[Buddha-l] "Nature" and eating meat

[Joy Vriens]

curt wrote:

> Thank you for your very kind reply to my rather over-sensitive 
> protestation. You are correct in that I am more insterested in "what do 
> buddhists do?" rather than "what would buddha do?" It is not that I am 
> some kind of rank materialist - its just that I tend to agree with 
> Goethe who said "In the beginning was the Deed."

I used to think like that too (I say this so you can skip a whole lot of 
thinking and simply hop aboard my latest thought to win time). Now, I am 
more thinking along the lines of Dostoiewski (sp?) who said that man 
isn't the sum of his deeds. And even if it weren't true, I like that 
thought a lot more. Not only because it is true, but it also comes with 
a nicer approach to life, others and oneself. Although it's probably not 
as hard on crime as the first one, which is a huge inconvenient for many 
these days.

> Yes you certainly do have that right - and I think that your mistrust is 
> not completely unreasonable. But I do think that Buddhism has had a 
> positive impact on Asian society - and that this has sometimes been a 
> top-down phenomenon from "Buddhist rulers".

I never know which comes first, perhaps Asian society was such that 
Buddhism could and had to develop the way it did. I tend to avoid the 
trap of thinking of -isms as independent living things. Buddhism is hard 
to define between primitive Buddhism (my Chaos Buddhism, not Theravada 
Sarvastivada), "main Buddhism" etc etc. What would be the core of those 
Buddhisms that had a positive impact?

>> Nature being the physical, the corporal, the "animal" in us?

> In Buddhist terms I would take "nature" to be everything that is subject 
> to change - (which doesn't really leave much else, does it?).

The All, as opposed to Nirvana?

Joy