The position and treatment of animals in Buddhism is important for the light it sheds on Buddhists' perception of their own relation to the natural world, on Buddhist humanitarian concerns in general, and on the relationship between Buddhist theory and Buddhist practice.
- The Animal world just got bigger: 100s of new species
Animals in Buddhist doctrine
Unlike religions and philosophies that regard animals as soulless automata incapable of thinking or feeling, animals in Buddhism have always been viewed as sentient beings, less intellectually and skillfully (sila) advanced than humans but no less capable of feeling suffering. Moreover, the doctrine of rebirth holds that humans can be reborn as animals. Similarly, animals can be reborn as humans.
Unlike religions and philosophies that regard animals as soulless automata incapable of thinking or feeling, animals in Buddhism have always been viewed as sentient beings, less intellectually and skillfully (sila) advanced than humans but no less capable of feeling suffering. Moreover, the doctrine of rebirth holds that humans can be reborn as animals. Similarly, animals can be reborn as humans.
An animal might be the rebirth of a deceased relative. And looking far enough back into one's own incalculable past lives, one would become aware of the unity of all life (that all beings are related and interdependent) and one's passing through many if not all planes of existence. One could not, therefore, make hard and fast judgments between animals, humans, or any beings; ultimately all are part of a single family.
In cosmological terms, animals are believed to inhabit a distinct "world" separated from humans not by space but by state of mind. That world is called Tiracchāna-yoni in Pāli (Sanskrit, Tiryagyoni). Rebirth as an animal is considered one of the five unhappy karmic destinations, usually involving more hardship and unhappiness than comfort and happiness. Buddhist commentaries speak movingly of the many types of suffering animals endure. Even when no humans are present, they are attacked and eaten by other animals or live in constant fear of it. They are forced to endure extreme changes in the environment throughout the year. They have no security. Those that live among humans are often slaughtered for their body parts, or taken and forced to work with many beatings until they are slaughtered as repayment for their work.
On top of this, they suffer from ignorance -- not knowing or understanding what is happening to them or why -- unable to do very much about it, acting impulsively and primarily on instinct.
A representation of the worlds in Buddhist cosmology with earth as the mound on which animals and unseen creatures coexist with humans.
Animals in the Jātakas
The Jātakas ("birth stories"), which tell of past lives of the Buddha in folktale fashion, frequently involve animals as peripheral or main characters, and it is not uncommon for the Bodhisattva (the Buddha in past lives) to appear as an animal as well. The stories sometimes involve animals alone, and sometimes involve conflicts between humans and animals; in the latter cases, the animals often exhibit characteristics of kindness and generosity that are absent in the humans.
Animals in the Jātakas
The Jātakas ("birth stories"), which tell of past lives of the Buddha in folktale fashion, frequently involve animals as peripheral or main characters, and it is not uncommon for the Bodhisattva (the Buddha in past lives) to appear as an animal as well. The stories sometimes involve animals alone, and sometimes involve conflicts between humans and animals; in the latter cases, the animals often exhibit characteristics of kindness and generosity that are absent in the humans.
Treatment of animals
The first of the Five Precepts is to undertake to abstain from taking life, any life, including animals. In its least stringent formulation, some apply this precept only to the killing of human beings. However, from the beginnings of Buddhism, there were also regulations intended to prevent the harming of animals as well. Monks were forbidden from intentionally killing an animal, or drinking water with living creatures in it without straining it, so as to avoid unintentionally hurting even minute creatures.
Concern for the treatment of animals is attested to back to the beginnings of Buddhist history. The first Buddhist imperial monarch of India, King Aśoka, includeed in his edicts an expression of concern for the number of animals that had been killed for his meals and expressed an intention to put an end to that killing. He also included animals with humans as the beneficiaries of his programs for obtaining medicinal plants, planting trees, and digging wells. In his fifth Pillar Edict, Aśoka decreed the protection of a large number of animals that were not in common use as livestock; protected from slaughter young animals and mothers still milking their young; protected forests from being burned, expressly to protect the animals living in them; and banned a number of other practices harmful to animals. In this Aśoka was carrying out the advice to a Cakravartin king given in the Cakkavattisīhanāda-sutra (DN.26), which is that a good king should extend his protection not merely to different classes of people equally, but also to beasts and birds.
