Buddhism 499: Taming the Mind…
Treat perfect strangers with the same kindness you give your pets and the world will be a better place. And pets deserve that special treatment, of course, but don’t we all? Because all too often, kindness is transactional, tit for tat, is it not? Yes, it is, whether we even realize it or not, we’re so accustomed to that sort of reciprocity, as long as the dog is loveable, of course, and silently obedient. And many Buddhists do that, also, which is not a bad thing in itself, unless it rewards evil at the same time.
Because justice and fairness is a real thing, too, of course, and that is the flipside to the equation. Pets are a special circumstance in the hierarchy of the world, and I love them greatly, no vestigial nostalgia for the savage wilderness here, no thank you. I wish that every animal in the world could be tamed and therefore survive, rather than live a precarious existence in a world where it is commonly thought that returning an animal to the wilderness is somehow standard logical procedure.
As always, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Conscientious taming seems perfectly acceptable to me, in lieu of wilderness, but dancing bears would seem to be going too far. But the point is that the kindness so often typically displayed toward our pets de rigueur is often totally lacking in our relationships to our human equals, even when they’ve done much to deserve it. No matter that there are Buddhist websites called Wildmind and so forth, the founding principle of Buddhism is to tame the mind, and that is a very good thing…
streaming consciousness... 
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