Killing, Vegetarianism and Buddhist Teachings

Since leaving the meditation center after the Jan. 30^th 10-day meditation course, I have been learning all that I can about the ideas behind the Vipassana meditation techniques we learned. Included in this is a foundation of Buddhist teachings which I find fascinating and perhaps worth brining into my life. As I sort through these ideas, testing them against my own experience and beliefs, I find that much of what Mr. Goenka teaches (and the Buddha taught) fits with what I have experienced the world to be beautifully and opens up whole new, exciting possibilities as well. But there are a few pieces which do not fit, which I cannot yet reconcile with logic and reason. 

CONVERSATIONS WITH GOD:

I pray and I pray and I often write my prayers, and when I am moved to hear an answer, I write that too. Here is the answer I got to my sorrow over this almost-40-year-old-body which is increasingly... well...almost 40.

GOD SPEAKS:

This is beauty. How can you not know that? Every dip and every valley in that skin you stare at so sadly. Those wrinkles, those scars, the bends and kinks in your swelling joints, the fleshy curves at your hips and waist. These are a map, every line and every shading a testament to all the places we have been, you and I together, as I led you on this journey that is your life. 

Did you not know? Do you not see? I am a painter! I paint with oils, thick and deep, mixing, pitting, brushing onto your canvas in colors brilliant and subdued. But it is the textures, the texture which is the key. My medium is not a simple color, flat and 2-dimensional. It encompasses height and weight, the oils thick or thin or sporadic from my brush. This is the beauty of my work. You are an oil painting. How can you long to be flat and smooth and shinny as you were?

I am a painter. Is a blank canvas the beauty that you crave?

I created you long ago, a blank canvas, as I create many whom I love. As any painter, I love a canvas, blank and white. To see it there fills me with excitement, with joy. It fills me with love. 

Do you think that this love comes from the whiteness of the canvas? Should I hang it then, on my wall as it is, unmarred, untouched, smooth and sleek? Would I love it if I did? No. What I love is not not the canvas. It is the potential, the excitement of the creation which is to come. Do you think this love, this joy would exist if I did not paint? If I did not intend, anticipate something better that is to come, something better than the smooth surface and bright, perfect face? 

Upon you, once a blank canvas, I have created. I have practiced the glory of creation. Each brushstroke has added texture, color, form. I have added, every day for forty years, another layer, another dip and valley, here and there, and your body has changed with my brush, colored and deepened, textured and shaded. 

Your wrinkles are deeper, the lines in your skin are longer and more pronounced. Your hands are rough and calloused. There is a scar bellow your right wrist. Smaller scars and transient cuts mar your arms. There are freckles here and there. Is that a sun spot beginning to appear?