Role of Compassion in True Love

Acharya Prashant: Love and responsibility have to be reasonless. They have to be mad. One has to be crazy enough to put in everything for a seemingly trivial creature.

I don’t know whether you have heard this story from the life of the Buddha. One man was carrying a goat to slaughter, and the Buddha met him. Buddha says, “Kindly leave her. Look at her face, look at her eyes. You really want to kill?”

The man says, “I understand what you are saying. Even though I know a little bit of the scriptures, I am trained in formal religion. I know it is bad to kill. And when you say, ‘Look at the face of the goat, look at her eyes, feel her. Do you still want to kill?’ I know all of that. But I have a family to support and my responsibility is towards my family also.”

See, this is what responsibility does. It is always a give and take, something of calculation, something of compromise. So, responsibility in one dimension, on one side, becomes cruelty to somebody else. “I have a responsibility towards my family, towards my kids, hence this goat must go. Unless the meat is sold off, how will my kids survive?”

Now, the Buddha didn’t have any money. Buddhas usually don’t end up with money. So, he said, “How much flesh are you going to derive from this little creature?”

He said, “This many pounds.”

The Buddha said, “Fine. Take that much flesh from my body. Extract as much as you want from my thighs. Leave her.”

This is crazy, is it not? The life of a Buddha is precious. If you were some kind of a management consultant you would go to the Buddha and tell him, “If you survive, then you will be able to save a million such goats. So, for the sake of compassion itself, do not save this particular goat. If you save this one, then so many other goats are gone. Further, even if you save this one, this man still remains a killer. He will find some other goat to kill. His greed is not going to be killed. So, there's no point making this expensive trade-off.” And the more you think, the more insane the Buddha’s offer will appear to you.

That is love. That is responsibility.

‘Responsibility’ is not a cold word. Responsibility is not something that can arise from your calculations; responsibility is not something that you can sit and talk over a coffee table. Responsibility is when you are really going mad trying to save a little inconsequential goat.

You do not discuss responsibility in a seminar or in a conference where international speakers are flowing in and, very gravely, they are discoursing over responsibility. Responsibility is when you are away from all of that and fighting your own little thing. And what are you doing? You are probably putting everything at stake for one irrelevant kid who may not necessarily be your own kid.

That is responsibility. That does not look like responsibility; that will look like a lack of responsibility. People will accuse you. They will say, “You know what, you abandoned that conference, and that conference was about this or that grave issue facing the earth, and instead, you chose to go to that kid, that animal, to that river, or to yourself, or to that woman, and you wasted your time there. That’s so irresponsible of you!” That’s the shape and form of responsibility. It follows no mental patterns.

We won’t be able to do anything. We won’t be able to save ourselves. We won’t be able to save the animals. We won’t be able to do anything about the exploitation of milch cattle, about all those people who are slaughtering in the name of diet, about all the people who are hellbent that unless you consume meat your dietary requirements will not be met. We won’t be able to do anything about them unless there is insanity about our general living. If your life from morning till evening does not have that element of madness, then you will never be mad enough to be sane. Never.

The things that are required, the mind that is required, to save ourselves and to ensure that these birds continue to chirp is not the same mind with which we live from morning till evening.

Veganism or compassion towards animals—is it just about ensuring that they are not killed or that they are kept in humane conditions or that they are not exploited for fur and milk? The way we live… I mean, look at the chair you are sitting on. Look at this stuff I am sitting on. None of this is conducive to the Sahaja (natural) flow of this entire ecosystem. Even when we don’t kill animals, what happens to the birds and the insects in the area where you set up an iron and steel plant? And most of them are set up beside rivers.

One takes a flight to a particular conference on veganism. Does one know what one is doing? And one is bound to take a flight because one is accustomed to flying. Do you know where that much of steel has come from? Do you know how much it has killed? And even if it has not killed, it has maimed. It has caused immense grief. Even if that grief is not physical, it is psychological.

Do you know how an animal feels when you disturb its ecosystem? Do you know how a fish feels when you divert a river or block a river? It’s not just about eating the fish. Are you in grief only when somebody eats you? You are in grief even when somebody disrespects you. In fact, you are in grief the moment somebody is not loving towards you.

So, veganism is, in its true sense, love.

Do you have love for the fish? If you have love for the fish, how will you fly so often? Now, that’s dangerous, because we don’t think of it this way. We never think that it has to do with our entire lifestyle. Iron and steel consumption is considered as one of the important benchmarks of a nation’s progress.

In fact, if you want to measure how a nation is doing, you look at the steel consumption, you look at the coal consumption, you look at the electricity consumption, and then you say, “Oh! The nation is doing well. 15% year-on-year growth in steel consumption, in electricity.” What’s going on? With so much electricity, with so much steel, with so many other chemicals and materials, how are you ever going to be truly compassionate?

Full article link: https://acharyaprashant.org/en/articles/spirituality-and-veganism-1_2e5e3c0

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