Selected Questions and Answers

Choose a Profession
Suited to Your 
Conscience 
and Noble Ideals

Spoken by Supreme Master Ching Hai, Los Angles, CA, USA, March 14, 1996 (Originally in English) Videotape # 537b

Q: How do fellow initiates who do scientific or medical research and have to sacrifice animals or hurt them balance such scientific study with the other aspect of having to violate the precept of non-killing?

M: Both are the same. In the name of science, people make many useless sacrifices such as vivisection and so on. I don’t like it. If you want to do that, you do it against your own conscience. But I don’t think you’ll like it.

After some time, you become very sensitive to the animals’ suffering. Animals have souls exactly like you do and they also suffer. So the best way is to avoid it. If you can’t avoid it then do it, but then you’ll have to bear it.

Q: But how do you do that if it’s part of the job unless one changes professions?

M: Then change.

Q: In Your view, is there any other way to develop medicine without using animals?

M: There are many ways. In ancient times people didn’t use animals to test medicines. People now use animals for all kinds of things; I don’t know why. It’s as if they’re using their own children, really. What can I tell you? You know what to do already; you know the answer.

The killing of animals is really unnecessary. For example, they kill the animals used in animal testing for cosmetics and so on. But there are so many cosmetics made without animal testing, which are still beautiful and good. So that means it’s really not necessary to sacrifice animals for anything.

Besides, if we meditate more, we don’t really need that much medicine. You’ve all had this experience. Of course I can’t change the way people live today, not every one of them. But you know for yourselves, it’s useless to kill for the sake of life because the dead will not bring life. Life cannot come from death. When life begins with death, it will end again with death.

We can’t use the dead body of someone else or some other being to feed ourselves. Eventually it will affect us because death can’t give birth to life. That’s why we have to be vegetarian. Look at the cosmetics and you’ll know. Many cosmetics have “Not Animal Tested” written on the label, and they’re far superior to those with animal testing. They’re even less expensive and more suitable for the skin, more convenient and economically better. Your skin feels better and you feel lighter when you use them. You don’t feel a heavy or burdened kind of feeling. So actually, animal testing is never, never, never necessary.

As you who are scientists know very well, many of the medicines tested on animals can’t be applied to humankind because they have so many differences. But the scientists try. Well, it’s with good intentions, just like the butcher who kills animals to feed the people.

Q: It’s just that this is part of the requirements for the development of any drug.

M: Then choose your job, or choose your life. If you think it’s justified, then you follow that job against your conscience. But if you think you belong to a group of peaceful beings with more noble character and higher thinking, then choose a profession more suitable to your conscience and your noble ideals.   ♥