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Would you kill a fly?
footiam
Veteran
One of the Buddhist precepts is not to kill and that makes many people ask what is sometimes termed the mosquito question: Is it all right to kill a mosquito. In the same line, would you kill a fly?
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Comments
Example: http://newbuddhist.com/discussion/382/killing-mosquitoes/p1
(Don't worry,I'm kidding)
Tom x
They spread disease, eat by vomiting on food then sucking it up and are basically pestilential.
I realise this may horrify many, but I do not consider either mosquitoes or flies to be sentient.
Therefore, I have no qualms in dispatching something the instinct of which is to live as it does, but which carries disease and is frankly, purely harmful in its actions.
"The taking of life is the volition of killing expressed through the doors of either body or speech, occasioning action which results in the cutting off of the life faculty in a living being, when there is a living being present and (the perpetrator of the act) perceives it as a living being."
I think the last part there is an oddly convenient loophole. The vinaya apparently categorizes insects as sentient beings, but the commentators assign no blame to a person that perceives bugs otherwise. This is much different than our notion of ignorance being no excuse for breaking the law. Here, the ignorance (willful or not) of the sentience of another being is a determining factor re: the karma developed.
Ignorance is bliss, no?
(That ignorance can be used as an excuse from the results of karma seems absurd in any Buddhist system. Ignorance or the mis-perception of Reality, we are told, is (along with desire) a primary cause for our existing in samsara. That ignorance would then be used to argue that a being not be responsible for an act that resulted in a death seems to go against the core of the teaching re: the causes of samsaric existence. Or maybe it just goes against my Western notions of justice, which I understand karma is not.)
If you kill a man out of spite, you have bad karma.
If you kill a man to save another, karma does not change.
If you kill a man to save several people, you get good karma.
So, if you kill a fly, who has a small life span to begin with and doesn't have a full-fledged nervous-system to feel pain in the first place, does that mean you get bad karma? I don't think so, since it could potentially get someone sick which could lead to worse things.
1.) Having a conscious or awareness of your actions.
2.) The ability to feel pain.
I believe insects don't qualify under the first definition however, I think they do fit the second. Edit - I googled and I don't think they do feel pain. I was confusing their instinct for survival (struggle to get away) as feeling pain. Who knows what they really feel?
The question I have is what was the original word used that was translated to sentient and does it have a more established definition? Edit - I'm still curious but I guess it is a moot point since now I don't think they qualify under either definition.
I myself kill bugs like flies and mosquitoes that do carry disease and bite me. If a horse fly bites me you can bet he is going to die. Other bugs like spiders and things that don't fly I tend to throw outside. It isn't that I don't want to harm the bug it is that I just try to not interfere with nature as much as possible. Insects serve a vital role in the world and spiders eat flies and mosquitoes.
Oh and Upalabhava I don't think the loophole was left as a convenient out for people. I think they mean intention as in someone who doesn't know better.
I am referring to the part that conditionalizes it thus: "(the perpetrator of the act) perceives it as a living being."
This seems to allow for the murder of anything as long as that thing is not thought of as a sentient being. The vinaya seems to explicitly refer to bugs as sentient beings and warns against the intentional killing of them, but then the commentator throws in the bit about the "view" of the perpetrator, as if it would absolve them of the karmic results of murder.
If I have such a view as to think that all people are actually robots, and I kill one. Then this seems to be saying that I would not reap the karmic result of the act of murdering some being, because I did not view them as a being. Thus, yes, I did not intend to kill a *being*. (Yet I did!)
(I took it to an extreme, here. And perhaps this undermines my argument a bit...but it seems like an insanity clause. E.g. if a killer of bugs holds the erroneous notion [erroneous to both consensus and/or Reality as explained by, e.g., the vinaya] that bugs are not living, sentient beings then that killer of bugs will not reap the results of murdering a being. This of course can be applied to the killing of anything. Perhaps a culture does not recognize that babies under 3 years old are persons; then it becomes possible for a thusly deluded being to kill them with no repercussions other than those that result from the general ignorance of the Reality of beings.)
http://www.dhammawiki.com/index.php?title=Insects_and_pest_control
In that it says that, "In the Vinaya the Buddha is depicted as saying, "A monk should not intentionally deprive a living creature of life, even if it be only an ant" (Vinaya I.97)." Since killing is the first precept I think this applies to anyone following the first five and not just monks.
More from the article, "The Buddha said that there is no “crime” when there is no intent. A vegetarian builder does not intend to kill insects just as the person walking down the street does not purposely step on the ant."
So instinctively slapping a bug attacking doesn't count as intent. I also think the commentator meant if the person killing doesn't view a fly as living and kills it there is no bad karma. If Buddha said all creatures are living even an ant well now you know that it is wrong. There is no loophole because you either know or you don't. You can pretend to not know but, at the end of the day you answer to yourself so, I don't see any point. In other words I disagree you can avoid Karma by claiming not to believe. You either do or you don't know it is wrong.
Also, "The Vinaya makes one such distinction, considering murder an offense so serious as to require permanent expulsion from the Sangha (Parajika 3), while killing an animal is a far less serious offence (Pacittiya 62), on a par with insulting someone, idle chatter and having a non-regulation size sitting mat."
If the Vinaya is true to Buddha's word then I'm left to believe we shouldn't intentionally kill insects which I've instinctively always thought. However, I'm glad to know it is such a minor offense and not considered the same as killing a mammal.
A) From seemingly uneducated people who say absolutely yes and that they have feelings too.
