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Thai Monk Antics

Kondoru

Kondoru

Beloved of Ra
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Dec 5, 2003
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Talking to a friend, they told me a person they know has been going though a lot of trouble, and so they contacted a Thai monk to turn their luck around.

He told them to purchase 52 perfectly gold goldfish.

So they went though the pet stores buying up fish (it wasnt easy)

and the monk realeased them as an act of atonement into the Thames.

(I pause to think how many laws this is breaking)

has anyone heard of things like that done in this country?
 
Not on that scale - but this was in the paper recently:

Goldfish plague checked

A pair of goldfish illegally released into a small duck pond at Elvetham Heath, Fleet, Hampshire, bred so fast they became a danger to wildlife. More than 200 have been removed in a cull by countryside officers and transferred to a larger lake nearby.
Click to expand...
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/ ... 80,00.html

(As it happens, I have an Aunt lives near there!)
 
Goldfish are fierce, resilient fish, being a species of carp. They can defend themselves and find their own food in the wild so they thrive when introduced - often as a joke - into ponds or ornamental lakes.

Goldfish were secretly left in the crassly unnatural ponds of the Trafford Centre near Manchester a few years ago. Last I heard, visitor were feeding them bread and chips.
 
They are also an introduced spieces and so illegal to release

Even if already found wild

But anything else on buddism? Else we might as well move this to cryptozoology
 
Yup, feral goldfish should have a thread of their own.
 
Releasing Animals

I have spent considerable time in Thailand as well as a fair amount studying Buddhism. There is some more to this action than simply a magical act of ill thought out penance.

For a start I expect the monk was unaware that Goldfish were not resident to our wildlife here. Lets be honest if I was a monk in Thailand I am sure I would make many faux pas or incorrect actions initially.

I recall being in Bangkok and a man came up with cages full of small birds and other travelers gave money to release a cage. I did the same and can say that it did feel good to let those animals fly out. It is that desiring to bring about freedom and the knowledge of doing so that betters us, not the fact a box of birds a Thai marketeer caught that morning specifically to make money by releasing them again is opened.

It may seem cynical to say we gain by the birds suffering, thats not very Buddhist, but the fact is that we recognize suffering and then the desire to end suffering both in others and ourselves. We take an action toward decreasing that suffering in some small way, but we have to decide whether to make that a ensuing personal focus. To that group of birds you may even have meant life or death possibly, by altering various paths of chance available for them.

In the end however a single monks actions can only represent a minute section of Buddhism as a whole which has many flexible aspects. What a Thai monk might do may be very different from a Tibetan or Japanese monk, yet the intention and focus of all is on the same tasks.
 
I've always found the 'purifying one's karma by releasing trapped animals' tradition very odd.

If a person sees an animal suffering, and is spontaneously moved by compassion and love to release it and end its suffering, fine. I can see that purifying their karma. Unless of course the animal is a tiger who then goes round gobbling up babies. Then it might not. It's complicated, innit? Maybe the finch released has avian flu and it's release facilitates an epedemic in which millions die. My understanding is that it is the intention of the act that is important.

To buy an animal and release it for the purposes of neutralising past actions or making good merit strikes me as a selfish act, though there may be an element of compassion in it.

IMO Konduru's friends would have been better off if the monk had taught them Vipassana rather than trailing round pet shops.

If karma is a reality, I very much doubt the unstoppable forces of cause and effect can be hoodwinked into striking off a few debts so effortlessly.
 
Knowing Thailand, I bet the man went around the corner, opened up the cage and whistled and the birds hopped back in for the next customers.
Even if they were wild birds caught that morning, all you were doing was paying someone to trap birds and then release them.
 
Even so that would hopefully mean the act would give him bad karma while giving yourself good karma.
 
It would be very naive of me to think that paying a few Baht to release a box of birds will make up for perhaps cutting peoples heads off in the many wars of millions of past lives for example. Really there is likely more merit in simply giving a handful of change to a beggar on a street corner.

As I tried to get across the action of releasing the birds is not very spectacular. The only thing to be gained is inside yourself, the opportunity to recognize that beings suffer, that it is correct to seek ways to lessen suffering and that if possible we should take right actions to bring about this.

As for using it to wipe away negative Karma it is clearly massively insufficient.
 
Markbellis,

I disagree, you are not paying the man to catch and release the birds. You pay to release them, it is his incorrect action to trap the birds. He can choose to stop doing it at any moment. We all know there are ways to make money that are less than perfect, its our personal decision whether we indulge in them.

You can't pay me to do anything that I would find morally objectionable.
 
Xanatico said:
Even so that would hopefully mean the act would give him bad karma while giving yourself good karma.
Click to expand...
Would financing somebody to get bad karma by extension give you bad karma? I'm always in a muddle about Dharmic book keeping.
 
Xanatico said:
Even so that would hopefully mean the act would give him bad karma while giving yourself good karma.
Click to expand...

Oooh, careful. Have you seen form KR15664a section 3c?
 
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