Page 40 - The Buddha‘s Noble Eightfold Path

An incident from the life of the Buddha illustrates this point.

Once, when the Buddha was going on his alms round, he found
a gang of boys tormenting a crow which had broken its wing, in

the way that boys do, and enjoying the 'fun'. He stopped, and
asked them, 'If you are struck, do you feel hurt?' and they said,
'Yes'. The Buddha then said, 'Well, when you hit the crow, the

bird also feels hurt. When you yourself know how unpleasant it
is to experience pain, why do you inflict it on another living

being?.' A simple lesson, that a child can understand and act
upon, but a lesson that needs to be learnt at an early age, for if
this sort of thing is not checked at an early stage of growth it

can get worse and worse and culminate in quite horrible
atrocities.

Hogarth's engravings of the Four Stages of Cruelty vividly
portray the frightening reality: the first shows young Tom Nero

and his friends tormenting a dog; in the second, now grown up,
Tom is flogging a horse to death; in the third he is caught in the

act of murder, while in the fourth his corpse is being dissected
by a band of surgeons after he has been hanged. So we should
not make light of the connection between these stages. When

we see a child tormenting an animal we should not think that it
does not matter, that the child will grow out of it. We should

be careful to explain to him what he is actually doing, for it is in
this way that the seeds of violence and cruelty are sown. So
here is another question for us to ask ourselves: 'Since I took

up Buddhism, have I become less cruel?' And cruelty, let us
remember, is not just physical. It can also be verbal. Many

people indulge in harsh, unkind, cutting sarcastic speech, and
this too is a form of cruelty. It is a form of cruelty in which a
Buddhist, or one in whom Perfect Vision and Perfect Emotion

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