A Small Glimpse at My Belief(s)

Yesterday, I had to sacrifice, disect, and extract organs for a number of mice for data analysis in lab. I've been pretty good at disections and stuff since my first experience a few years ago. Strangely enough of all the disection days, two people randomly questioned how I felt about killing and disecting the mice. I think they were expecting me to give a one sentence response, but it's not as easy as that.

My one sentence response would be: It's against my belief to kill and/or hurt other living beings (ie: people, animals, etc.).

That's pretty much the main simplified theme of Buddhist's belief on how to treat others. If you can't help them, then at least don't hurt them. However, if you dig deeper, you would see how and why I am "okay" with the disection.

So Buddhists belief that there are six realms of existence. One of which is the human realm and another is the animal realm...so on. Depending on your karma (a count of how much good merit you have accumulated) then you are born/placed into one of these realms. Basically, if you do good deeds with good intentions, then you acquire good merit. When you have good merit, you can lead a good life presently or have a good rebirth, which to simplify everything down, can be conducive to the right conditions and ulitmately lead to enlightenment. I have really simplified everything down.

Anyway, the point is good merit can be acquired not only by doing good deeds, but according to Buddhism, it can be acquired through reciting prayers and mantras. By accumulating good merit through prayer/mantra recitations, in Buddhism we believe in "dedicating merit". This simply means dedicating the good merit you have accumulated to other people. To better explain this, I think I need to describe a situation.

Let's say, Person A has done no good deed and thus did not accumulate good merit. When Person A finds him or herself in trouble or about to be reborn, without any good merit, the results aren't looking that good. Now, Person B comes into the picture. Person B has recited mantras and done good deeds, thus Person B finds him or herself accumulating tons of good merit. In addition to that, Person B dedicates the accumulated good merit to everyone he or she knows at the end of each prayer and one of whom is to Person A. So that not only has Person B received good merit, everyone in his dedication prayer has also received good merit. All of a sudden, Person A has received the dedication and thus now have some good merit stored. Depending on how "heavy" Person A's karmic obstacles are, the situation Person A was facing will turn to good results or well not as bad as the original. That's the point of dedicating merit.

So now, to go back to my story. This is why to me it's "okay" because I make amends to the killings by praying and dedicating merit to the mice to counter the negative effects accumulated from killing the mice, but also by dedication of merit, it will allow the mice a better rebirth (ie: have a human birth next life). This is something that may not make sense to everyone, but it's something I truly believe in.

This is also why when I say I would like to pray for someone, this is what it basically entails, dedication of merit so that whatever someone's going through, through prayer and accumulation of merit, the situation becomes better. It's not because I'm dramatic, but it's because I truly believe this will help.

After all of that, as a side note, I'd like to add by helping people out in this way, I don't feel entitled to anything. I don't feel people owe me anything. I do this out of my own volition because I see it as a way to help others out.