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Karma and Meat - Eating - veg5.txt [1/1]
Vegetarianism: A Means to a Higher End
>From the book "The Hare Krishna Book of Vegetarian Cooking"
By Adiraja Dasa
(c) 1989 The Bhaktivedanta Book Trust International
Used with permission
Karma
The Saskrit word karma means "action", or more specifically, any material
action that brings a reaction that binds us to the material world. Althought
the idea of karma is generally associated with Eastern philosophy, many
people in the West are also coming to understand that karma is a natural
principle, like time or gravity, and no less inescapable. For every action
there is a reaction. Acording to the law of karma, if we cause pain and
suffering to other living beings, we must endure pain and suffering in
return, both individually and collectively. We reap what we sow, in this life
and the next, for nature has her own justice. No one can escape the law of
karma, except those who understand how it works.
To understand how karma can cause war, for example, let's take an
illustration from the Vedas. Sometimes a fire starts in a bamboo forest
when the trees rub together. The real cause of the fire however, is not the
trees but the wind that moves them. The trees are only the instuments. In
the same way, the principle of karma tell us that the United States and the
Soviet Union are not the real causes of the friction that exists between
them, the friction that may well set off the forest fire of nuclear war. The
real cause is the imperceptible wind of karma generated by the world's
supposedly innocent citizens.
According to the law of karma, the neighborhood supermarket or
hamburger stand (the local abortion clinic too, but that could be the
subject for another book) has more to do with the threat of nuclear war
than the White House or the Kremlin. We recoil with horror at the
prospects of nuclear war while we permit equally horrifying massacres
every day of the world's automated slaughterhouses.
The person who eats an animal may say that he hasn't killed anything, but
when he buys his neatly packaged meat at the supermarket he is paying
someone else to kill for him, and both of them bring upon themselves the
reactions of karma. Can it be anything but hypocritical to march for peace
and then go to McDonald's for a hamburger or go home to grill a steak?
This is the very duplicity that George Bernard Shaw condemned:
We pray on Sundays that we may have light
To guide our footsteps on the path we tread;
We are sick of war, we don't want to fight,
And yet we gorge ourselves upon the dead.
As Srila Prabhupada says in his explanations of Bhagavad-gita, "Those
who kill animals and give them unnecessary pain-as people do in
slaughterhouses-will be killed in a similar way in the next life and in many
lives to come...In the Judeo-Christian scriptures, it is stated clearly 'Thou
shalt not kill.' Nonetheless, giving all kinds of excuses, even the heads of
religion indulge in killing animals and, at the same time, try to pass as
saintly persons. This mockery and hypocrisy in human society brings
about unlimited calamities such as great war, where masses of people go
out onto the battlefields and kill each other. Presently they have
discovered the nuclear bomb, which is simply waiting to be used for
wholesale destruction." Such are the effects of karma.
Those who understand the laws of karma, know that peace will not come
from marches and petitions, but rather form a campaign to educate people
about the consequences of murdering innocent animals (and unborn
children). That will go a long way toward preventing any increase in the
world's enormous burden of karma. To solve the world's problems we
need people with purified consciousness to perceive that the real problem
is a spiritual one. Sinful people will always exist, but they shouldn't occupy
positions of leadership.
One of the most common objections non-vegetarians raise against
vegetarianism is that vegetarians still have to kill plants, and that this is
also violence. In response it may be pointed out that vegetarian foods such
as ripe fruits and many vegetables, nuts, grains, and milk do not require
any killing. But even in those cases where a plant's life is taken, because
plants have a less evolved consciousness than animals, we can presume
that the pain involved is much less than when an animal is slaughtered,
what to speak of the suffering a food-animal experiences throughout its
life.
It's true vegetarians have to kill some plants, and that is also violence, but
we do have to eat something, and the Vedas say, jivo jivasya jivanam: one
living entity is food for another in the struggle fo rexistence. So the
problem is not how to avoid killing altogether-and impossible
proposal-but how to cause the least suffering to other creatures while
meeting the nutritional needs of the body.
The taking of any life, even that of a plant, is certainly sinful, but Krishna,
the supreme controller, frees us from sin by accepting what we offer.
Eating food first offered to the Lord is something like a soldier's killing
during wartime. In a war, when the commander orders a man to attack,
the obedient soldier who kills the enemy will get a medal. But if the same
soldier kills someone on his own, he will be punished. Similarly, when we
eat only prasada, we do not commit any sin. This is confirmed in the
Bhagavad-gita (3.13) "The devotees of the Lord are realeased from all
kinds of sins because they eat food which is offered first for sacrifice.
Others, who prepare food for personal enjoyment, eat only sin." this
brings us to the central theme of this book: vegetarianism, although
essential, is not an end in itself.
