What can we understand from the story above?
I. Love is there even amongst animals.
This feeling of care or protection towards once partner or children is even present in animals. Even we can see in every species of animals, the mother feeding food to its children, or the love between the partners.
So how different is a human being from an animal? If we analyse closely we can observe:
a) Animals also eat, humans also eat.
b) Animals also sleep, humans also sleep.
c) Animals mate and so do humans.
d) Animals defend themselves and so do humans.
e) Animals show the feelings of love, care and protection and so do humans.
So what is it that differentiates humans from animals? It is ‘athato brahm jignasa”, i.e to enquire about the self and Supreme. To enquire about ones real position. Who am I? Why I have to undergo birth and death? Why so many miseries are there in life? What is the cycle of birth and death? What is karma and karmic reactions? This is the real enquiry. A dog cannot enquire these things. It can only bark and search where is food, where is sleep etc… but it cannot enquire why it is a dog. It will by default accept its real position as a dog. If a human being also engages his rare human birth in eating, sleeping, mating and defending business (ahaar, nidra, bhaya, maithun), then he is as good as an animal.
Therefore everyone must make this important enquiry and try to understand the real aim of life. The real aim of life is to surrender one to the Supreme Lord, and get rid of the cycle of repeated birth and death. And this can be achieved only in human form of life. No other form has that developed consciousness except the human form. But the human birth is very rare. Hence one must make best use of this rare opportunity.
II. Everyone has to suffer for his karmic reactions.
In this case, the lizard got stuck for 10 years at the same place, bearing the pain caused by the nail. But this question keeps coming as to why this happened to the lizard? For example, when people die in bomb blasts or other such incidents, then the usual feeling is , ‘oh, he was such a nice person. He never harmed anyone. Why he had to meet this terrible end’ ..etc.
Well, if a person is well behaved in this life does not mean he was well behaved in his earlier lives as well. We keep committing lot of sins forgetting that we will have to bear the reactions of our own activities. A human being, based on his karma, may be promoted to a higher life or demoted to animal life in his next birth. In both the lives, he bears the reactions of his activities. In higher life, he enjoys the fruits of his good deeds and in lower\animal life he suffers the reactions of his bad deeds. If a person dies prematuredly, one should understand that he was the cause of someone’s premature death in his past birth. The cycle of birth and death cannot be denied.
Just like the soul traverses from the body of a small child to yourth to old age, similarly the soul passes on to another body at the time of death. The soul keeps changing the bodies just like we change clothes. When our clothes become old we reject them and accept new ones. Sometimes our new clothes get torn apart and we reject them and accept new clothes again. Similarly when a body no more remains suitable for a soul to stay, it leaves this body and enters another body. This transition is death and re-birth.
So whatever karmic activities one performs in this birth, he must suffer the reactions either in this birth, or the next birth or next-to-next birth and so on.
In Mahabharata, when Bhishma was pierced with arrows, he enquired from Lord Krishna as to why he had to suffer so much of pain of these pierced arrows. At that time Lord informed Bhishma that in his 71st birth, Bhishma had thrown a snake on a cactus and the snake died a painful death after being pierced with the thorns of the cactus. Hence Bhishma was bound to suffer the reactions of this activity and hence he was also pierced with arrows in the same way.
Hence, we should be very careful in our dealings. Those who are killing the innocent animals for their sense gratification, i.e for satisfying the taste buds of their tongue, are sure to suffer in the same manner in their coming births, the way these animals are suffering whom they are eating. In Manu Samhita, it is described, "...He who gives permission, he who kills the animal, he who sells the slaughtered animal, he who cooks the animal, he who administers the distribution of the flesh, and at last he who eats the flesh are all murderers and all of them are punishable under the law of karma." Hence one should be merciful to all his fellow living entities, and try to remain always engaged in the service of the Supreme Lord, by whose mercy one can easily cross beyond this cycle of repeated birth and death.
