[Buddha-l] Victimized Vegans?

[Joy Vriens]

Dear co-listers,      

>Bernie Simon, with admirable consistency, asked 
 
>> Why resort to half measures and discriminate against the plant  
>> kingdom? Become a breatharian and live a totally non-violent life. 
 
>Curt responded, 
 
>> The only way out is suicide. As long as your immune system is  
>> functioning you are constantly engaged in the act of killing. And as  
>> soon as your immune system turns off the countdown begins. 

>While this is accurate, it ought to matter to Jains more than  
>Buddhists. The functioning of the immune system is autonomic,  
>non-volitional. So it creates bad karma for us only if the hardcore  
>kriy¨¡v¨¡dins (like the Jains) are right and actions are all-important.  
>But the standard Buddhist view gets us off the hook here. In this view,  
>such autonomic actions are surely unintentional and perhaps even  
>ahetuka (causeless), like the actions of an arahant, and thus won't  
>impede our future path to nibb¨¡na. 

With knowledge evolving, thanks to science, we lose our original innocence and what used to be non-volitional *could* no longer be considered as such since now we know. And when we know about "evil" or "harm" and don't act against it, we become guilty by affiliation or somesuch and the non-volitional becomes less non and more volitional. That's the trap of the righteous who want to go for 100% morality. 

In Christian countries, such as France, that condemn euthanasia and practice "palliative sedation", therapeutical care and/or "therapeutical harassment" are stopped and the patient is left to die "naturally". E.g. when water is no longer administerd, the liver and kidneys stop functioning and the patient's body starts to poison itself. The medical staff and family can thus have a clear conscience of not having administered the lethal cocktail. There seems to be no morality without hypocrisie (= intentional blindness, intentionally-not-wanting-to-know in order to save morality).    
 
>Suicide, btw, is also not an option, at least in the Pali canon. Damien  
>Keown has dealt with this very subtly: 
> 
>http://purifymind.com/BuddhismSuicide.htm 

I am sure that Buddhism/the Pali canon evolved into the view that suicide is not an option, but I simultaneously have a strong intuition that this has not always been the case. The case on suicide is not closed. 

Joy