Buddhist Vegetarianism
Main article: Vegetarianism in Buddhism
However, there are Vinaya rules forbidding monastics from accepting animal flesh if they know, believe, or even suspect that the animal in question was killed for them, for example, if the visits of alms-gathering monks have become an occasion for the slaughter of animals.
Although vegetarianism is not mandated in the Pāli canon, it is evidently viewed as an ideal state from which human beings have fallen; the Aggañña Sutra (DN.27) explains how human beings were originally sustained by various kinds of vegetable but as a result of increasing wickedness began to live by hunting, which was originally thought of as a demeaning occupation.
In Mahāyāna Chinese Buddhism and in those countries whose Buddhism comes from China (Korea, Japan, Vietnam), Buddhist monks are more strictly vegetarian. One of the scriptural sources for this prohibition is the Mahāyāna Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra. This sūtra condemns meat-eating in the strongest terms; among several other reasons, it is stated that it should be avoided because the presence of a meat-eater causes terror in animals, who believe them to be likely to kill them.
Release of Animals
Main article: Releasing life
In East Asian Buddhism, particularly in China, the release of animals into their natural environment, particularly birds or fish, became an important way of demonstrating Buddhist piety. In China it was known as fang sheng. This practice is based on a passage in the Mahāyāna sūtra Brahma's Net (Chinese, Fanwang Jing), which states that "all the beings in the six paths of existence are my parents. If I should kill and eat them, it is the same as killing my own parents....Since to be reborn into one existence after another is the permanent and unalterable law, we should teach people to release sentient beings." In the later Ming dynasty, societies "for releasing life" were created, which built ponds in which to release fish that were redeemed from fishermen for this purpose. They also bought other animals which were sold in the markets and released them."
- References: WQ edit of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animals_in_Buddhism
Oldest footprints Valentia Island (bbc.co.uk)
Oldest "Footprints" on Earth Found
LiveScience.com (10-05-08)
The oldest-known tracks of a creature apparently using legs have been discovered in rock dated to 570 million years ago in what was once a shallow sea in Nevada. Scientists think land beasts evolved from ancient creatures that left the sea and evolved lungs and legs. If the new finding is real -- the discoverer says will fuel skepticism -- it pushes the advent of walking back 30 million years earlier than any previous solid finding.
LiveScience.com (10-05-08)
The oldest-known tracks of a creature apparently using legs have been discovered in rock dated to 570 million years ago in what was once a shallow sea in Nevada. Scientists think land beasts evolved from ancient creatures that left the sea and evolved lungs and legs. If the new finding is real -- the discoverer says will fuel skepticism -- it pushes the advent of walking back 30 million years earlier than any previous solid finding.
The aquatic creature left its "footprints" as two parallel rows of small dots, each about 2 millimeters in diameter. Scientists said today that the animal must have stepped lightly onto the soft marine sediment, because its legs only pressed shallow pinpoints into that long-ago sea bed. The tracks were made during what is called the Ediacaran period, which preceded the Cambrian period, the time when most major groups of animals first evolved. Scientists had once thought only microbes and simple multicellular animals that existed prior to the Cambrian, but that notion is changing, said Ohio State University Professor Loren Babcock.
"We keep talking about the possibility of more complex animals in the Ediacaran -- soft corals, some arthropods, and flatworms -- but the evidence has not been totally convincing," Babcock said. "But if you find evidence, like we did, of an animal with legs -- an animal walking around -- then that makes the possibility much more likely."
Soo-Yeun Ahn, a doctoral student at Ohio State, presented the discovery today at a meeting of the Geological Society of America. Babcock was surveying rocks in the mountains near Goldfield, Nevada, with Hollingsworth in 2000 when he found the tracks. "This was truly an accidental discovery," he said. "We came on an outcrop that looked like it crossed the Precambrian-Cambrian boundary, so we stopped to take a look at it. We just sat down and started flipping rocks over. We were there less than an hour when I saw it."
