To suppress the grief, the pain, is to condemn oneself to a living death. Living fully means feeling fully; it means becoming completely one with what you are experiencing and not holding it at arm's length.

The truth is that everything is One, and this of course is not a numerical one.

Anyone familiar with the numerous accounts of the Buddha's extraordinary compassion and reverence for living beings - for example his insistence that his monks strain the water they drink lest they inadvertently cause the death of any micro-organisms - could never believe that he would be indifferent to the sufferings of domestic animals caused by their slaughter of food

A Zen master, when asked where he would go after he died, replied, 'To Hell, for that's where help is needed most.'

The uniqueness of zazen lies in this: that the mind is freed from bondage to all thought forms, visions, objects, and imaginings, however sacred or elevating, and brought to a state of absolute emptiness, from which alone it may one day perceive its own true nature, or the nature of the universe.

To suppress the grief, the pain, is to condemn oneself to a living death. Living fully means feeling fully; it means becoming completely one with what you are experiencing and not holding it at arm's length.

To put the flesh of an animal into one's belly makes one an accessory after the fact of its slaughter, simply because if cows, pigs, sheep, fowl, and fish, to mention the most common, were not eaten they would not be killed.