Some Hindu wisdom

[Guest guest]

(While I would be VERY wary of the ways that thinking

has manipulated 'situation ethics', surely we need

to recall that the longterm wellbeing of others persons

needs to be a central concern in our decisionmaking.)

 

this post from a Hindu list has application to vegans elsewhere

 

LOVE IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN RULES

 

I have experienced this at times. Once in a Satsang

at our centre, we had a guest speaker with great calibre,

hence quiet a few " interested " people attended,

who were not particularly devotees. One such lady

a friend of mine, brought with love some food with

fish in it. She, being ignorant of the vegetarian disciplines

of Sai Devotees, understood fish to be vegetarian.

 

She so enjoyed the talk and was spiritually high on

it, so full of love. Well the bubble burst when the

organiser asked her to remove her offering from the

table afterwards. She has never attended another function

 

I for one understand that rules and regulations are

important, but please we must exercise it with LOVE.

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

Now, MY take on that is as follows:

 

The members had a relationship of trust with the

members of the community, and the outsider

violated the expectations of that trust relationship,

although inadvertently.

 

I've seen dozens, even scores of persons never return

to our local vegetarian society because our protocols

obliged us to remove something from the table

of shared food contributions.

 

Perhaps the most controversial was our relationship

of trust with a local Seventh Day Adventist church,

with which we had an agreement to never serve

alcohol or alcoholic beverages.

 

One nonmember attended our public potluck and

brought a bottle of wine. The newcomer was

discretely brought over to the side and succinctly

but graciously told that, in part because of our

trust relationship with our host organization,

we don't allow alcoholic beverages at our potlucks.

However, we were thrilled that he attended and

he could enjoy the potluck contributions of

the rest of the group and discretely take home

his bottle of wine for a later use.

That seemed to work, but he never returned.

That was IMO a loving way to look at the

persons and issues involved. Who knows

whether that newcomer would ever have

returned under ANY circumstances.

As a matter of personal observation,

I've long maintained that the attendees at

public vegetarian events are about a third

newcomers, a third regulars, and a third

non-and-then people. So, if a third of your

attendees are newcomers with no sense

of the protocol, someone needs to assure

others that

 

But here it's not a question of 'the rules'

but of the love for these nonhumans,

and our principled education around that.

If someone served a meal with a human corpse,

would we allow it 'in the spirit of liberalism'?

I think not, and I think that it's the spirit of the

age with which we're grappling when we

puzzle over whether or not to allow nonvegetarian

food in our public events.

 

We don't do that, and we know that many

devout Hindus don't eat eggs, and many

macrobiotics don't eat dairy.

 

The vegan food standard is the standard

of lowest conflict, and vegetarians everywhere

are learning to live with it and to like it,

and often are converting themselves to full vegans.

 

I strongly recommend the vegan food standard

for all public vegetarian groups.

 

And, if someone brings food with eggs or dairy

products, there you can apply the standards

of 'liberality' in the spirit of tolerance, even though

the production of dairy products and eggs in

Western societies cause great suffering to

cows and chickens.

 

Love itself may be more important than any

formulation of the rules, but if we are ignorant

of the deep reflection which built those rules

as guidelines, and the meanings and intentions

of those rules, perhaps we will never see much

value in any structures whatsoever.

 

But formulations, while fallible, are indeed

formulations of at least a human intelligence,

and one with which we ought to be constantly

in dialogue.

 

Maynard S.Clark