June 8, 2005

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  MY THOUGHT OF RELIGION

  It was easy for me to refrain from killing animals when I was little.  I automatically step away from crushing insects.  I did not shoot birds with the slings.  I did not catch butterflies or dragonflies or fire flies to play.  I refused to kill chicken or ducks for party or for ceremony to worship ancestors (or đám giổ.) 

  The summer before I entered 8^th grade, my mom had a seamstress made me 3 silk white long dresses (or áo dài) to prepare for the new school year.  I loved those dresses.  They made me feel feminine.  Girls in long dresses learned to walk gracefully while trying to balance two long pieces, which were twirled between the legs, and tossed in the wind.  I folded them and kept them in a drawer.  I took them out to admire them quietly, and sometimes I tried them on. 

  One day, pulling open the drawer I saw 6 newly born mice.  They are red, tiny, as small as my little pinky.  Somehow their mother determined to use my drawers and my beautiful silk dresses as its nest.  I also had a cat that was very agile.  This cat always caught birds to eat.  It was lying in the middle of a few bushes of sugar canes pretended to be dead.  When the gray birds or robins came near it snatched them in a trice.

  At that moment, I was facing a decision.  If I tossed the newborns out, the cat would eat them.  The cat smelled the baby mice in the drawer so it sat there patiently waited.  Tossing the mice out was killing them and that would violate my first and most important vow of refrain from killing living creatures.  From the Buddhist teaching I learned that the first vow was extended a little further, beside refrain from killing I should foster and accommodate lives.

  If I kept the mice in the drawer they would destroy my three beautiful white dresses.  I decided to keep the mice in the drawer.  I did not even blink to think that my single mom was struggling to give me the best that she could not afford for herself.

  Guess what, by the fall my mom had to have my dresses made again.  This time the dresses were not silk.  The mice did not even leave a thank you note.

  Question:  What should be saved, the unknown, unattached, and ungrateful mice or my mother’s money and the anguish that she went through?
  

  

  
  Note:  Painting of girls in white dress, high school uniforms for public school.

  • 8:23 pm
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