Who are you?

What I found most interesting is that hunting, or killing, an animal was alluded to in both “The Thrill of the Chase” and “Shooting an Elephant.”  What I’ve heard about hunting is that it creates a feeling of superiority, a thrill of excitement, an experience of power.  I’ve never hunted for animals like deer, pigs, or birds, so I’m not quite sure if this is true.

That’s not to say that I’ve never killed an animal.  I feel safe in saying that we’ve all had our fair share of bug stomping.  I’ve killed snakes and fish before (nothing else sticks out in my mind at this point, although I’m sure there are many other creatures I have forgotten or who I have indirectly harmed).  But the point is that these are animals that I have intentionally sought out to kill.

The snake, of course, was 1) an order from my family and 2) out of protection.  Spending my summers on farms, I was able to identify between a harmful and a harmless snake.  So my encounters with snakes… the most memorable one was when we were driving down a dirt road in the middle of the night, on our way home from a neighbor’s bbq.  We were nearly back to the farm when my mom stopped the car, reversed it, went forward, stopped, reversed.  I asked what she was doing, and she said, “There’s a cottonmouth in the road.”

My cousins, sister, and I soon learned not to go out in the tall grass during the warm seasons without a garden hoe.  I remember the first snake I ever killed myself was at the farm’s pond.  It was a large, long, green snake that was slithering near the shore.  It must have been 2-3 feet long.  I cut it’s head off with the hoe, draped the dead body over the barbed wire fence, and backed away from the still slithering head.  I can vividly remember it’s fat yellow body hanging helplessly on the fence.

Another significant time in my life was when we still lived in Beaumont.  We lived right near a large drainage ditch, so turtles, frogs, snakes, and even the occasional tiny alligator were our visitors.  My puppy, Snickers, was parking and pointing her snout at the ground, like a bird dog that had spotted her prey.  I went outside, not knowing what to expect.  A large, black moccasin was coiled under the bushes.  Again, I used a garden hoe to sever its head.  I tossed the head over the fence into the ditch, and again draped the body on the fence.

The last and final snake killing I remember was at camp.  There was a coral snake under the steps of the mess hall.  My father was there (he was the one who spotted it), and with his help, we both killed the snake.  It was a strange sort of daughter-father bonding over the death of an animal… but we didn’t see it that way.  At the time, we saw it as the protection of others.  The snake had been resting in the most populated, trafficked area of the camp.  Moving it would cause a danger to ourselves, and leaving it would be a danger to others.  Was I right in any of my decisions?

Unlike the policeman in “Shooting an Elephant,” I don’t feel as if my motives were as selfish as, “do[ing] it solely to avoid looking a fool” (443).  My actions weren’t out of pride, but out of fear.  (Fear, at this point, may be too generalized an emotion.  Perhaps concern?)  Each time I picked up the garden hoe, I never felt a surge of excitement.  On the contrary, I felt fear, but not a debilitating fear.  It was more of a calm fear that sat in the back of my mind.  I focused more on the calm rather than the fear that could strike panic in me at any moment.  Calmness was the key factor in any of these situations.

Snake killing was not a sport.  It was more a defense mechanism.  Something I was taught to do in order to protect myself.  Of course, I don’t go killing every little garden snake I pass by.

However, I see fishing as a sport.  Since I was a toddler, I’ve gone fishing.  In the summers, we went to Arkansas to catch rainbow trout, Athens for catfish, Galveston for red snapper, and Canton for large mouth bass.  The last time I fished was last year in Lake Travis, during the mating season.  I know how to clean, gut, and prepare a fish for cooking.  Although I may not find myself within “rows of horns and hides, mounted heads and stuffed bodies,” is fishing any different than sport hunting? (416)  Am I any better than the orange man?

Click to play: Birds by Masakazu Yoshizawa

“The good Lord Buddha seated him
Under a jambu-tree, with ankles crossed–
As holy statues sit–and first began
To meditate this deep disease of life,
What its far source and whence its remedy.
So vast a pity filled him, such wide love
For living things, such passion to heal pain,
That by their stress his princely spirit passed
To ecstasy, and, purged from mortal taint
Of sense and self, the boy attained thereat
Dhyana, first step of ‘the path’” (461).

The story of Prince Siddhartha meditating under the jambu tree tells about the inevitable suffering of life.  While everything may seem to be at harmony one minute, pain and death will always follow.  Becoming overwhelmed, Siddhartha leaves the area until he finds the jambu tree and meditates.  Here, he enters dhyana–or the state one enters during meditation–and reflects on suffering as a part of life.  This is a precursor of when Siddhartha meditates under the bodhi tree, where he attains enlightenment and becomes the founder of Buddhism.  We know Siddhartha as the Supreme Buddha, or just Buddha.

“The Path” which Siddhartha mentions at the end of his meditation is the Four Noble Truths:

1. life is suffering
2. suffering is caused by craving
3. suffering can have an end
4. there is a path which leads to the end of suffering (the Eight Fold Path, which focuses on wisdom, morality, and meditation).

Although I had some problems with the article “What the West Can Learn from Oriental Thought” (for starters, I didn’t like how they called it “oriental”… that implies that it is an inanimate object such as a cup.  Also, oriental does not include Indian/Bangladeshi/Pakistani/Sri Lankan thought–where these religions originated), many of the differences between Western and Eastern thought were true, although glorifying Eastern thought may be taking the situation too far.  But it is true that Eastern thought tends to believe in the Four Noble Truths, where as Westerners believe that everything can be improved.  Although I would not go as far as to say the West needs this, I do agree that Eastern thought “sens[es] the presence of what is at every particular moment, and of giving up everything that can be had” (507).  In my Buddhism class last semester, the self and impermance were the foundations of the course.

The above video is of Tibetan Buddhist monks creating art with colored sand–known as a sand mandala. (The video says it is a sand mandala of Chenrezig, which is the Tibetan name for Avalokitesvara). It’s a practice used to demonstrate impermanence.  After they have spent hours–even days–tediously exerting themselves over the art, they quickly wipe it away and destroy it, much like the story about Siddhartha realizing that “life liv[es] upon death” (461).  Life depends on the end of life.  Through this, Siddhartha feels extreme passion towards living things, yet he is unable to help everyone.

One of the four most influential Bodhisattvas of Mahayana is Avalokitesvara, who exhibits extreme compassion (the other three: Manjusri, Mahasthamaprapta, and Samantabhadra, are known for their compassion and wisdom).  A Bodhisattva is an enlightened being who intentionally postpones his Buddhahood in order to help others attain nirvana.

Avalokitesvara became known as the Bodhisattva of compassion when he vowed to free all beings from samsara–or the cycle of rebirth.  But he was unable to hear all the cries of the people, so Amitabha Buddha gave him eleven heads to hear everyone.  But once Avalokitesvara could hear everyone, he did not have enough hands to help, so Amitabha again came to his aid and gave him a thousand arms to reach all the people.

So what the article, “What the West Can Learn from Oriental Thought,” essentially tries to say is that Americans need more compassion, wisdom, and self-awareness in their lives.  Although I think this is true for all people, the article gave me the impression that Eastern thought was perfect.

I would like to know when this article was written–was it pre- or post-Chinese economy take over?  Before the Japan bubble burst of the late 80s and early 90s?  Does it correlate at all with the success of Eastern economies versus Western?  What did they think of Western thought during the early years of nuclear fission, before films like Gojira publicized the downfall of nuclear power?