Searching and Believing

Part 1

What provokes an idea?  Four things happened in the space of a week. I read Peter Matthiessen’s book, The Snow Leopard, which describes his two months in Nepal in 1972, interacting with fundamental Buddhist cultures in extreme winter conditions; one of the few snow leopards in captivity (Norfolk, England) successfully underwent cataract surgery; in an interview on PBS,  Sadhguru Darshan  described western religions as based essentially on belief, compared to eastern religions which focus on searching; and the media covered extensively a group of Buddhist monks and their dog, Aloka,  as they walk 2300 miles from Fort Worth, Texas, to Washington DC in what has been labeled “The  Walk for Peace.”

One school of thought suggests that such coincidences are happening around us all of the time; it is when we notice them that we are truly alive.  And in in the back of my mind (of course!) was the question- does this offer any insight into honey bees and beekeeping? 

For Christians, Jesus was a divine being who took human form, is unique as such and will come again.   By contrast, Buddhists believe that Siddhartha Gautama was fully human without any divinity and was the first in a long series of Buddhas (currently, at least in Tibetan Buddhism, the Buddha is embodied by the Dalai Lama.) Whereas Jesus’ divinity came about by the action of God the Father, the Buddha attained enlightenment through intense personal reflection.  Thus salvation for Christians focuses on God’s grace together with one’s on-going works  while the goal of Buddhism is nirvana, or liberation from attachment and worldly suffering. 

Fundamental to both faiths are the principles of love, compassion, patience and tolerance; for example, Buddhism’s Noble Eightfold Path aligns in many ways with Christian ethical teachings.   Thus the Golden Rule in Christianity (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,”) compares favorably with Buddhism’s “Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.”  Similar sentiments can be found in Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Native American religions.

Both Christianity and Buddhism offer a concise list of moral directives—the Ten Commandments for Christianity and the Five Precepts for Buddhism.  Several of the former, which are understood to have been given to Moses by God,  deal with how people should relate to the divine, whereas the Precepts function more as guidelines for seekers of enlightenment. Four of the Christian directives have their quasi-equivalents in Buddhism: no killing, no stealing, no lying and no adultery or sexual misconduct, perhaps because  these actions tear so deeply at the fabric of human community that they demand restraint.

In summary, Christianity is a religion, Buddhism is a practice.  The former emphasizes faith, divine grace, and a Creator God – essentially an external locus – while the focus of the latter is on experiential understanding, the illusion of self, and karma, an internal journey towards true enlightenment. Nor are they mutually exclusive.  The late Thich Nhat Hanh was told by a Catholic priest who lives in a Buddhist monastery in France that Buddhism  made him a better Christian. 

Surely one can find exceptions to these descriptions; after all reliable sources suggest that there are 10 different groups of Christians (Catholics, Protestants, Eastern Orthodox, Assyrian, for example) and more than 45 000 denominations within them, just as there are three branches of Buddhism. So yes, there are many different interpretations and experiences within these generalizations. 

For Buddhists the Five Precepts are ethical directions for lay followers. They are followed by the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, the first a diagnosis of the human condition and the second a practical guide to what the Buddha called ‘the middle way’ to nirvana. 

The first of the Five Precepts is often mistranslated as “Do Not Kill,” but again, the Precepts are not commandments  so much as guidelines for cultivating mindfulness, compassion, and ethical living for the  benefit of self and others.  A more accurate translation, according to Phra Anil Sakya, Deputy Abbot of Wat Bowonniwet Vihara, the Monastery of the Supreme Patriarch of Thailand, is “I dedicate myself to study the lesson of avoiding killing living beings.”  Of course one cannot completely avoid killing creatures – as Sakya explains, a simple walk in the grass, never mind the very act of breathing, will kill other beings.  Even as we eat, other forms of life are transformed into sustenance. The essence of the precept lies in ones intention. 

So if avoiding killing is impossible, the intention becomes cultivating a heart that values life in all its forms, together with a mindfulness of the ways in which we can cause harm through mindlessness, neglect and indifference. Key here is the recognition that all beings treasure their existence, that all life forms have a strong drive to endure.  To align oneself with that universal force of compassion is to cultivate empathy for all living things. 

So how might this relate to honey bees and their management?  For example, should one avoid doing an alcohol wash to check mite counts because it involves killing bees?  (And incidentally, in my experience, sugar rolls also kill bees, just not as quickly, in that vigorous shaking of the bees in a jar of powdered sugar critically destroys their delicate wings.) First, the overall intention of a mite check is the long term health and survival of the colony, which makes the killing of some of the bees ethically acceptable, even perhaps to the bees themselves – in terms of the much discussed altruism of bees, if they could understand that their sacrifice is for the well being of their nest mates, they might accept it. 

Similarly this does not mean that one should not kill wax moths, hive beetles or varroa mites, provided that one’s intent is the health and survival of the colony. 

And what is your intention as a beekeeper?  Denis Vanengelsdorp was the first person I heard use the term ‘the zen of beekeeping,’ which means approaching and working a colony slowly with a deliberate  mindset of compassion.  There are physiological benefits for the beekeeper – when we breathe quickly we exhale more carbon dioxide which is an alarm pheromone to the guard bees, who respond accordingly.  So aligning oneself with the universal force of compassion and humility is to cultivate empathy for the bees individually and collectively, and fewer bees (or beekeepers) get hurt in the process.

The remaining  four Precepts will be addressed next month, together with an attempt to summarize what it all means for ourselves as well as for our charges.