AHIMSA LESSON

What are we to do when, following an afternoon rain, a bunch of little snails come crawling out onto the sidewalk where we are taking our late-afternoon stroll?  Vedantists, Buddhists, and Jains hold to the principle of ahimsa, which is to not harm other sentient beings.  We are, accordingly, to avoid stepping on the snails, even picking them up and putting them out of harm's way, so no one else with crush them after us.

But we can only be responsible for those snails directly in our path, the principle has it.  Jain monks, for example, carry staffs with them when they walk through a forest, tapping as they go along to chase from danger any creatures close underfoot, but they do not go out and search the forest for all the critters whom they might potentially accidentally step on.

Yet, what about the matter of karma?  What if those snails, or at least some of them, had bad karma and were meant to be stepped on?  Christopher Isherwood describes a situation that he and a friend were in where karma was possibly an issue:

"Denny found a sea gull with a broken wing and amputated it, which made the bird more comfortable but didn't solve his problem.  I followed it up the beach and saw how the other gulls pecked at it, and how it couldn't fly or swim and would almost certainly starve.  So I killed it.  This  made me feel horrible all day.  I asked Swami (Prabhavananda), did I do right?  And Swami said no, one shouldn't interfere with the karma of any creature."

So is our sidestepping the snails on the sidewalk a case of our interfering with their bad karma, that they were meant to die unpleasantly at our feet?  No, the evidence is that it is good karma that the snails had, for they happened to cross the sidewalk just as a person who adhered to the principle of ahimsa walked along.