D1W1 wrote: ↑Mon Sep 17, 2018 3:53 pm
Obtaining food can be considered the ripening of good kamma. There are people in some countries do not have access to food, let alone healthy and good food. If the food is thrown away, it's said we are wasting our wholesome kamma, which is not a good deed. Since it's not a wholesome deed, the result of that action is suffering. What's your thought on this?
I think that obtaining food
might be the result of good
kamma ripening, but it doesn't have to be. Not everything that happens to us is
vipaka.
Your example is about throwing food away when there are others who are hungry. Again, there could be various intentions in play here, and that is presumably what would determine the brightness or otherwise of the
kamma. If one is merely heedless and does not think about the other person's needs, then that would be less serious than if one had the intention to deprive them of the food by discarding it. That would be malevolence.
The important point here, however, is that if we are talking about distant foreign countries then in the majority of cases there is nothing that one can do to get the food to those people that need it. One might have any amount of compassion for such starving people, but attempting to actually get the food to them would be futile. No matter how good one's intentions are, it is simply impossible. The situation is analogous to saying that we have acquired good health as a result of previous bright kamma, and therefore we are wasting it if we can't transfer some of it to people who are sick. In the majority of cases, we cannot transfer our health in this manner. I don't think a deed can actually be wholesome or unwholesome unless we are actually capable of doing it. It's not in itself unwholesome to be unable to catch a person falling from a cliff, or to be unable to enter a fire to save someone. Giving food to a starving person thousands of miles away is, in this respect, like that: it can't be done. All we can do is feel compassion, which
is wholesome.
Someone else might have made a mistake in producing food in order to guarantee a profit rather than feeding the hungry (that's often why over-production and wastage happens). But that's their kamma, and not ours. It would presumably be good kamma to work out ways of preserving food and transferring it to the needy, but again the intention is what counts. If we do it out of compassion for the starving people, then that's better than doing it to make a bigger profit. But we can only do what is possible.