Saving Fish from Drowning - Heal Burma

SAVING FISH FROM DROWNING
“Man, that is one miserable existence,” Roxanne said. The others
echoed similar sentiments.
Esmé was close to tears. “Make them stop.”
Miss Rong tried to ease their discomfort. “This is karma,” she
tried to explain in her rudimentary English. “Past life this buffalo
must be doing bad things. Now suffer, so next life get better....”
What she was trying to say was this: Your situation and form in life
are already determined before you are born. If you are a buffalo suf­
fering in mud, you must have committed wrongs upon others in a
previous existence, and thus, you deserve this particular reincarna­
tion. Perhaps this buffalo was once a man who killed an innocent
person. Maybe he was a thief. By suffering now, he would earn a
much cushier reincarnation in the next go-round. It’s an accepted
way of thinking in China, a pragmatic way of viewing all the misfor­
tunes of the world. You cannot change a buffalo into a man. And if
a buffalo does not mash the mud, who else would do this job?
Miss Rong blithely continued her philosophical talk: “So family
must having a house, house must having bricks, buffalo must having
smash mud. Do not be sad, this the way of life. . . .” She enjoyed the
opportunity to inform her charges of Buddhist ideas. She had heard
that many Americans, especially those who travel to China, love
Buddhism. She did not realize that the Buddhism the Americans be­
fore her loved was Zen-like, a form of not-thinking, not-moving, and
not-eating anything living, like buffaloes. This blank-minded Bud­
dhism was practiced by well-to-do people in San Francisco and
Marin County, who bought organic-buckwheat pillows for sitting on
the floor, who paid experts to teach them to empty their minds of the
noise of life. This was quite different from the buffalo-torture and
bad-karma Buddhism found in China. Miss Rong also did not real­
ize that most Americans, especially those with pets, have great sym­
pathy for animals in misery, often more so than for miserable
humans. Animals, with their inability to speak for themselves, the
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