Pearls of Wisdom
The Cow, Our Second Mother
Spoken by Supreme Master Ching Hai, Florida, USA,
December 25, 2001 (Originally in English)In the Bible, God said, “I made animals just to help you, be your friends.” They are really helping us. The cows help to fertilize the land, and to give milk to some children who don’t have mother’s milk, or give milk to any beings, to all the animals as well, and they give their cheese from milk. They don’t mind doing that, but in a natural way, not like now with a machine, so painful and all that. So, I rarely eat dairy products. Not that I’m fanatic, but I don’t like them since long before I even practiced the Quan Yin Method. I rarely take milk, or any dairy product. And actually, they are the second mother to many babies for many of us. Nowadays, most of us grow up with cow’s milk, so how can you slaughter your mother?
In China and in Aulac before, in Asia, we had a second mother like that. Like the mother who is a wealthy lady and doesn’t want to feed the baby because it’s too inconvenient, then she always hired another mother who had a baby herself but had plenty of milk, so they both could drink from that milk. We call that a wet nurse. How can you slaughter a wet nurse like that? We even call that like a second mother, or nourishing mother. So how can you do that? In our country we were very grateful to these kinds of mothers as well. We called it, not wet nurse, wet mother, but maybe Godmother, or adopted mother, or nourishing mother. And we have respect for these mothers, too, second to our mother. So, it’s the same if we do that to the cows, as if you slaughter a mother who gives you milk. So, it’s incredible how people can do that. Really, sometimes I’m very startled at our ignorance of the nature of creation.
