The Solutions to Teaser No. 86 can be found in the lefthand column under Arts & Entertainment. Just look for Tinytown Teasers ~ click ~ and there you are.
Just because the Buddha said all life is suffering doesn't necessarily mean ALL of life is suffering ...
Some of life seems to be doing pretty well. We've never known a slime mold to complain. Then again we're not attunded to the bottom of the vegetable kingdom the way we ought to be. Ants suffer, tho -- we make sure of that almost every day of our lives.
During an event at the Insectapalooza, an annual event sponsored by the Cornell Dept. of Entomology, the man handling the maggots and flies could not say with 100 percent certainly that those creatures did not experience some sort of pain. The bug zapped by the bug light may have a brief and horrific flood of pain for all we know. Few men give a hoot. Let them be gaffed.
We now know that fish suffer. Rocks too may have their good eons and bad eons. Is it good or bad to be magma? Is chiseling into rock either to set something in stone or to climb some sheer cliff face fair to the rocks? Silicon may be an intelligence all its own. Tread lightly. Seems like some people know this and a lot of others don't.
Handicap parking spaces appear to be sensible way to compensate for some of the suffering we may be inflicting on the inanimate world through our own ignorance.
The idea resembles carbon emission credits in that we build a space that is itself, specifically handicapped. It is no longer a normal, healthy parking space. It may have been in the past, but after the designation is official, the space is afflicted for the duration. This allows us then to breathe a little easier about spiders we vacuum up or tiny bits of life we squash unknowingly all the time. We have sacrificed a unit of space for them.
Buddha's major insight came to him on a rather tense day for the spoiled little rich kid. And it is true he mostly had his eye out for the sufferings of his fellow human beings. We doubt much if the Buddha-in-progress had come across a tree with maple leaf tar spot or an ash ravaged by the emerald leaf borer, he'd have been so swayed. No. His shock came from the in-your-face squalor and misery of his native homeland and its people. That doesn't mean Buddha was a specist. But it is clear that he figured the vegetable kingdom to be in a separate even lower department. As for animals like the crocodile, he no doubt had some respect -- but did his concept of suffering extend to the croc? We think he loved the croc, but there are no family shots with the Buddha in lotus with a coupla crocodiles resting at his big soft feet.
Some of the drift here depends on whether or not you take his statement "all life is suffering" to mean "we are suffering" or really, truly, all life, even tubeworms and microbes and ghost shrimp at the bottom of the sea are in a state of suffering because we are in a constrant struggle to survive. Do you think it is a personal or a general statement?
Cholly Darwin took a different but no less haughty view of the whole megillah saying that life suffered, sure, but for a very good reason. Life was trying its damndest to stay alive and using all the tricks in nature's workshop along with any happy accidents to perpetuate the animal and vegetable kingdoms.
It's too bad the Chuck and Buddy could not have met under the Bodhi Tree and tackled life's illiusions together. Buddha wanted to come back and save souls, though.
Darwin seemed to think that once was enough and if you were lucky there was heaven.
–– C. Penbroke Handy
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