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How harmless are you?
lobster
Crusty Veteran
As an extreme fish eater, trainer of birds to eat slugs and aphids, I can hardly be considered a practitioner of ahimsa.
I try. 
However I use tea, coffee and chocolate, all often produced as cash crops by slave and child labour. 😱
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/food-and-wine/the-fair-trade-dilemma/article24871950/
Should I turn myself into the Buddhist Authorities for realignment? How harmless are any of us ... 
http://wisdomquarterly.blogspot.com/2013/05/great-read-on-buddhist-and-jain-culture.html
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Comments
Yes. We will arrive soon to transport you to the nearest Realignment Center. Do not resist. Resistance is futile.
I like to think I live with do no harm at the forefront of my mind, which normally equates to do the least harm possible under the circumstances....
I think in a way children point us the way... if you tell a child where meat comes from for the first time and take them to a kids farm to get in touch with animals, they often are shocked and don’t want to eat meat anymore. Eating animal products seems to be a social adaptation to the norm.
But it’s a question, a lot of people will react in self-defense and are quite capable of doing damage. Many people take self-defense classes.
The recently finished comedy show The Good Place made this topic the cornerstone of its plot. If you're not familiar the basis for the show is moral philosophy and it receives %100 ratings on Rotten Tomatoes.
Anyway, this is sort of a season 3 spoiler but they discover that with the complexity and interconnectedness of today's world it is impossible to be officially a good person anymore and eventually conclude that the best we can do is try.
I loved The Good Place, it was an awesome show. Good finale too.
I have yet to watch it through to the end... I grew frustrated 3 programmes into season 2...
The Good Place is over? That's bullshirt!
Only have up to season 2 on my netflix.
Thanks @Lobster
The links along with reading the posts by @Kerome and @Person reminds me of a Zen parable I heard about cleaning the glass.
I'll just recite a quick version. Master presents student with a glass with a smudge on it and tells the student that they must keep all dust and defilements off the glass. Fingerprints are defilements and anything covering the glass meant to shield it from dust is a defilement.
Master comes back a week later and finds the student furiously cleaning the glass with a cloth. The student is told that you cannot keep a glass clean with anger because you will keep missing something. The student, defeated, says I don't miss anything but still dust will land the moment my work ceases.
The Master says " Just so, just so. Now you understand. To keep the glass clean we must always be cleaning the glass".
Harmlessness is just being attentive to the options that each moment offers and choosing the ones that are likely to result in the least amount of suffering for all.
Harmlessness and selflessness are interchangeable expressions of compassion, love and wisdom.
I agree with @how.
It reminds me of what Ajahn Sona once said, paraphrasing the Buddha:
"Try to do good and avoid, in as much as possible, what is bad."
I am vegetarian myself, but I eat eggs (even if the label says bio I know really don't know what is the reality in those farms. I try to not buy clothes at all, but I'm sure I have some children sweat-factory stuff like my sneakers, my Macbook.
A small experiment I did was to use an old Nokia from the year 2003 to not feed the Smartphone madness, but as I said I still have a laptop and even a Nintendo Switch. So many attachments... haha.
As long as we are working on this and raising our awareness, I believe we will notice and will be doing good. However, it seems that time is of the essence yet Buddhism has taught me the power of the individual and how our own example can heavily make an impact.
Follow Truth and you will slowly distance yourself from any harm-making.
I likes The Good Place. One season was good enough for me ...
Being harmless is an inevitable result of kindness indulgence. Do not harm yourself, you will only end up going 'mad monkeying'.
Be human, humane, ahimsa ...
Simple plans are the best ...
The plan of no plan is the best
Dear Friends,
Too kind.
Today my teenage garden rats were out eating flowers, seeds and playing in the sun. They probably eat slugs at night when no one but the cats and foxes are out hunting teen rodents tasty snacks ...
Nature is wild ... long may she thrive ...
@lobster
Thanks for the reference! I will be watching this series soon, The Good Place. I'm a big fan of Ted Danson since Becker.
In my garden -well, community / the block's garden has a raccoon and he is feasting with our rubbish. Maybe, instead of killing it, like some say we should do, we should be mindful about how much waste we throw and how this attracts him.
There’s leather shoes, and the ants and wasps nests dilemmas. And mosquitos. And I eat fish, and even occasionally meat. So not totally harmless. But not as harmful as a soldier in some fighting army, or a bulldozer driver clearing ground in the Amazon.
But in terms of being natural, we have to admit that we too are a part of nature, and if we were living as wild humans in the forest with only the natural resources, we might well have killed many more wild animals while hunting.
@Kerome
Yes, yes! We are part of nature!
This is something I find certain vegans / vegetarians do not understand. I feel they are actually denying nature and what being natural consists in (or maybe of?); which consists of beauty, life, and death. Of course, one thing is to mass kill animals in production lines to satisfy unhealthy and confused appetites, and another is to understand why a Thai forest monk eats snails with rice offered by the villagers -this reference is from Ajahn Brahm and his first 9 years in the jungle-.
We each have to find the line we won't cross and then not cross it. Personally I won't eat the flesh of other beings and I don't really think there is room for too loose a definition of the 1st Precept. The living being is butchered in the name of whoever puts the money down.
If I put myself in a similar position I would probably accept alms with meat in it but depending on who brought it, I may ask it be left out next time. I feel it may be a greater harm to let it go to waste. After all, in this day and age I have the luxury of being able to find out where the protein rich plants are growing.
I think the problem is when we know something is wrong and we do it anyways.
I don't understand early humans, lol. In the wild, carnivores are much more unhealthy looking than herbivores and usually can only go after the sick or old. So humans, instead of seeing how we should mimic the herbivores, decide to prey on the healthiest of the herbivores and then create factory farms where suffering is the main ingredient.
Yep. Nature at it's best.
We have the ability to be so much more mindful and skillful than this.
Flesh, fish and other edible friend chomping is not kind, @David is right.
Just heard the fox clambering over fence. Rat feast. She is so naughty but still welcome.
Forgive the predators. Be kind.
Interestingly enough, on another forum I got into a discussion about my politics and how they arose out of my practice of harmlessness so that I can essentially use left-leaning and non-harm interchangeably. In that sense, I have tried to become more harmless in my actions and in my engagement with the world around me.
Maybe impossible to completely be? I’m trying bit by bit to gradually shift my habits though, one at a time, or a few at a time, so it becomes less and less over time. Eg: going back to being vegetarian, now trying to shift all my clothes and food buying to more ethical alternatives and so on and so on.
The window to our kitchen is left open. Our friendly neighbourhood spiders catch and drain the life of for example this tiny mint moth that visited our garden mints the other day.
Do I clear the spin or accept the on site murder?
Nature is a battle ground to death. At the moment many are contemplating their very real fragility.
I feel ethical behavour where we can set an example, as @Jason, @wildflowers and @otherstoo [not a real person], have sought to do is a basic whumane good will prevailing.
Be kind. Every kind.
Too hardcore for me as a spiritual terrorist, heretic and general fanatical interference pattern ...
Be this, be that!
YAM YAM I AM AY AM [ooh I just invented mantra]
I think I may be possessed by unplanned wee besties from other realms ... ah well could have been trumped ...