Chapter 62 Mice have parents too

Seeing a group of children discussing on the playground, I walked over curiously. It turned out that a child’s iron pet caught a mouse. He invited his companions to the playground to hold a mouse killing ceremony. He was going to pour gasoline on the mouse and set it on fire. Then he opened the cage door to see how far the lit mouse could run. I said to the children: "This is too cruel. Think about how painful it would be if you were set on fire and ran on the playground!" The children didn't expect a stranger to appear out of nowhere and persuaded them to burn the mice. The atmosphere became rigid and silent.

The child who caught the mouse said: "But, but the mice are pests! They ate things from our house." I said: "According to what you say, shouldn't a thief be set on fire? Anyone, good or bad, has parents, and they are very cute in their eyes. Mice may be cute children in their eyes!" Another child said: "If we don't kill the pests, there will be more and more pests, and then they will be overrun by pests." I told my child that tens of millions of people in this world are killing insects every day, such as spraying mosquitoes and cockroaches, but mosquitoes and cockroaches have never decreased. Many people in this world are protecting wild animals, and wild animals are also No increase.Besides, what are pests?People in the past saw all the ferocious birds and beasts in the mountains as pests, but which one was not a pest, such as an eagle, a lion, a tiger, a leopard, a wolf, or a fox?

"Animals, good or bad, have the right to live on the earth. Animals, good or bad, have parents and children, so we should not kill animals casually." The children became more silent. The kid who "owns" the mouse said, "Otherwise, let's not set it on fire. Let's give it a little punishment and punish it to go to the garbage mountain to eat garbage." The children all cheered and roared away. I looked at the back of the child and the gasoline stains left on the grass, and thought that we adults have the responsibility to open up children's benevolence and not treat other sentient beings cruelly.

True benevolence is not love for good beings, but compassion for bad beings—not to mention the difference between likes and dislikes among sentient beings? A Patriarch of the Pure Land School once said: "The Western Pure Land teaches for the wicked." Someone asked him why it was not for good people, but for evil people. He said: "The place where good people live is the pure land. What kind of pure land do we need? What's more, evil people can go to the pure land by reciting Amitabha ten times, let alone good people." When we were young, because of our ignorance, we used to catch birds in the trees, fill the fields with crickets, and catch fish and shrimps in the rivers. Our ignorance has been passed down from generation to generation, and our elders have sprayed industrial black smoke into the sky, polluting The waste water was poured into rivers and the fields were sprayed with excessive pesticides.Not to mention animals, many people even forget that other children have parents too.

What we want to save is not the rats caught by accident, but the hearts of children. In a society, if children don't generally have a benevolent heart, the victims will not only be mice!