The whale

Thuyên led his son past the rows of houses, gradually heading towards the seashore. Thuyên said:

• When I was little, this whole town was just a small commune, all sand, with no asphalt roads, so you couldn't use a vehicle. Everyone had to go on foot. Now the commune has been upgraded to a town, the State has paved every road, and every household has a vehicle roaring about, just like in the city.
  His son asked:
• Dad, where did you go to school then?
• When I was small I went to the village school over there. It has been demolished now to make a new residential area, and the school has been rebuilt, much bigger, somewhere else.
• Do people here still make their living by fishing, Dad?
• Yes, son. But now they have to go very far, and sometimes they stray into another country's exclusive economic zone and their boats are seized, which is terrible. When I was small, people only needed to row a little way out to sea to catch lots of fish. But someone made nets with tiny meshes, sweeping up and catching even the tiny fish and shrimp, and within just a few years the marine resources were wiped out.
• As far as I know, in civilised countries the government forbids catching small fish.
• Just a little lack of foresight, son, and you fall decades behind others.
• Where are you taking me, Dad?
• I'm taking you into the temple of Ông Nam Hải, the Lord of the Southern Sea. It enshrines the skeleton of a "cá ông", which is a whale.
  The father and son went into the temple, burned incense and prayed, then went and stood looking at the skeleton of the very large whale.
  The son asked:
• Dad, why do the people here worship whales?
• To people who go out to sea to fish, the whale, or "cá ông", is the sacred creature of the ocean.
• I don't understand.
• In the old days your grandfather was a fisherman too. He told me that on one trip out to sea a storm suddenly broke. You should understand that at that time there were no weather satellites to warn fishermen. Anyone who went to sea just looked at the sky and guessed, and whether they were right or wrong they had to bear it. When the storm rose, they saw death before their eyes. All they could do was join their palms and pray to heaven and earth. Suddenly a whale surfaced from somewhere, lifted the boat and carried it close to the shore, and only then dived and went back out to sea. Your grandfather said this happened very often to fishermen, so everyone believed it. If one or two people said it, we might think it was an embroidered tale, but here many people tell it the same way, so no one doubts it. From then on fishermen have revered the whale as the sacred creature of the ocean.
• But I've heard someone say that the whale just surfaced and bumped into the boat by chance, and people attributed it to the whale saving the boat.
• If you want to claim something you have to prove it, son. To say such things carelessly is ungrateful and heartless. Those who say that have never been in a boat in the middle of a storm and been saved by a whale. Those who were saved by a whale feel very clearly the whale's intentional action, surfacing to lift the boat and carry them to shore, and in most cases that shore is near their home. It can't have been by chance.
• Why do a few countries make a business of hunting whales for meat, like Japan and Norway? They don't seem to fear any sacred creature of the ocean.
• You'll see: those countries meet with one disaster after another, however civilised and advanced they are. There are organisations that try to protect whales, such as Greenpeace and the International Whaling Commission (IWC), which have campaigned for Japan and Norway to stop slaughtering whales, but all of it stops at pleading.
  The son joined his palms and bowed to the whale skeleton with reverence, then said:
• I think that in some other countries they have realised this too. In one Star Trek film, when the starship Enterprise returns to Earth, it comes across something strange. A huge spacecraft has come to Earth to find the humpback whales that they brought here several hundred thousand years ago. After searching and not finding them (perhaps Japan has killed them all), they decide to use a super-engine to drain all the sea water from the Earth so as to search thoroughly. Of course, if they finished draining it, the Earth would be wiped out. So the Enterprise crew has to save the Earth by going back 30 years to find the surviving humpback whales and bring them to the present to satisfy the demand of that spacecraft. Thanks to that, the Earth is not destroyed. Perhaps the scriptwriter also thought that whales are creatures with a special spirituality, because they were brought here from space. So it is not only Vietnam that has seen this. But why can't an advanced country like Japan see it?
• Anyone who becomes too skilled can grow arrogant, son. Anyone with talent is prone to that psychology. You're a good student too, and you must be careful of your own arrogance, or it will lead you to do wrong. 🐋

Whales and some other animals have a very strong spiritual intuition, far beyond that of human beings. And it's not only animals: some plants also have very strong spiritual power, namely the kinds of "ngải" plants. People who practise with ngải are those who discovered the special ability of those plants and found ways to exploit it as they wished (human beings are the cleverest, for they know how to make use of even species that are better than themselves).

It is only that whales lack hands with deft fingers like humans, and so have not tried to rearrange nature as humans have. Humans have both intelligence and deft hands, and so have manufactured many things, rearranged nature as they wish, and also destroyed nature as they wish (on this point humans are rather stupid).

Slaughtering a species with strong spirituality is a cruel act.
Humans have not stopped killing, but the degree of cruelty in killing is judged by the victim. If the victim has a high level of spiritual development, that killing is cruel. If the victim has a low level of spiritual development, that killing is less cruel.
Even within human society it is the same. If we kill a kind, talented person, the offence is very grave because it harms humanity as a whole. But if we kill a savagely cruel person, sometimes we may even be praised and rewarded for our service.

The whales out there at sea are lovable, precious creatures. They are even regarded as the sacred creatures of the ocean. We should open our hearts, not only towards one another as humans but also towards species with highly developed spirituality, so as to build together a peaceful and happy Earth.
We should not think that the killing of whales out at sea has nothing to do with us. It does.
"It concerns our conscience, it concerns our intelligence, and it concerns the future lives of our children and grandchildren" (collected).