Little can be gleaned about what sort of creature it was, but Babcock "reasonably certain -- not 100%" that it was an arthropod, such as one resembling a centipede or millipede, or by a leg-bearing worm. It might have been about one as wide as a pencil and may have had multiple, spindly legs.
In 2002, other researchers reported a similar fossil trail from Canada that dated back to the middle of the Cambrian period, about 520 million years ago. Another set of tracks found in South China date back to 540 million years ago. At approximately 570 million years old, this new fossil not only provides the earliest suggestion of animals walking on legs, but it also shows that complex animals were alive on earth before the Cambrian.
"I expect that there will be a lot of skepticism," Babcock said about the discovery. "There should be. But I think it will cause some excitement. And it will probably cause some people to look harder at the rocks they already have. Sometimes it's just a matter of thinking differently about the same specimen."
- Original Story: Oldest "Footprints" on Earth Found
The extremes of where animal life can exist and in what form defies comprehension as new discoveries boggle the mind: Off Japanese waters, sail fish that live five miles beneath the sea have been documented and filmed. Superheated water is no obstacle as sunless vents and acidic waters support worm, crab, shrimp, and other life under the sea.
A Ctenophore or Comb Jellyfish collected off Wassteri reef, Heron Island in far north Queensland. Australian scientists have discovered hundreds of new coral and marine species on the Great Barrier Reef and Ningaloo Reef which they say will improve monitoring reef biodiversity and the impact of climate change. Three expeditions to the reefs over four years to collect the first inventory of soft corals, found 300 soft corals of which 130 were new species (Queensland Museum/Gary Cranitch/Handout/Reuters).Hundreds of new marine species discovered: Australian scientists
SYDNEY (AFP, 10/8/08) - Hundreds of new marine species and previously uncharted undersea mountains and canyons have been discovered in the depths of the Southern Ocean, Australian scientists said Wednesday.
A total of 274 species of fish, ancient corals, molluscs, crustaceans and sponges new to science were found in icy waters up to 3,000 metres (9,800 feet) deep among extinct volcanoes, they said. The scientists mapped undersea mountains up to 500 metres high and canyons larger than the Grand Canyon for the first time, the government's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) said.
The finds were made in marine reserves 100 nautical miles south of the Australian island of Tasmania during two CSIRO voyages in November 2006 and April 2007 using new sonar and video technology as well as seafloor sampling. Announcing the discoveries in the Tasmanian capital Hobart, CSIRO scientist Kate Wilson said more was known about the surface of Mars than the depths of the world's oceans.
"In Australian waters, for example, more than 40 percent of the creatures brought to the surface by our scientists on a voyage of discovery have never been seen before," she said. A total of 123 underwater mountains were found, said CSIRO specialist Nic Bax, noting they were home to thousands of deep-sea animals. "They're really what we call the rainforests of the deep, they provide an area where we get a very wide range of species collected and that's really unique in the deep sea environment," he said.
In the cold depths of the Southern Ocean "things grow quite slowly so when you're looking at a coral which is maybe two metres high, it may also be 300 years old or more," said Bax. "So you end up seeing some very old things down there. You can see corals which probably existed 2,000 years ago down there."
Scientists said that only a tiny proportion of Australia's oceans had been explored in such a way and they could only speculate on the biodiversity hidden under the water. "We have no idea how many species there are, and most of the species we get we only catch once," Bax said. Environment Minister Peter Garrett described the results as "an amazing day for Australian science."
"It's extraordinary to think that we've put someone on the moon and we're very familiar with lots of parts of the planet, we've got Google Earth and yet here we are, we've got parts of the planet that have never been sighted or explored before," he told national radio. The minister said the research would help the effort to conserve Australia's ocean biodiversity. "It'll greatly inform scientists as they deepen their understanding about likely climate change impacts, water currents, and impacts of water temperature on the diversity of species," Garrett said.
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