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“If we say that the ocean ecosystems are dependent on fish populations to be balanced, then those ecosystems are extremely imbalanced right now.” “If fish are continually taken from the ocean, it will become as empty as the desert. In 2006, an international team of scientists and economists found that around a third of the ocean’s fish populations has already been wiped out due to fishing, pollution, and other human causes. They warned that if the steep decline of fish populations was not stopped, the oceans would be empty of fish by 2048. It’s not far. It’s not far future for us. Our own survival is at risk if we continue consuming fish, because the oceans produce half of the world’s oxygen, and fish are an important part of the marine ecosystem which produces oxygen for us.”
Supreme Master Ching Hai shared one of Her own interesting encounters with fish and explained why fish love to be close to spiritual practitioners. “It happened when we were in Pingtung as well. The fishes all swam to the surface and danced. Yes! They were shining. In Pingtung, when we first arrived, we went down to wash our faces and hands. The fishes immediately came up to the surface. Wow! There were so many that the whole lake was lit up! It happened every time! Fishes love to be around us. They understand, their Buddha Nature inside understands. Their Buddha Nature and ours are the same.”
“(Does one incur bad karma [retribution] when you go fishing?) Of course, you will get a lot, a lot of bad karma (retribution). Or what do you think? That the fish gets the bad karma (retribution) or what? Of course, if you go fishing, then you create heavy karma (retribution) because you are terminating a living being when his time has not yet come, when he hasn't gone naturally by God's will. Anytime we terminate an existence by our own self-will, we create a burden for our soul, and it's very difficult for us to erase that later on.”
“If we truly wish to see real harmony born between humans and animals and nature and Heaven, we must be the harmony, we must live in harmony, and act also in harmony, which includes the act of eating harmoniously each time we come to the table. Peace, compassion, mercy begins on our plate. We cannot truly call ourselves harmonious if every meal is the result of filling our hands with the blood of the innocent and harming the environment and killing our planet on which we live. How can we call a dinner of fish harmonious, when slow and painful deaths by mass suffocation had to take place to bring the fish there onto our plate? All the scriptures told us that we receive what we grant, or we reap what we sow.”
