In Amida Buddha's Eighteenth Primal Vow, he declares that he would not wish, on obtaining Buddhahood, to attain the highest enlightenment unless “all beings in the ten quarters”, who sincerely desired to be born in his country and thought of him up to ten times, were born there, excepting only those who have committed the five grave offences or been abusive of the Dharma.

As it stands, this, like all the other forty seven vows, clearly refers to human beings.

However, the vows date from a period in which all Buddhists, without exception, believed in transmigration or reincarnation.

This entailed the belief that whilst sinful humans could be reborn as animals or insects, those born as animals and insects could, conversely, rise, through countless transmigrations to become human beings.

It therefore followed that the term 'all beings’ was taken to cover, not just human beings, but all sentient beings.

Later, possibly due in part to the influence of earlier Animist beliefs, this was further extended, in China and Japan, to cover not only what were considered to be non-sentient forms of life such as plants and trees, but to the inorganic forms of existence, such as rocks and mountains.

This is, of course, entirely consonant with the Buddhist belief in the unity of all that exists and in the avoidance of all distinctions and categorisations.

It also throws light on the existing close relations between the essentially animist Shinto religion and contemporary Japanese Buddhism.

As I said in a talk, which I gave here in 1999, on Early Buddhism and Modern Science, the scientists of today are coming, strictly as a result of their scientific research, closer and closer to the age old Buddhist perception of the natural world as a single, unbroken continuum.

They have shown that the atomic and subatomic substrate is the same for all that exists in the physical universe, galaxy out beyond galaxy, through the vast reaches of space and time.

If then we move up from the physics of the inorganic world to the organic realm of life, and of the biological sciences, we now know that it is also underpinned by a no less all pervading unity.

It has, I think been rightly said that "Wherever you go in the world, whatever animal, plant, bug or blob you look at, if it is alive, it will use the same dictionary and know the same code. All life is one!'

It is therefore fortunate that Buddhism does not involve the related ideas of a Creator God and of the soul, which so retarded and bedevilled the early development of science.

The Bible based idea of a Creator led, as late as the early nineteenth century, to the general belief that the world was no more than about four and a half thousand years old, a belief which, in various forms and in the face of all the accumulated geological, biological and zoological, not to mention archaeological, evidence to the contrary, is undergoing an extraordinary resurgence in contemporary fundamentalist Christian circles, particularly, but not exclusively, in the United States.

Belief in the soul, on the other hand, produced, not a relative distinction, but an absolute cleavage between the human race, which alone possessed one, and the whole of the rest of the animal kingdom, which did not.

It is, I think, a continuing reverberation of this mindset which leads most people in the West, including many scientists, to be more interested in showing the extent to which some animals are like us in certain ways, than, on the whole, in looking through the other end of the telescope to remark how much the human animal continues to owe to its common ancestry.

Despite the evolution of intellectual powers which give us an often unwarranted sense of superiority, we continue, in innumerable ways, to behave, for good or very often ill, like many other kinds of animal.

In everyday life we tend to forget about the fundamental Buddhist concepts of emptiness and interdependence and think of ourselves, erroneously, as single independent entities. If we ever knew, we tend to forget that we have, living on us and in us, ten times as many bacteria, in hundreds of different species, as we have cells in our bodies, and that, on many of them we depend for our lives.

It is, I think, again remarkable that the world which they were able to observe about them should, in its relationship to that of the myriads of microscopic biological species of which, of course, the writers of the sutras could have had no knowledge, be so strikingly in harmony with their basic outlook.

As you will, no doubt expect by now, I have put this thought into something that may or may not be, and probably is not, a poem.

It goes like this:-

I am jungles.

I am forests.

I am plains.

and savannahs
and fertile fields.

I am rivulets
and streams
and rivers
and artesian wells.

I am oil reserves
and opencast
mineral mines
and detritus
and spoil heaps.

I am food
in plenty,

manna
from heaven,

year round crops

for the million
million
inhabitants
on the surface
of the world

that is thought of

as me.

I am underground caves
in their hundreds
and thousands,

vast reservoirs
and small pools
far out
of the reach
of the sun.

I am raging torrents
and seepages.

I am waterfalls
into other worlds.

I am tunnels
of slowmoving
debris,

of billions
of corpses
of those
that die each day

of the hundred
million millions
that work

from second
to second

and minute
to minute,

year in
year out

in mile upon mile
of dark,

writhing,

underground passages

to manufacture
from what
was indigestible waste

the chemical feedstock
that keeps
the whole world
in which they live

alive.

*

Do not ever ask me
who I
am.

I have never
been I,

been one.

