Veganism is about nonviolence: nonviolence to other sentient beings; nonviolence to yourself; nonviolence to the earth.
Refraining from all evil, not clinging to birth and death, working in deep compassion for all sentient beings, respecting those over you and pitying those below you, without any detesting or desiring, worrying or lamentation - this is what is called Buddha. Do not search beyond it.
One of the remarks made by farmers at their public discussion of these problems suggest that they are rapidly ceasing to think of animals as sentient beings at all. If you handle vast numbers of creatures which are in any case going to die soon, it is, I suppose, easy to get into a state of mind in which they seem to be merely machines.
My advice for people is to love the world they are in, in whatever way makes sense to them. It may be a devotional practice, it may be song or poetry, it may be by gardening, it may be as an activist, scientist, or community leader. The path to restoration extends from our heart to the heart of sentient beings, and that path will be different for every person.
A child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lacking empathy, is still a sentient being.
The main point for me is moral; animals are sentient beings. I know for some this is a hard argument to accept, but we're not built to eat a lot of meat.
To our human minds, computers behave less like rocks and trees than they do like humans, so we unconsciously treat them like people.... In other words, humans have special instincts that tell them how to behave around other sentient beings, and as soon as any object exhibits sufficient cognitive function, those instincts kick in and we react as though we were interacting with another sentient human being.
Just as we reject racism, sexism, ageism, and heterosexism, we reject speciesism. The species of a sentient being is no more reason to deny the protection of this basic right than race, sex, age, or sexual orientation is a reason to deny membership in the human moral community to other humans.
There is no logical basis to support the theory that plants feel pain. The dubious possibility that they might, however, is no justification for killing obviously sentient beings. Any rational person understands the striking difference between slitting the throat of a sentient animal and plucking a fruit or a vegetable.
Cruelty to animals is an enormous injustice; so is expecting those on the lowest rung of the economic ladder to do the dangerous, soul-numbing work of slaughtering sentient beings on our behalf.
Even if a bodhisattva investigates the highest wisdom, one is not a proper bodhisattva unless one applies skillful means for the benefit of other sentient beings.
Whenever I visit a market and see the chickens crowded together in tiny cages that give them no room to move around and spread their wings and the fish slowly drowning in the air, my heart goes out to them. People have to learn to think about animals in a different way, as sentient beings who love life and fear death. I urge everyone who can to adopt a compassionate vegetarian diet.
If a man loses one-third of his skin he dies; if a tree loses one-third of its bark, it too dies. If the Earth is a 'sentient being', would it not be reasonable to expect that if it loses one-third of its trees and vegetable covering, it will also die?
Where there is a mind, there are feelings such as pain, pleasure, and joy. No sentient being wants pain: all wants happiness instead.
Occult powers, on the other hand, are much wider-ranging. They involve the ability to change dimensional structures and the evolutionary path of sentient beings.
The writer of these lines has nothing whatsoever to teach anyone; his words are just his contribution to our common discussion of what must inevitably be for us the most important subject which could be discussed by sentient beings.
Mammals are sentient beings that want to live and are afraid to die. Evolution vouchsafed us all with an instinct to survive, reproduce and flourish.
Just as compassion is the wish that all sentient beings be free of suffering, loving-kindness is the wish that all may enjoy happiness.
Animal experimentation is the blackest of all the black crimes that a man is at present committing... We should be able to refuse to live if the price of living be the torture of sentient beings... I abhor [animal] experimentation with my whole soul. All the scientific discoveries stained with innocent blood I count as of no consequence... The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.
Having abandoned the taking of life, refraining from killing, we dwell without violence, with the knife laid down, scrupulous, full of mercy, trembling with compassion for all sentient beings.
If it takes several billion years to develop the building blocks which you need, like RNA and DNA, and then those can build multicellular life and then multicellular life can be honed with natural selection to a point where it becomes sentient like us, then at some point that sentient being can begin to manipulate the matter around it to build better sentient life.
Ethics arises in the recognition of our obligation to care for others as beings, like us, exposed to mortality - that is, beings who need our help. Buddhism, not wrongly, extends this to 'all sentient beings'.
Our idealists must own that their velleity to abolish all suffering is most fully expressed in the Fifth Wisdom of Lamaism, the doctrine that teaches that "no durable happiness, nor yet security, for any sentient being can exist while others are a prey to suffering." That truth cannot be questioned and you may take it to heart: in practical terms it means we got ourselves born on the wrong planet - in the wrong universe.
Years of cultural programming have taught us to love some animals while eating others, when in all reality, all animals are sentient beings with the capacity to feel, both physically and emotionally.
We can't change the world for animals without changing our ideas about animals. We have to move from the idea that animals are things, tools, machines, commodities, resources here for our use to the idea that as sentient beings they have their own inherent value and dignity.
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