Guest guest Posted May 11, 2001 Report Share Posted May 11, 2001 namo nArAyaNAya! Salutations to all. In the light of the on-going discussion on vegetarianism, I have a few comments to offer and a few doubts. Is vegetarianism restricted to oral consumption? Or, as someone pointed out, what about wearing cow skin on our feet (shoes, etc.)? In what way is silk considered pure? 20000 to 50000 silk-worms are dumped into boiling water to be able to make one, just one, sADikA/pudavai. Do we need to kill God's creation to clothe ourselves when many alternatives are available? How do we even dare to silk near the Lord's vigrahas and even make them wear it? A grain of irritant is placed in an oyster. (Compare it with a pencil surgically implanted in a human body). All its life, the oyster lives in pain and secretes something to protect itself. The secretion grows and when the time is right (when someone needs the pencil inside the living human), the oyster is ripped apart and the pearl is extracted. Why do we even think of wearing pearl? How do we even think of making our vigrahas wear pearl? We can go on about coral, honey, ivory, etc. But that shall be for another day. Leather - Other options are becoming available. USA - www.pangeaveg.com UK - Brighton is a veggie town India - KGB "supposedly" makes shoes out of animals that died of old age. If you think it is acceptable to you, you may go ahead. (KGB is my acronym for Khadi Gramodyog Bhavan, not the former Soviet Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bizopasnosti!). Milk - Those were the days when the cow was a member of the family and taken care of so. Due consideration was given to the cow and the calf before extracting milk. With mass production of today, you may as well call milk as "cow juice". No one knows what the cows are fed (in the Western countries, I am told, anything from waste?!? to non-veg. food is fed to cows - explains why Western cows are bigger). Once they stop producing milk, they are sent to the slaughter-house. I mean no offence to elders and our AchAryas when I say that they exist in a different world than ours. They do not bother with mundane things. And, in most cases, our needs and actions are different from theirs. We will have to seek their advice based on our experience (as I am doing now). Our elders/AchAryas had no use for leather, etc., so it would not be reasonable to expect them to give us an informed decision. That is why we should request elders their decisions based on the facts that we can submit to them, not based on history. Regards, S.Sudarsan _ GO.com Mail Get Your Free, Private E-mail at http://mail.go.com Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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