The cow stood there, stoically it seemed to me, chewing with lazy abandon, while I fumbled with the focus on my camera. She rolled her big weepy eyes, as cows are wont to do when confronted with something new. Coincidence or not? I pressed the shutter and peered at the tiny LCD screen, the sun’s glare bleaching out the finer details.
When I look at cows face to face, particularly their eyes, I sense a connection, laughable as that might sound. And I should. After all, cows provided the milk that American nutritionists insisted that American children drink in copious quantities. And we did. “Morning milk,” our school teachers called it – we took morning breaks to drink our milk, after pressing two copper pennies into our teacher’s hand.
Cheese, cream, yogurt, ice cream, butter, all these dairy products usually come from cow’s milk.* And, of course, given the American propensity to eat beef, and a lot of it, I can safely say, I think, that cows (cattle) made me what I am today. In more ways than one.
There’s a story, told by Thich Nhat Hanh, about a farmer who came upon a group of monks. It’s worth retelling here:
One day the Buddha was sitting in the wood with thirty or forty monks. They had an excellent lunch and they were enjoying the company of each other. There was a farmer passing by and the farmer was very unhappy. He asked the Buddha and the monks whether they had seen his cows passing by. The Buddha said they had not seen any cows passing by.
The farmer said, “Monks, I’m so unhappy. I have twelve cows and I don’t know why they all ran away. I have also a few acres of a sesame seed plantation and the insects have eaten up everything. I suffer so much I think I am going to kill myself.”
The Buddha said, “My friend, we have not seen any cows passing by here. You might like to look for them in the other direction.”
So the farmer thanked him and ran away, and the Buddha turned to his monks and said, “My dear friends, you are the happiest people in the world. You don’t have any cows to lose. If you have too many cows to take care of, you will be very busy.”
“That is why, in order to be happy, you have to learn the art of cow releasing . You release the cows one by one. In the beginning you thought that those cows were essential to your happiness, and you tried to get more and more cows. But now you realize that cows are not really conditions for your happiness; they constitute an obstacle for your happiness. That is why you are determined to release your cows.”
Or more simply stated: Don’t have a cow, man?
Take it further:
*Sheep and goats also produce milk as well, but not on the scale of that of cows.
© 2013 C. Bertelsen