home help: so buddhists aren’t supposed to kill but what about bugs in the home? - Help.com

If you are contemplating suicide, hurting yourself, or you are seriously depressed: please, seek professional help!

Call this hotline (1-800-273-8255) operated by our friends at the
Suicide Prevention Lifeline, anytime, for free, professional, and
confidential assistance. While other Help.com users are likely to reply
to your post, please make sure you understand that your use of Help.com
falls under our TOS.

Note: I’m a robot that the Help.com staff created. If this response is in error, I apologize, please ignore it.

Trap them in a friendly bug trap and set them free outside

There is no compassion in killing when it is not for food or to end suffering….

so the gnats that fly into my apple juice are just committing suicide right? nature not me killing?

yep Thats Free Protein :) a gift from the Gods they must really love you :)

are you buddhist?

Unless they’re in pain, Buddhism says they don’t deserve to die. And even when they’re in pain, they’ll die eventually anyway if it’s fatal. If you step on one by mistake then most Buddhists (I think) punish themselves by, say, not wearing their shoes for a while.

I don’t know about it in in Buddhism, but for Christians, one of the basic commandments is “thou shall not kill”, but they seem to ignore it fairly regularly. If you want to know about extreme nonharmful peoples, you could look up the Jain monks. Some of them wear masks to avoid killing bugs with their breath, and take care how they walk so they don’t kill grass. They have a similar approach as Buddhism, except far more extreme, in believing that rebirth is imperfection and suffering, and that the final goal is escaping the cycle of rebirth (liberation, moksha, or nirvana.)
In contrast, rebirth is required in Christianity (according to Jesus’ teaching about it to Nicodemus) and though various things are forbidden as sins, everyone is expected to be imperfect and sinful, so if there is a Christian cult that says “please don’t walk on the grass” then there should be some way to achieve forgiveness for stepping on the grass or bugs or whatever. Mainstream Buddhism was this similar easy-going attitude — the goal may be nirvana, but unlike for the Jain monks, it’s not something expected to be achieved by any given individual. So, basically, mainstream religions aren’t extremist, they don’t do extreme things like forbid everyone to step on bugs. I hope those thoughts help.

so what about the intoxication precept? what if you have o have surgery and they use drugs to knock you out or give you drugs for pain and that sort of thing?