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elfsIt's really hard to meditate, especially do the breath meditation, when your head is completely stuffed, but while I'm thinking about meditating, I'm also thinking about the Buddhist teachings that go along with it. The other day, a friend who knew of my cold asked me how I was feeling. I said, "It's mostly done now. Just mopping up. T-cells fighting insurgent battles with resistent pockets of the virus hiding out on my larynx, mostly."
It's funny that I devolved to a military metaphor, but the more I think about it, the less funny it seems. One of the biggest steps in learning Buddhism is to embrace the moral teachings of Buddha, and the first moral teaching of Budda is "to abstain from being harmful to all living things."
How can you even begin to follow the First Precept when your very body is a constant, ongoing battlefield? Where the colony of cells with your DNA makes common cause with a host of microbes to fend off invaders, where the very distinction of host, guest, and interloper exists day in and day out?
When Buddha gave his teachings, we knew people got sick. Buddha advised us to harm "not even the mosquito," which is a hard thing to do after we learned about malaria, zika, and chikungaya! But now we know that illness itself is a battlefield in which living things die. As in the case of simply breathing, I wonder how science has muddied the waters of Buddhism's pure teachings.
It's funny that I devolved to a military metaphor, but the more I think about it, the less funny it seems. One of the biggest steps in learning Buddhism is to embrace the moral teachings of Buddha, and the first moral teaching of Budda is "to abstain from being harmful to all living things."
How can you even begin to follow the First Precept when your very body is a constant, ongoing battlefield? Where the colony of cells with your DNA makes common cause with a host of microbes to fend off invaders, where the very distinction of host, guest, and interloper exists day in and day out?
When Buddha gave his teachings, we knew people got sick. Buddha advised us to harm "not even the mosquito," which is a hard thing to do after we learned about malaria, zika, and chikungaya! But now we know that illness itself is a battlefield in which living things die. As in the case of simply breathing, I wonder how science has muddied the waters of Buddhism's pure teachings.
