I’m writing this
post with so much emotion. I feel so much pain for the subject – a fish that
has been caught and cut to pieces and laid out in the bowl to fry. Let me hold
my emotion and let me give you the background.
My survey team
is now in Punakha. We got here on 17th evening. We are put up at an
apartment at Jigmethang. We got a comfortable accommodation here because our next-door
neighbor is my friend Ugyen, who works as Kidu Officer. Last night she went to
a remote Nunnery and did not return – thus having to sleep alone at her house –
a bit sleepless because it was my first night and did not feel much at home. Because
of that lack of sleep, I had to sleep this evening at 3:30 p.m. I had a very
repulsive smell of meat being cooked that it woke me up. In half sleep I asked
the girls in the same room with me if someone was preparing a meat curry. They
said yes.
I woke up and
went to the kitchen to find those pieces of fish in the bowl. One boy frying them
in hot, hot oil, one boy squatting on the floor, squashing the spices to add to
the fried fish. I must tell you, this brought in me such big pity. I call it
pity because it was mixed with distaste. I asked, ‘where did you get it from?’
and the boy frying it told me that uncle (one of the drivers) caught it from a
pond. I expressed a bit of the upset in me and left. Then in the one minute I
was in the toilet, it occurred to me that they had killed a fish on the 30th
of the Bhutanese month, which is considered auspicious. Moreover today is the 9th
death anniversary of my father and my visit to the Machen at the Punakha Dzong this morning to offer prayer was made
to seem so fruitless. I have been wondering about the unequal capability of
feeling for others for quite sometime now. I have been blind to believe that
all Bhutanese have some faith in Buddhism.
I did not become
a vegetarian because of my compassion for the animals. I bore distaste to the
taste of meat since I was a child. But thinking about it, even if I did not
have that distaste, I would have become a vegetarian as I grew up and
understood the equality of pain and fear of death, the equal preciousness of
life – for both human and animals. By
saying this, I do not mean to be contemptuous – there is no feeling of
superiority for being vegetarian. It is my deepest wish that once we have been
born as human, all of us had the same capacity to for others. And others don’t
have to be just human beings. I am sad. Really sad. Why did the fish have to
die for our desire for a better meal? We are not going to die even if we are
not fed meat. Is it too hard to put ourselves in the place of the animal we
want to eat? How hard is it to think that the fish in the bowl, the pieces of
its body fried in the boiling oil is you?
I tell you this:
if there is no good you can do, better not do any harm.
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