Humans and animals

When the father's sperm joins the mother's egg, that is the moment everyone begins a new life. But according to one's karma, that sperm and egg are either human or animal.

Usually, only someone with grave wrongdoing falls into being an animal. In human eyes, animals have little worth. People can use animals as food, for scientific experiments, and to serve humankind. Although in recent times advanced countries have laws protecting animals, or protecting species in danger of extinction, animals still belong to a lower "rank" than human beings.

So whoever creates base, degrading karma, karma that loses worth and human dignity, will fall into being an animal, and in that animal body will be looked down on and despised.

Which kinds of karma are considered degrading and undignified?

They are sexual misconduct and incest, breaking the moral order of human society. Desire that knows no restraint and has no reason to guide it is clearly equivalent to the desire of animals. Conduct like that of animals leads its doer to an animal life afterwards.

Or extreme selfishness that turns into the ruthless act of fighting over and tearing apart one's own kind is also very much like animals. People who are too selfish, who think only of themselves and use every vicious means to harm others and secure their own interests, are no different in character from animals that live only by selfish instinct. Where one fights over things like an animal, the karmic result of falling into being an animal is unavoidable.

Or there are people who, whenever angry, curse others as animals, calling them buffalo, dogs, pigs, horses and so on. Such harsh speech, repeated many times over a lifetime, is enough to form the karmic result of falling into an animal body in the next life. In the Śrāmaṇera precepts of Northern Buddhism there is a story of a novice monk who, without meaning to, mocked an arhat's chanting as sounding like a dog barking. Because of those words, the novice fell into being a dog for five hundred lives in a row.

Or there are people who work as slaughterers, killing chickens and ducks, pigs and cattle. As they near death, they suddenly fall ill, crying out like ducks or pigs, and see visions of countless animals coming to bite and tear at them. When they pass to the next life, they will surely fall into being animals to suffer again the pain of being slaughtered. But because in one lifetime of this trade they killed too many animals, they must fall into being animals for many successive lives afterwards to repay all the old grievances.

If such a person has killed animals and also has a base character, in the next life they will surely fall into being animals, both despised and killed in return.

If, however, the person only committed the wrong of killing but has a noble character and is generous and loving towards everyone, then in the next life they will still return as a human being, but will suffer accidents, disability or early death.

Some people in a previous life received much of other people's property improperly, through theft, swindling debts, or, in the case of monastics, accepting offerings without keeping the precepts, together with a depraved and selfish character. In the next life they will fall into being beasts that do heavy labour, such as buffalo, oxen, horses and camels, to repay the debt. And if they only incurred debts of property but kept a good character, in the next life they will still be born human but will have to work back-breakingly to pay their debts. Enjoying property that is not rightfully one's own always leaves unpleasant debts for the next life. A person who must bend their back to serve a master, carefully and fearfully following the master's every wish, or an animal that must pull the plough, haul heavy loads and endure the whip, are all painful ways of repaying a debt from a former life. It is so because they took on too many debts. So when we are now generously given gifts, let us be careful whether these are unpleasant debts being stored up for a later life. Only property created through one's own labour, by honest means, whether little or much, is truly the reward of life and not a debt that drags on afterwards.

Some people fall into being animals, becoming a species that is despised, because they habitually despised everyone. That is fairness! When we always rate others low and look down on others, we have created for ourselves a karmic result of being despised in return. There are many forms of being despised. There are people with infectious diseases that are hard to cure, such as leprosy or foul-smelling sores; people with the status of prisoners; people who are short of money, talent or character; people with a bad reputation (whether true or the result of slander). But an animal body remains the "status" that is most clearly looked down on. So a mind of conceit, thinking oneself superior and seeing others as inferior, if it goes too far, can still lead to the karmic result of falling into being an animal in the future.

In other cases we also see a few exceptions. Some dogs that are doted on and cared for by their owners live better than human beings (poor people, of course). This karmic result has two causes: first, in a previous body as a human being, this dog did much kindness to its owner and helped the owner greatly; second, alongside that, it created some base karma that lost it its human dignity. Because of its karma of poor character, it had to fall into being a dog, and because of its great kindness to the owner, it is pampered beyond measure.

As regards the theory of evolution, biologists hold that mutations in the structure of animals appear from time to time, giving a few individuals traits far superior to the rest of their kind. In a pack of wolves, now and then a few are cleverer and gentler; people chose them to rear and gradually tame, forming the domestic dog we know today. Other animals, thanks to such mutations, adapted to changes in the Earth's environment while others were eliminated by nature. Such mutations made animals gradually evolve until they became human beings. Then among human beings too there are mutations that produce outstanding great figures. But humankind has not found, in addition, that these great figures could produce a "new humanity" higher than present humanity. They are like a few lone stars that flash across the sky and then fall, leaving people to the same ordinary whirling and sinking as before.

How life first appeared on Earth is still a mystery. Scientists calculate that under the original natural conditions the chance of a single protein appearing was one in two billion, that is, practically zero. Yet cells appeared in ever greater numbers and gradually grew more complex. How is cause and effect to explain this? From a place where there was nothing, living things suddenly appeared, and then animals were formally born with complex consciousness, creating karmic causes to receive karmic results. Who made animals with consciousness so that those animals must struggle wretchedly for survival? In that struggle to survive, animals sometimes help one another (good) and sometimes tear one another apart (evil), creating countless mixed good and evil karma that drives them to roll on in the cycle of rebirth for ever. Could it be that the original cause was an almighty God who made everything like a tragicomedy with no way out?

On another occasion we will return to this question in more detail.