| | On Fridays, I have a 30-minute sit with a meditation group at work, and then we eat lunch together. Today I was asking my meditation buddies at lunch what they do about ants or cockroaches in the house, explaining that I don't like to kill them but can't convince them to just leave my house. I feel intense aversion to cockroaches. In fact, although I won't kill them, I will find ways to get my husband to come kill them so that it is not "on" me, which raises the question whether inducing my spouse to kill for me is on me, after all. I was shocked that every single Buddhist at the lunch table said, without the slightest compunction, "I just kill them if they are ants, mosquitoes, or roaches." Then they detailed all the ways you can devise for killing ants, including elaborate baiting schemes and fumigation bombs.
This conversation reminded me of something that happened about a year ago. I had woken up in the middle of the night and gone downstairs for a glass of water. When I walked into the kitchen, I saw an adult male mosquito dying a slow, painful death on the edge of the kitchen sink.
Those of you who are parents, have you ever gotten down on your small child's level (physically) and looked closely into his or her face and been shocked by the full-on sentience there? I remember that I used to ignore the intricacies of my son's being for whole weeks at a time when he was small, wrapped up in my adult worries and penchant for teaching and directing him from on high rather than receiving and listening to him at his level. Then one day I would get down on my knees, look into his face on his level, and really listen to his speech and look into his eyes for every nuance of expression. The result was always astonishing to me. I was full of the sense of this incredible being in this little boy, this being that my "directing things" spent most of our time together glossing over, subsuming, refracting, and ignoring--even though he was my only precious child.
A dying adult mosquito is like a child in this way if you take the moment to tune in. The moquito on that night had a broken left wing and several crushed legs. Moreover, he was caught in a puddle of water and was struggling to drag himself, by his two good legs, out. I leaned in closely and just observed him a while, "listened" to him, if you will, to what he was experiencing. I saw that he had a "will" to live, to escape that water puddle, no matter what, and live on even without flight and ability to walk, no matter the pain and struggle. I could see that he was suffering. I could see his fierce struggle, the stress, the strong will, and the defeating pain he was in as he flapped in the puddle and tried over and over again to save himself. Strangely, this affected me greatly. I felt in a moral bind, somehow horrible for merely watching.
I dried up the little puddle with the edge of a paper towel so that the mosquito was at least not struggling to get to dry "land." Then I deliberated whether I should kill the doomed mosquito, to put it out of its misery. The Buddha, I had read, condoned killing under no circumstances. He permitted his monks to fight back in self-defense if attacked, but not with an intention to kill the attacker. According to the Buddha, there are simply no other exceptions. However, the Buddha also said that one has to test his ideas and come to accept his findings experientially, not on faith, and moral training comes down to intention. As I stood there over the mosquito, I remembered a passage I had read by Trungpa Rinpoche in which he said he would kill anyone who was about to press the Doomsday Nuclear Missile Button, and do it gladly. I thought at the time I read it how weird a statement it was.
Finally, unable to bear watching the mosquito flail about another hopeless minute, I crushed it, killing it in one swift instant. The next day, my now teenaged son was discussing another matter with me and asked me this classic moral dilemma question: "If you saw a train heading down a track toward 5 stangers, obviously about to kill them, and you could stop the killing, but only by diverting the train to a side track on which stood one person who would be killed, what would you do?" I almost instantly answered that I would save the 5 people and divert the train to kill the one person. My son said, "We are morally divergent; that is the wrong answer."
My son's point was that, from the point of view of each person on the tracks, he or she had one life to lose, his or her only life. The other lives had no additional value, since each person had one life and only one, and from each point of view that life was the one to be taken. Without any rationale to value 5 "one life" instances over one "one life" instance, my son would have no moral justification for intentionally intervening in the scenario. I argued that not diverting the train was in essence killing the 5 original people. my son disagreed. He stated that he didn't set the train in motion or put the people there, and to divert the train to the one person was to directly kill that person and incur moral responsibility for the choice in a way that merely observing the original 5 die did not.
Thanissaro Bhikkhu writes, "Thus, from the Buddha's perspective, encouraging a sick person to relax her grip on life or to give up the will to live would not count as an act of compassion. Instead of trying to ease the patient's transition to death, the Buddha focused on easing his or her insight into suffering and its end." I'm not sure how this would work for a mosquito.
By contrast, in a 1996 article entitled "Dalai Lama Backs Euthanasia in Exceptional Circumstances" regarding his position on legal euthanasia, the Dalai Lama is asked his view on euthanasia, the Dalai Lama said Buddhists believed every life was precious and none more so than human life, adding, "I think it's better to avoid it. But at the same time I think with abortion, (which) Buddhism considers an act of killing ... the Buddhist way is to judge the right and wrong or the pros and cons." He cited the case of a person in a coma with no possibility of recovery, or a woman whose pregnancy threatened her life or that of the child or both, where the harm caused by not taking action might be greater. "These are, I think from the Buddhist viewpoint, exceptional cases," he said. "So it's best to be judged on a case by case basis."
Back when I was following a Tibetan Buddhist tradition, I told one of the nuns the story about my resident mosquito. She said that my killing it was a wrong action because I had interfered with that being's karma--although this statement rested on the notion that one needs to live through such torment as the mosquito did in order to expend any undesirable karmic accumulation.
Thoughts?
Are you surprised that every person in my mediation group nonchalantly stated that he just kills bugs if they are ants, mosquitos, or roaches?
And, perhaps more urgently, how do I convince these ants to take their party outside? |