Toddler stomps monks' sand creation - Peculiar Postings - MSNBC.com How do you punish someone who may not even realize what they did was wrong?
Well, with children that's something parents have to deal with every day as their child grows up. It also depends on what is wrong and right, and in whose eyes. This is a bit off the wall, but I sometimes wonder if there is an afterlife and any kind of judgment, not in a total condemning to Hell type thing just a sort of summing up to see if you have to try harder next time, and wonder what happens to suicide bombers who've deliberately killed people thinking they were doing the right thing. I wonder what I would say or do if I was a god faced with such a person. Personally I'd feel obligated to help them spiritually evolve and show how much time they have wasted on phony beliefs, but that's just my point of view so I might be wrong. I even had a dream once, about 15 years ago, that all the "crazy extremists" in the Middle East weren't crazy at all but were in direct contact with God and battling, literally, furiously to save all of our souls. This was only a dream mind, but it was an interesting point of view to think about for a short time. It also showed me how easily the Human Organism can be led down that pathway of thinking. I mean if I had been surrounded by people all having similar dreams and talking about similar viewpoints at the time I had my dream I might have actually believed it, well maybe for a little while longer than a few minutes anyway.
A wise post from Mal. Aside from that, on a more practical base - you have to confront children with a certain order, and system of values, which should have some inherent logic. (That can be: DOn't destroy other people's things.) Most kids have an accurate sense of when you contradict yourself, by the way. In this case, these designs are meant to be temporary, aren't they? Now some of it is being carried into the kid's kindergarten, on the sole of his sandals, and into mom's washing machine...
That is true Hsing, and seeing the way the monks took it, it doesn't seem so terrible. I wouldn't see this as a case for punishment anyway, but for teaching. Ok, so if this part of teaching requires a tv ban or a smacked wrist or bottom (depending on child and parents) so the child realises how serious what he did was, then fine, but it's still just part of growing up and learning what's right and wrong. Now if he had been a little older and had done it consciously out of mischieve or spite, then punishment would be punishment.
Firstly, that question could easily be rewritten as 'How do you punish children?' Secondly, who says what the child did was wrong? Maybe the mother could have been paying more attention, but the child was just playing in the sand. He wasn't to know.
Well, it's buddhism in action right there. The suffering of imperminance. Everything must some to an end. I think the joy of a child tap dancing on lovely coloured sand is well worth 2 days work. However, if that was my child I'd probably lock it in the naught chest for a couple of weeks to teach it a lesson or two.
Oh God, not the naught chest... The dark place where one become nothing in the universe, please not again!
Most kids do things like this, I was with my sister -in -law when her little boy insisted on pushing the shopping cart. He got out of our reach and ran the cart into a display of glass ketchup bottles, I was never so embarassed in my life and Mike was sobbing. Neither his mom nor I felt like he needed to be punished, it was more our stupidity then his. This is why grocery stores have insurance. The child's mom should have been more in control of her kid but it just happens. This is a teaching moment and what you teach is that every one makes mistakes and we all have to think about what we do before we do it. Mike has never ran a shoppig cart into a display of glass bottles since that day, I think. Maybe I'll ask him, but I bet he can't even remember this incident, it was about 20 tears ago now.
the Naught Chest... is that like a sensory deprevation chamber? the child is forced to realize they are Mu and life is outside them and without them? their actions are temporal and they themselves are nothingness, not even entropy can caress them? the walls of the Naught Chest close in from unconsollable distance and collapse in on themselves, a neutron of ontology leaving the world as it was before the child never existed?
I just wish that it has been only twenty tears, He's turned out okay though, He's my AirForce Hunk Nephew
Seems like a pretty clear-cut case for damnation. No sense going soft of crime just because of little things like age or innocence.
