I'm not going to preach about not eating meat or be grotesque. I have, however, been reading some of the publications they leave in the foyers of Buddhist temples and Chinese vegetarian restaurants and some of these newsprint texts can be a little strange. One of them, "Cherishing Life", has poems with cartoons that try to evoke compassion for animals. They talk about the Chinese character for meat (above) which is a representation of an open mouth with a person inside. The reason for this is because if you eat meat you will probably be reincarnated as an animal that will, in turn, be eaten. So the theory is that it's people eating people.
So the back of the book has some weird stories that are really absurd and aren't very inspiring. Some are about people who keep their hands in their pockets because they were born with a pig hand or something from being gluttonous carnivores. All religions have their fanatical horse crap.
Then, wallking home from Chinatown, I see this strangely related graffiti art...
I was once with a very Jewwy friend of mine and we saw a Jewish man with Hassidic gear on begging on Broadway and she dropped all her things on the street and just went off on him. She said that they didn't do that and that it was a shanda, beyond a shame. I'm sure this guy I filmed above (I donated one dolla) can do any type of long division in his head. There must be a word for shonda in Japan, though.