I am part
of a teeming,

ephemeral,

ecological
system,

which lives

and grows

and dies

for the most part
outside my control;

of which I know
almost nothing
except

that I owe to it

my being.

Symbiosis is, indeed, everywhere.

Oaks and pines and other trees depend upon the threadlike fungi on their roots to break down essential nutrients, and in the animal kingdom, from elephants at one end of the scale to termites at the other, and all the ruminants in between across the world, including the vast herds of wildebeest that stream across the plains of Africa, and in their turn are prey to the predators above them in the food chain; in all of them, it is the bacteria in their guts that break down cellulose to provide nutrition.

Likewise, innumerable plants depend on symbiotic relationships with bacteria for their nutrition and survival.

Thinking of mountains as being animate is, perhaps, not so fanciful after all, for in the very bedrock, hundreds of metres down beneath the surface of the earth, bacterial colonies exist, feeding directly on the inert chemical substances by which they are surrounded and seemingly entombed.

It is a sobering thought that the only living things that move over and under the surface of the earth and in its oceans and do not kill, are the very lowliest of all.

Above them, all of evolution is a vast machine dependent upon killing, and what is somewhat euphemistically called the food chain, is in fact a killing chain, a world of unremitting slaughter.

Because of our need to distinguish and divide and categorise in order to make intellectual sense of the world in which we live, we tend to think of nature 'red in tooth and claw', to use the English cliché, in terms of predators and prey, forgetting that the herbivores, the antelope that lions hunt, the rabbits that the eagles take, are also, in their own way, killers.

They live by browsing upon grass and foliage, and because, quite contrary to Buddhist ways of thinking, we break up and compartmentalise the unbroken, natural continuum of life and separate plants from animals, we seldom think of that as killing.

We never hear plants scream.

Yet, strange as it may seem plants can in fact communicate.

When pests attack the leaves of certain trees, they send out chemical signals over quite long distances to other members of their species, which then immediately begin to strengthen the toxins in their foliage that are their natural defence against attack.

I think if most of us were asked to make a list of major animal predators, we might quite easily forget to put ourselves at the head of it.

Yet that is what we are.

When we think of wolf packs, prides of lions, pods of killer whales, we readily forget that we too have evolved to be pack animals, and much of our behaviour shows it still.

Millennia ago we roamed across the plains of Africa and Asia as small packs of hunter gatherers.

Now urban gangs roam in the streets in all the major cities of the world, and anyone who truly knows the British countryside will know of rural gangs of Football supporters that readily form packs to fight each other; factions or packs, though that is not what they are usually called, quite swiftly form in any large industrial or commercial organisation, not to mention in every political party there has ever been.

Armies have been deliberately based upon pack loyalty at the level of the section, numbering less than a dozen men or so, and building up to the platoon, the company, the battalion and the regiment.

And if you want to see the instinct for, and natural reversion of, the civilised human animal into competing packs, there is no need to go much further than the playground of the nearest school.

It is the pack which is the focus and foundation of many human games and competitions, and even when there is no actual pack, as in athletic competition or in singles tennis matches, or the greater part of the Olympic Games, the commentators and the fans alike make virtual packs by relentlessly attaching all the individual competitors to whatever national group they happen to belong to.

In the animal kingdom many packs of predator survive by creating rigid hierarchies under a single leader that holds absolute sway until deposed by a stronger, younger, or more cunning rival which, in turn, demands complete submission from the members of the pack In this too, we are animals indeed, forever searching for and then submitting to a leader, often a dictator.

But, because the method of selection is less simple in the large scale, modem, complex world, and death or swift expulsion from the pack does not invariably and immediately follow, false and incompetent leaders and misled, foolish, often vicious followers abound.

This urge for leadership is everywhere, from family to school, to village hall and nation state, and is accompanied by another hallmark of innumerable predators, the marking out of rigidly defended territories, the boundaries of which are a cause of never-ending conflict.

Where other animals tend to use their urine to mark out their territories, the ingenious human animal resorts to minefields and barbed wire.

Whether in the endemic sectarian conflicts of Northern Ireland or in urban gangs, the territories are often marked out street by street and house by house, and all intruders from the gangs in neighbouring territories are then viciously attacked and even killed.

In Belfast or Berlin, or in the Middle East, actual walls once were, or are now being built, and armies fight sporadic wars and skirmishes over imagined, hypothetical boundaries in the remote and largely uninhabited fastnesses of the Himalayas.

When I myself was very young, not more than six or seven, and lived for a time in the isolated vicarage of a tiny hamlet of no more than a dozen houses, I was, as an intruder, under constant threat from the local boys until I managed to make allies of the younger members of a numerous family, who were bullied by their siblings. The two packs then collected piles of stones and hurled them at each other for possession of a ditch.

