Puppies, Cruelty, and Karma

I came home last night to find my husband yelling at the television. He was watching the evening news and a story about a 55-year-old woman in California who was caught on surveillance camera on a 95-degree day tossing a plastic garbage bag containing a litter of 3-day-old puppies into a dumpster.

My husband rewound the video, and I saw a woman pull up behind a store in a white jeep, hop out with the bag, flip open the lid of a dumpster, and fling the bag of puppies inside. She jumped back in her jeep and drove away.

It was lucky for these puppies that a man saw this, was curious about what the woman threw away, and found the sealed bag of puppies, sill alive. With the intense heat and lack of air, they would have all quickly died. The woman has since been identified and arrested.

My husband was shouting the usual questions: what kind of monster would do this to innocent puppies? Where is the puppies’ mother, and what abuse has she suffered besides having her babies, whom she loves, torn from her? How can a person do this to animals? He was really upset. So was I.

As much as he was upset, he was also confused. The ‘why’ of it all is what gets to him. It gets to everyone. This kind of cruelty is hard to understand and hard to forgive.

It’s hard for Buddhists too. The Buddha teaches us about Buddha nature – our true nature, the nature of our mind, the essential being. Every sentient being, every being with mind and consciousness, has the essential nature of Buddha. The qualities of Buddha are there. It’s the core nature of all consciousness.

He also teaches that all sentient beings have the exact same Buddha nature. There is no one being with more Buddha nature than another. There is no difference of man or woman, races or colors, casts of society, incasts or outcasts, in a flea, a dog, or a human. Buddha nature is already present in everything. All of it is within us all.

Buddha awakened his disciples to that most inner beauty, perfect peace, infinite compassion, and omniscient wisdom. His disciples, already imbued with Buddha nature, nonetheless had to be awakened to it.

Their illusions of ego, of self – the baggage of mistakes and projections and habitual thinking that were constructed artificially by forces outside themselves, their ideas of time and space, beginnings and endings, the abstract concepts of phenomena  – had to be identified and done away with before their Buddha nature was realized.

They needed to be freed from those illusions before Buddha nature could be activated. Until it’s realized, understood, and then made present - until it’s initiated - we may have Buddha nature, but we are not Buddhas.

This gives us all the potential to become fully enlightened, to put an end to suffering and the causes of suffering, to abide in our Buddha nature, and even rejoice in the experience.

Buddha also teaches of great compassion. Compassion is the ability to see clearly into the true nature of suffering, to recognize that we are not separate from others’ suffering. Our true nature - our Buddha nature, the eternal, changeless nature of mind, the timeless, changeless truth that is in all of us - abides in compassion. And our deeds of compassion are indications of our Buddha nature.

The woman who threw the puppies away as garbage is blind to her Buddha nature, to her potential for limitless love. She needs an entry point, a place where she can connect with it. For whatever reason – whether she is mentally ill, or has been abused, neglected, or thrown away herself like the puppies she tossed in the dumpster – she abides in the delusion that the puppies are separate from Buddha nature, and that she is separate from the puppies, from the cruelty, and from the karma.

This is the work we are all called to do with no exceptions. The Buddha left us with the task of teaching this truth to each other, to activating the Buddhas in all of us. I was as horrified and angry as my husband was at that news story. But it’s a call for us to reach out to each other with the compassion of the Buddha and the truth of the Dharma.

We live in a very noxious world. I know it’s hard to feel any compassion for the woman who left the puppies in the garbage to die, to look into her and see the truth of her suffering. But moral outrage is the enemy of compassion. Compassion has many faces and it’s essential. We must aspire to compassion, and yet we can only know compassion at the level of our consciousness. The conditions needed to activate compassion are conditions that this woman has not realized, and it’s our task to bring this truth to her. 

Without compassion, the world will be paralyzed by fear and anger, and humanity and all species will not survive. Compassion is the phenomenal strength that’s going to save us all.

Barbie xo