David N. Snyder wrote:^ Yes, I agree with what Lyndon wrote. And also, Ron's point is the Jain view. The Jains believe there is jiva or soul in plants. Buddhists do not believe this and rebirth is to Animal Kingdom and other celestial beings, not plants, minerals, microorganisms, etc.
And in any event, even in the Jain philosophy which believes in jiva in plants, they adopt vegetarianism, apparently to cause the least harm.
I agree that a vegan life-style probably causes the least harm when killing other life-forms and eating them. As I said in my previous post, the only way to avoid this is to become a scavenger and to consume only already dead life-forms.
Then you will occupy the moral high-ground.
Dave, Yes, I have heard and read the "Jain" deflection before. I believe you pointed this out to me a year or so ago, when I posted a similar argument in another thread, which shows that we are both consistent with our arguments. But, there are Buddhists, who can read the latest scientific findings regarding plants, such as the one I provided, and can come to their own conclusions. Hopefully there are more than a few of those posting on this board. It seems (to me) foolish to believe that Buddha wanted us to stop learning about the true nature of ever evolving life-forms once he died. When Buddha asked of his Bhikkhus, "Which is larger, this number of leaves I hold in my hand or the number of leaves in the forest that surrounds us, he did not mean to say that because he didn't teach us all those other things that he knew, that we weren't free to discover and understand them for ourselves. Besides, what we "believe" is of little importance. Science allows us to discover, verify and validate the truth for ourselves. All we have to do is look and we can see the true nature of the life which surrounds us.
reference:
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka ... .wlsh.html
John, we have discussed this point many times before, and I don't expect to change your mind. All that I was trying to do was to provide recent scientific findings regarding the sentient nature of our sessile co-habitants of Planet Earth.
Because their brains aren't located in their heads, like ours doesn't mean that they aren't conscious, sentient, sapient, and intelligent. Should you ever decide to read the recent article I provided in full, you will find that they have all of the sensory organs that we do, plus more effective ones on The Chemical plane as do dogs and bears, when compared to us humans.
Interestingly, plants occupied and adapated to the land far before animal creatures eventually evolving into us humans climbed from beneath the seas. And, if it wasn't for them, we wouldn't even have oxygen to breathe. Some other version of us would still be metabolizing sulfur as did our earliest ancestors, The Thermo-philes (Archaea).
resource:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermophile
That's all I got!