First sex, now murder.
So now we have a question about killing people.
What would you rather do?
Kill one person to save a thousand or let one live and one thousand must die?
one of these what-if questions.
No one has books full of these that you're supposed to torture yourself over.
It's really silly.
I mean, there's no, I'm not causing a thousand people to die if I let one live.
I mean, yeah, I could go around hunting out serial killers and shooting them and so on.
I mean, it's such a long and complicated answer, but this is the argument that we had over buying meat and so on.
The point is you're only responsible for the actions that you do.
An action is only unwholesome, is only bad.
because of the nature of the mind of the person who performs it.
That's it.
There's no God telling us this is wrong.
There's no society telling us.
Just because God tells you it's wrong, just because society tells you it's wrong, doesn't make anything wrong.
Socrates pointed this out.
Socrates said, or Plato, however, but Socrates said that
this man was going to take his parents to court because he thought it's what the gods wanted.
And so Sakriza asked him, well, so is it right to take your parents to court because the gods say it's right?
Or do the gods say it's right because it's right?
And either way, you can't evoke the gods.
There is no entity that could tell you that something is right or wrong.
Murder could be perfectly right,
There's nothing intrinsic about the act of killing someone that is in any way wrong.
If one person kills another, it's meaningless to you.
If this person kills that person, it's totally unrelated to your state of mind.
You can just watch it and say, seeing, seeing.
There's no relationship And this is scientific This isn't Buddhist theory If you're thinking about this logically And removing your emotions from it If you're thinking of it scientifically This is why scientists have a real problem with ethics And why they cut up rats And poison rats And wind up horrible people
Because they are unable to develop a clear code of ethics.
Simply because from a scientific point of view there's nothing wrong with killing.
Killing is the end of a life.
What does it mean?
It means nothing.
Their only understanding of ethics is a religious concept that has no basis in reality.
So Buddhism just points one thing out, that not only does the physical exist and go by laws of physics, but the mind also exists, and it goes by laws of how the mind works.
At the moment when you kill someone, you're creating a problem in your mind.
When you let someone kill someone else, you're not creating a problem in your mind.
This is the only...
ethical principle that exists in Theravada Buddhism anyway, that the actions that you perform will affect your mind, the choices that you make.
So if you're watching someone kill someone else or kill a thousand people creates anguish in your mind, then you're responsible for the creating of anguish.
If you could save those people and you choose to not save them,
if all you had to do is tell them run that guy's got a gun or something like that or someone's coming with a gun go hide and you don't do that then you're responsible for that you're not ever responsible for the killing unless you're the one pulling the trigger or unless you're the one telling a person to kill if you say to this person kill that man
I mean, you're still not responsible for pulling the trigger.
You're responsible for telling that person to do something.
You're responsible for the ethical qualities of mind, the greed, the anger, and the delusion inherent in the mind at that moment.
So,
If you don't kill the person who's going to kill a thousand people, then it may be that unwholesomeness arises in your mind as a result.
You think, let those people die, good, nothing to do, not my problem.
And so as a result, you create some kind of worry and anguish afterwards.
I couldn't save them, all I had to do was kill that one man.
But on the other hand, if you kill that one person,
then you have to say, what is different?
What is worse?
This guilt that I have over those thousand deaths, which weren't a result of my actions.
And so the only reason it comes up is because of some intellectualizing, or some minor feelings of guilt, or the feeling of pulling a trigger.
I think the real reason why people have a problem with this, and a problem with...
with understanding things like hunting in general, is because they've never done it themselves.
If you've never killed a significantly large being, like my example is a deer, because that's how far I went, or even more a human being, then you have no real right to argue this question.
And I don't have the right to argue, but if you've read the books, if you've read accounts of people who have killed, and how it affects them,
any of these books.
The book I was referring to earlier was Crime and Punishment.
It's just an excellent, excellent description of the torture that goes through the mind of someone who kills another human being that we can't even fathom.
Most of us, we think, well, it's just intellectualizing.
So you kill someone, what's the problem?
totally different when you actually try to do it.
It's an incredibly powerful act.
The only comparison I have is with, as I said, with hunting, with killing a deer.
I had no compunction, no problem with killing and I, you know, I killed insects and small animals and no problem with hunting.
I got my hunting license trained and so on.
And then I sat up in the tree and when the deer came,
raising this crossbow, ready to pull the trigger, and suddenly my whole body started to shake.
The deer was no threat to me.
There was no fear.
There should have been no fear in my mind.
It wasn't like there was some danger to me, but I just got this incredible dread and revulsion to it, and my whole body started to shake, and I could barely pull the trigger.
That's how powerful it is.
This was totally not intellectual because I had no feelings of hesitation.
I was perfectly ready to do this.
And yet when it came time to do that, because I had never done it, because my mind was still pure of that,
it had an incredible effect on my mind and this is what you're looking at if you kill someone if you're just talking about the guilt feelings of not having prevented other people's death when actually in the end all of those people are going to have to die anyway whether it be from a bullet wound or whether it be from old age everyone dies and in horrible ways you can't possibly save even a small portion of the people who have to die in horrible ways
If it's just a matter of feeling that kind of guilt from not having prevented the inevitable, or put off the inevitable, then it's far preferable to the horror of having killed a human being, even an evil human being.
You know, there are other, you know, I've read other accounts of this.
I can't remember where, but people, you know, police officers who have had to kill humans, and they can have, or, right, the one is post-traumatic stress disorder.
soldiers who go to war and will come back and just don't want to ever talk about it again.
They've just locked off that part of their mind.
It's just so horrific.
If you've never been to war, you can't imagine the horrors of war and people who are not able to sleep at night.
because of what they've seen and what they've done.
Sumeda was telling us about these caravans that they had to drive from point A to point B and they weren't allowed to stop for anything.
A man, woman, child standing in the middle of the road had to be run over, basically.
This kind of thing.
Maybe that's going quite far afield, but...
the horror that is involved with these visceral acts or these
real acts of body.
There's an incredible power there.
But the point is that there's no intellectualizing in Buddhism.
Buddhism is experientially based on experience.
You can't come up with a theory of morality and call it Buddhist.
Buddhism is
You are responsible for your own actions and you can never escape that responsibility and you're responsible for nothing else.
And that is scientific.
It's verifiable.
You can never verify what is the guilt of letting someone kill someone else.
You can only verify what is the guilt or what is the suffering involved in your own actions.
So if you choose to feel guilty about it, that's going to create suffering for you.
If you choose to kill a person to not feel guilty, then that's going to cause
I would say as well, or even more intense feelings of horror and nightmares because now you're a murderer.
Whether it was a justified murder or not, it was murder.