No, they do not feel pain like humans or animals. The central nervous system of insects is only for "control and function" they have no sensation of pain per-say.
&
On the other hand, the insects are non-vertebra and they do not have central nervous system. Thus if an ant's leg is crushed, only the leg will feel local pain. Moreover, their pain magnitude is short, since they produce large number of off springs and their life is short. They can also reproduce their lost organs.
C) People who say they don't feel anything at all:
"The answer is almost certainly no.
Insects, arachnids, and other less developed forms of life lack conciousness and so feel no pain, nor do they have emotions or concious thought.
(Slightly more developed animals like fish or small mammals have limited fellings and conciousness, no not in the same way we do, well most of us anyway!)"
I'm not willing to go on the assumption that just because an animal lacks a backbone that it cannot and does not experience pain exactly the same way I do. It's just not scientifically sound to do so.
PS: Spiders, flies, and earthworms *are* animals. And most Buddhists would disagree with you that they do not have consciousness. This is why we are admonished not to harm any sentient being. There is no way to prove an earthworm does not have sentience (there have been threads upon threads about this, I'm not trying to start one).
Zen story of Chuang Tzu: http://users.rider.edu/~suler/zenstory/fish.html
Well, from searching around I've gotten a few answers. They pertain to be:
A) From seemingly uneducated people who say absolutely yes and that they have feelings too.
No, they do not feel pain like humans or animals. The central nervous system of insects is only for "control and function" they have no sensation of pain per-say.
&
On the other hand, the insects are non-vertebra and they do not have central nervous system. Thus if an ant's leg is crushed, only the leg will feel local pain. Moreover, their pain magnitude is short, since they produce large number of off springs and their life is short. They can also reproduce their lost organs.
C) People who say they don't feel anything at all:
"The answer is almost certainly no.
Insects, arachnids, and other less developed forms of life lack conciousness and so feel no pain, nor do they have emotions or concious thought.
(Slightly more developed animals like fish or small mammals have limited fellings and conciousness, no not in the same way we do, well most of us anyway!)"
Well, from searching around I've gotten a few answers. They pertain to be:
A) From seemingly uneducated people who say absolutely yes and that they have feelings too.
No, they do not feel pain like humans or animals. The central nervous system of insects is only for "control and function" they have no sensation of pain per-say.
&
On the other hand, the insects are non-vertebra and they do not have central nervous system. Thus if an ant's leg is crushed, only the leg will feel local pain. Moreover, their pain magnitude is short, since they produce large number of off springs and their life is short. They can also reproduce their lost organs.
C) People who say they don't feel anything at all:
"The answer is almost certainly no.
Insects, arachnids, and other less developed forms of life lack conciousness and so feel no pain, nor do they have emotions or concious thought.
(Slightly more developed animals like fish or small mammals have limited fellings and conciousness, no not in the same way we do, well most of us anyway!)"
I don't think it works this way. I think karma exists to show us what we do. I was walking down the street one time feeling anxious, physically crappy and in a bad mood, and some memory came to me of a time when I caused someone else to feel that way. And I thought, "Karma is so beautiful. It means that each of us will know everything we've ever done, in the deepest sense." If you go around killing insects, well maybe that's just a small bit of bad karma, but maybe someday, due to your karma, you will feel what those insects felt. And then you won't ever kill an insect again. Karma is there to help us wake up, to keep us on the path one way or another. I heard in a Dhamma talk once, that the only way to erase bad karma is to feel genuine remorse for what you've done. I totally buy this, because it means we don't need our lesson after all, we've already learned it. And this moment is the perfect teacher. I know a lot of people would disagree with me on this, but that's okay. It's just what makes sense to me right now.
Anyway, to answer the OP's question, it depends on the circumstances, but in a vast majority of cases no, I wouldn't hurt a fly.
I assumed nothing, other than "From seemingly uneducated people." The rest of the quotes were from other people on teh interwebz.
So, after extensive research we can definitively conclude that we have absolutely no idea. I hope that clears everything up for everyone.
In all seriousness, the papers seem to conclude that some insects have a higher probability of being able to feel pain, but we don't have a way of knowing for sure.
We have collective karma and share some of the same dream. Like Chuang tzu dreamed he was a butterful dreaming he was Chuang tzu
In Pali, the word kamma itself means 'action,' and in AN 6.63, the Buddha in defines it as, "Intention, I tell you, is kamma. Intending, one does kamma by way of body, speech, and intellect." So the kamma of killing requires the intention to deprive something of life as well as the actual taking of life based on one's actions of body and speech.
If a monk unintentionally kills an insect by stepping on it by accident, or if they step on it thinking that it was already dead or something other than a bug (e.g., a pebble), there's no penalty since there was no intent to kill. And really, what would be the point of penalizing a monastic for an accident?
If you're interested in learning more about the Vinaya, I suggest checking out Buddhist Monastic Code by Thanissaro Bhikkhu and The Bhikkhus' Rules: A Guide for Laypeople by Bhikkhu Ariyesako.
Claiming not to believe, I would like to thinki, is believing.
I suppose too there are different degree of killing just like there are different degree of murder.
-- Old English Adage
I don't even know if other humans experience pain, or simply pretend to be in pain when I beat them. I assume they don't and that I am simply projecting my own personal psychology onto other beings. The reality is, you are the only person whose experience you can be positively sure of. As such, technically, you don't have any responsibility toward other beings, besides the contrived legal fallout that human beings have concocted.
See: Solypsism