seventh world of chan buddhism - Zen Buddhist Order of Hsu Yun

killing of animals being unambiguously cruel. Helping other people to kill recreationally is,
however, honest and legal. Many family men are employed by country squires who
occasionally hunt foxes. What should they do when ordered to prepare for the hunt? Quit or
get fired? What about the hound breeder and the blacksmith? They also contribute their skill
to the hunt. If the only way in the world a man can earn a living and feed his family is to
guide people on safari, well... we can hope he makes sure no nursing females are taken and
that all the kills are clean, but we can't ask him either to remove himself from our Buddhist
ranks or to abandon his responsibilities to his family. The guide, furthermore, is not alone in
lending his talents to the kill and may not be singled out for criticism. The hunter may have
been outfitted by a pious sporting goods salesman and transported to the safari site through
the services of a upstanding travel agent and a devout pilot. A decent, loving clerk may have
sold him his hunting license. What are we asking here? Should Buddhist pilots refuse to fly
to Nairobi?
May a Buddhist perform or assist in the performance of an abortion? Good question.
(My personal answer is, `God, I hope not.') But... it is honest and it is legal and sometimes
greater compassion in shown assisting in an abortion than in denying the procedure. Health
care professionals have to decide for themselves whether they consider terminating an early
pregnancy to be killing. The law more or less states that if a child can make it on its own, its
life may not be aborted. For this reason, third trimester pregnancies are usually not even
considered. In some unsophisticated societies, an infant doesn't exist as a human being until
it is named. If the mother does not have sufficient food for it, she lets it die anonymously.
Wherever medicines or skills are available, abortions are performed.
No society has existed without practicing abortion and/or infanticide. Some societies
are, however, more skilled than others and kill less women. Ultimately, this is the issue.
Legal abortions are at least safe. Where abortion is not legal, the rich can afford to go where
it is legal to obtain a safe procedure. The poor, removed from the traditions of native
cultures, are reduced to the often lethal quackery of back-alley abortionists. Abortion,
however, is not and can never be anything but a remedy of last resort. It is not an acceptable
substitute for the Pill or other birth control methods.
In "The Empty Mirror", Janwillem van de Wetering's fascinating account of his
experiences in a Japanese Zen Monastery, he relates how villagers would often bring their
unwanted kittens to the monastery. The task of disposing of them fell to a Buddhist priest
who would put them into a sack and drown them. What else could this priest have done?
Should he have kept a large snake as a monastery pet, thrown the kittens to the dogs, or let
the kittens starve to death? People who get indignant about the priest's solution have lived
too long in an oxygen-deprived stratosphere. Down on earth tough life-and-death choices
have to be made.
It is a certainty that the villagers knew or suspected that the kittens were being killed.
But they did what so many of us do. We don't have `the heart' or we are `religiously opposed'
CHAPTER 15 RIGHT LIVELIHOOD
S EVENTH W ORLD O F C HAN B UDDHISM
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