Open Letter to Nepal

Dear Nepal:

The world is terribly sorry for your suffering. Already, the world responds to your prayers, as you begin a recovery process to be measured in decades.

You will receive more than $1 billion in direct foreign assistance. In addition to the disaster management funds, it is likely you will receive at least $1 billion more indirectly, for the purposes of disaster recovery.

You will receive millions of dollars more from people you have never met. Ordinary people, with good hearts, and charitable instincts.

That is just money. Who knows how much food, medicine, surgical equipment, earth-moving equipment ... the list goes on and on... who knows how much more you will receive in hard aid? Aid that will keep your nation together, at a time when it is torn apart.

Nepal, stop killing the animals in ritual sacrifice. You have brought the anger of the earth itself upon yourselves by barbaric blood-letting. Now, nature itself has answered you. Now, your blood has been taken in payment for the blood you have shed.

If you wish your own prayers answered, answer the prayers of the many beings you have slaughtered.

Nepal, just stop ritual killing. 

In the land blessed by the holiest of relics; in the land that gave birth to Buddha himself; in the land where there is great instability of all sorts -- in this land, where princes have gone mad, where the walls around palaces have now fallen, where foul corruption keeps the poor oppressed -- it is 2015 in this land that Tara herself graced beyond all measure, and still you believe it spiritually necessary to spill the blood of sentient beings?

Are you in the thrall of black magicians?

Nepal, you have forgotten Tara. Now, you scream and pray to what you have forgotten: do you even remember Tara's name? How you have treated the most humble sentient beings in your nation is an absolute spiritual disgrace. It is blind, and it bears the most terrible possible consequences.

You have already experienced some of those consequences. Can you learn from them? Can you allow this tragedy to give rise to compassion?

To stop the killing is a small act of compassion, as compared to the large acts of compassion from which you now benefit.

I beg you, please stop the ritual slaughter of innocent beings in the name of mankind. I am of mankind too, and you bring a stain upon all of us.

Sincerely,

One Buddhist