မိဘေတြဆိုတာကလည္း အလံုးလိုက္အခဲလိုက္ သူလိုသမွ်ေပးႏိုင္ေလာက္ေအာင္ ခ်မ္းသာသူမ်ား မဟုတ္ျပန္။ ဒါေပမဲ့ သူ႔ရင္ထဲမွာ ျဖစ္ေပၚေနတဲ့ လူသားခ်င္းကိုယ္ခ်င္းစာတရားကို ဘယ္အရာကမွ တားဆီးလို႔မရတာနဲ႔အမွ် သူလုပ္လို႔ ရတဲ့ အလုပ္တစ္ခုရွိတယ္ဆိုတဲ့ အသိတစ္ခုကိုလည္း ခ်က္ခ်င္းရလိုက္ပါတယ္။ အဲဒါကေတာ့ စက္ဘီးစီးၿပီး ရံပံုေငြရွာရင္ ရႏိုင္တယ္ ဆိုတဲ့ အသိပါ။ အဲဒီအသိရလိုက္ၿပီးတဲ့ေနာက္မွာေတာ့ ခ်ာလီေလးဟာ စက္ဘီးစီးၿပီး ရံပံုေငြရွာဖို႔အတြက္ လံုးပန္းပါေတာ့တယ္။
Do you believe in reincarnations? You may or you may not. But there is many a evidence which reflects an individual's previous life. Reincarnation is a critical issue in many religions including Buddhism which opines a life consists of the three moments; past, present and future. Of many world religions, the two faiths; Hinduism and Buddhism which were originated at the same land, accept all moments of a life. The most salient feature between the two religions is the theory of Self and Non-self. The former theory is firmly held by Hindus. On the contrary, the second one is decisively accepted by those who regard themselves as Buddhists.
(A) I don’t have much time actually. But I am really interested in the questions you’ve put.
(Q) I have read in a few books that buddhism considers a foetus to be a full human being from the moment of conception because it is in posession of the five aggregates. This would suggest then that aborting a foetus at an earlier stage is no less wrong than doing it at a later stage. Do you agree with these statements?
(A) It is true that Buddhism recognizes a human being from the beginning; that is from the first moment of conception. It, however, does not mean that both aborting a foetus at an earlier stage and killing an already developed human being are in the same quantity of bad karma because a tender embryo is destined to be easier destroyed than an adult body. According to Buddhism, by karma is precisely meant volition or intention. That is bad intention is bad karma and good intention is good karma.
(Q) If the foetus is a complete human being, then does that make killing it just as immoral as killing an adult human?
(A) Negative. The answer is already given above.
(Q) If it were a choice between the two (for example if continuing with a pregnancy would kill the mother), would it then be ok to abort the foetus?
(A) This question is raised by many people as far as I know. The answer, however, given to it is somewhat arbitrary. I checked last night the canonical and paracanonical accounts recorded in the Theravada Pali texts. So far as I have discovered, there is no exception for this issue. However, Buddhism is not such a dogmatic religion but a really flexible and logical. It provides a due respect to the society concerned though a monk under any circumstances is not allowed to do so. I mean a monk must not give even a suggestion to a woman who requests for some contraceptives from him. Nevertheless, lay individuals have a choice. In aborting a foetus, to the question whether it leads to bad karma or not, the most critical factor is a mother’s own intention. If she does abortion with a bad purpose; that is just to destroy it for her own advantages, she cannot escape from the corresponding consequence. In contrast, if a woman has to choose either life, I assume that she is right to do abortion because her life pragmatically is more valuable than that of an unseen and unborn conceptus. You may find some stories in which the Buddha himself seems cruel. For example, the Blessed One, in the story of Magandiya (Dhammapada), who foresees that both the Brahmins; wife and husband are destined to realize the enlightenment and their daughter is to be badly ruined. The Lord prioritises the parents and ignores the daughter. Let alone an unseen embryo, when you happen to kill a person who tries to definitely take your life, what does the British Law mention? You have a right to defends and protect your own life and so does the Buddhist Law, my dear. The most significant phenomenon as I aforementioned is ‘intention’. If a woman aborts her conceptus with a bad intention, the result will come out depending on the weak or strong purpose. On the other hand, if she is in critical situation for her life, she is right to prioritise hers. Life is in deal or no deal, my friend.
(Q) Are there no circumstances at all under which it is ok to have an abortion, and not receive bad kamma for it (such as the example above, or a case where the child would live a very short life of extreme suffering)?
(A) Definitely yes, there is a circumstance. In this case, it is necessary to understand how karmas are functioning. There are 12 types of karmas which are explicitly expressed in Abhidhamma treatises, and are not elaborated herein. Of them, however, one of karmas is discussible. It is called ‘Ahosi-karma’ meaning a ‘barren action’. For instance, a person has committed some evil deeds; physical, verbal or mental which may be following his/her like a silhouette under the light in this very life and in the hereafter as well. This karma, if weak, is, however, automatically erased when another stronger karma whatever good or bad is performed. When a student applied for the university admission, it is not necessary to describe that s/he attended a primary school when s/he was young but s/he is eligible if s/he has an official certificate access to a course. Similarly, all karmas are playing. When a strong karma results in a corresponding effect, a weak one fades away. One thing, nonetheless, should be noted is that whatever karma which is performed with an intention cannot be deleted, says the Buddha, and in the endless circle of life, it awaits to bear a due fruit until a person gains the final liberation. A woman, who aborts, under unavoidable circumstances such as to save her life or to stop an extremely miserable condition of her child, with a reluctant intention or without having any bad purpose, is plausible. One thing should be denoted is that Buddhism never conflict with what a society fairly follows.
(Q) Is there such a thing as a good-intentioned abortion? Even though the act itself may be wrong, if the people who performed it genuinely believed it were for the best, then would they still receive punishment and bad kamma for it?
(A) The answer to this question does not deviate from the above mentioned one. But some details might make you happier. You have put a very good question. I don’t think some women who do abortion have a good intention. If they are, nevertheless, asked why they did so, zillions of excuses will come out of their beautiful lips. Yes, you are right saying that there are some who are genuine in their actions. But how many such people have you ever seen in your life? And in aborting a foetus, who knows they made it with a good intention? Many people give excuses to themselves for what they have done so that they dare not to recall. Despite such dishonest abortion done by many without genuine intention, if a woman who happens to unwillingly do such a thing for the sake of her life or her child’s incurable suffering, she is to be said doing what should be done. By doing so, I logically assume that she might not receive any punishment the Hereafter if she can lead the rest of her life to be better and better, that is if she well conducts some benevolent services for her society. It is pragmatic to comprehend that although the Buddhist religious texts mention different types of realms such as heavens and hells, the Buddha himself emphasises on the present condition in this very life. Rules and regulations laid down for monks and nuns must not be applied to the laities. In contrast, many monastic rules such as killing, stealing, etc., were laid down somewhat adopting the then-laws of Magadha State. Some academics, reading the monastic codes for the particular religious virtuosos and wearing such dark-glasses, might take a look at the lay society and assume that Buddhism is negative, dogmatic and non-flexible religion. Yes, they are right to say Buddhism is negative. But this “Negativeness” is precisely compared to a negative result in a blood test. Dogmatic it is because it regards that there is only one single way, to the final liberation, which is the ‘Eightfold Noble Path”. It is not flexible with intentionally committing any vicious deeds. So it is called ‘Buddhism’, my dear Bruce.
So far, Bruce, I have provided your questions with some relevant answers. You may, however, have some further quests. They are also welcome, my dear. I am pleased with your questions.