4 comments:
This is an Wonderful Eye opener
I have a similar tale to tell. I work in a Biology lab, although all my work is on computers and I don't work on animals.
So in our lab, experiments are conducted on animals. And as per
"the university protocol" animals are killed after in-vivo experiments.
There were a couple of parakeets in our lab whose wings were somewhat damaged, but they were otherwise normal. Only a behavioral study had been done on them. Since one of our lab-mates had finished her thesis she wanted to dispose these off before leaving.
She had killed all the chicken she had experimented on (non behavioral study), and when it was the turn of the parakeets (behavioral subjects, otherwise healthy but with injured wings due to extended period of post-experiment captivity in a tiny cage), the couple started protecting each other.
Amazing! Right? Both of them tried to push each other away from the door, symbolically volunteering to come out first. What could be more touching? I was left wondering who is the animal here and who is humane?
I could not handle it anymore and I told my lab-mate that I wished to run a molecular biology experiment on them, since she is getting rid of them anyway. She was curious because I lack a biology background. But I insisted that I had a molecular and cell biology experiment to try. Now this lady did not know anything much about my research, so she could not decline and she left them for me.
Thus I trafficked the couple and now have them for pets.
Aarti didi, I would like it if you copy-paste this comment into a post.
Scientific reasons for embracing vegetarianism :
1) Animals by virtue of being animals, feel pain! The reason is their nature itself. If you sit in an uncomfortable posture, you should be warned to reposition yourself. If you plunge your hands in flame, you should feel the pain and withdraw your hand in reflex action! But the same is not true for plants. Therefore, plants neither have a brain, nor have a nervous system, nor do they feel pain. This is one of the reasons why many a neuroscientists(I count myself amongst them) are vegetarians. The only motion exhibited by plants is towards light.
2) Emotions! Unlike animals Plants do not have emotions. Simply because plants have no brain, no nervous system. In that sense, a plant is not emotionally hurt when you eat its sibling or child or parent! The same cannot be said for humans or animals.
3) If I were to feed on a plant, I am simply eating the plant. But if I were to feed on a cow, one is not only eating the cow, but also consuming everything the cow has eaten!
Let me illustrate. If I were to eat 1 kilo of vegetation daily, I would eat 365 kilos per year and 36500 of vegetation in my life. But if I were to 200 gms of meat and 800 gms of vegetation per day. I will eat 29200 kilos veg and 7300 kilos meat in my lifetime. Assuming that a goat eats 500 gms per day and takes one year to attain the weight of 30 kilos, So 1 kilo of goat meat = 30 kilos of vegetation! S0, 7300 kilos of meat = 7300*30 = 219000! So, I am almost consuming double the resources by having 20% of meat in my diet! This is not a baseless argument, go and refer to the articles posted to get clarity! This is one of the leading reasons why ecologists turn vegetarians! Not only that, with so many humans starving is it right to waste resources this way?
4) Bio-magnification of toxins. If an area of land is poisoned, you consume the plant you only consume the toxins in that plant. But, if you eat an animal you eat all the toxin the animal has accumulated over its lifetime! Simply because most of the inorganic toxins are not disposed and stay in the body of the animal. To give a simple example, if a deer lives as a herbivore all its life say it consumes 10 mg of lead, and disposes 4 mg of lead outside, a lion that eats a deer every third day is consuming 6 mg of lead per three days! This phenomenon is called bio-magnification. Ergo, Pollution affects plants less than herbivores and herbivores less than carnivores! Therefore, its also in your personal selfish interest to go vegetarian.
I do not believe in the nonsensical concept of choice in this matter! In my opinion, a person has no right to inflict pain, he/she has no right to cause emotional stress to other beings, he/she has no right to waste resources, he/she has no right to poison himself/herself! Govt.s are being stupid and hypocritical by not imposing a blanket ban on meat-eating. In a country when sadism, wastage of resources/excess pollution (your vehicle needs a pollution certificate), suicide through slow-poisoning are illegal, even meat eating must be banned! Period.
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