One essential difference between the human animal and what we call wild animals is that our increasing intelligence and mastery of technology, from the stone axe to the spear and bow and arrow and the atomic bomb, have enabled us, for some millennia now, to do our killing on a vastly greater scale.

In my own lifetime, and in most of yours, as we meet here in a place devoted to nonviolence, tens of millions of our own species died at our own hands in a single war.

In this, and every year of post-war 'peace', there are twenty to forty so called local conflicts and attempts at genocide in progress, with millions of resulting, destitute and starving refugees. Cambodia, Vietnam, Korea, Serbia and Croatia, Rwanda, Israel and Palestine, and now Iraq; the list is endless.

Another feature which, at the same time, betrays our animal, predatory nature and distinguishes us from all our fellow animals is the indiscriminate nature of our killings.

In spite of recent, shamefaced efforts at conservation and the creation of game parks, and reserves and zoos, we, as a species, have killed, and are now killing, every animal that happens to have got into our way or which we see as food.

Now, not content with wreaking havoc upon land, we are turning our attention to the seas and oceans. Whole species of fish in the shallower seas are being fished to near extinction, and now attention is turning, with predictably disastrous results, to the inhabitants of the ocean depths.

The hooks on kilometres long lines catch fish indiscriminately, and not just fish, but seabirds like the albatross of which the numbers are in steep decline, and over three quarters of the fish that have been killed are thrown away as being non-commercial.

To our shame we are still killing, in the name of science if you please, not only numbers of smaller whales, but along with them, some of the greatest animals that have ever roamed the earth, and in such quantities that they are surplus to our own requirements and are being used for pet food.

And, let us remember, it is we, not they, who do these things: I too eat meat and fish and vegetables: I drive a car and fly across the world to talk to you, and in so doing add to the pollution of the very atmosphere we breathe.

Across the tropical world we hack down forests to make desserts, killing all the myriad species, many of them still unknown, that live in them in vast and intricate, wholly interdependent ecosystems.

But when we point the finger at Brazil or Indonesia, it would be as well to remember that, what they now do, we did in Britain in the bronze age three millennia ago, for before the Ancient Britons cleared the land for farming, Britain was, from end to end, unbroken, virgin forest.

But even in the most ferocious predator species that has ever lived, there are, at the margins, signs of change.

In what we think of as the developed, ‘civilised’ world, we most of us, at least in what we are pleased to call ‘peacetime’, tend to kill members of our own species, and indiscriminate numbers of other species, by proxy; we either get other people to do our killing for us, or only do it ourselves, at a distance, by simple neglect.

This has, of course, long been a problem for many branches of Buddhism, in particular, in relation to the prohibitions on the killing of animals or even plants. But whatever we do, however greedy or unprincipled or self-serving, or quite simply careless it may be, we should at least recognise what it is that we do and what we, in the light of our doings, are.

Introspection is not just a matter for individuals only, and should be extended to cover the whole of this particular species to which we all of us belong.

Finally, in case anyone should think that the third line of the poem that concludes this talk, with its reference to "learned men' is merely an unfortunate example of ingrained male chauvinism, I would remind you that, though much of our behaviour seems to me to be uncomfortably close to that of predatory, non-human animals, it is not always at them that we should look.

In nature as a whole, where there are sexual divisions at all, the female is often dominant, but among human beings, this is very seldom so.

Although in parts of the Western world there are modest signs of change in this respect, in a vast preponderance of the world's population it is still the men who kill and go to war and lead whatever pack they happen to belong to, while the women bring up children, look after the home and plant and reap, and, if in the West, and now increasingly, in the Far East, they do go out for other work, are mostly confined to the less prestigious and remunerative tasks.

Although we share the trait with other primates, it is, I think, from our long distant hunter gatherer forebears that we inherit this persistent legacy.

In the few hunter gatherer tribes that still, in ever dwindling numbers, now remain, it is the men who hunt, the women who are gatherers, and it is virtually certain that this was also the case when the small groups of our forebears fanned out across the plains of Africa tens of thousands of years ago, and maybe it was so among their yet more distant hominid ancestors a million years or more before them.

Recent statistics show that only 1% of the titled land in the world is owned by women; that almost twice as many girls as boys are unable to go to school, and that 67% of all illiterate adults are women, leaving 700,000,000 of them also without adequate food or water, sanitation or health care.

It is strange indeed how little we have changed.

The poem to which I referred goes like this:-

Philosophers,
humanists,
learned men,

intelligent,
evolved;

in spite
of ourselves,
in spite of everything,

we are no more

than predators.

It is for that
that we have developed.

It is, for us,
our only destiny;

magnificent,

disastrous
predators

that we are.