Planting of seeds

This recent trip to Teochew brought back some old memories of seeds planted during my younger days...

One interesting concept that the Teochew people have is that they believe Oysters are vegetarian food because there is no blood outflow from it. So, we discussed if the shell products are vegetarian, it was then that I recall of my early encounters of reading picture books on advocating vegetarian and avoidance of killing from the library of S'pore Buddhist Lodge. There are several stories advocated of kind people who after rescuing the lives, even yes, shell lives from being killed from cooking and releasing them back to the water, dreamt of the shell lives transforming into human/deity forms and appearing in the kind persons' dreams, thanking them for saving their lives.
 
It led me to recall that I had always thought that I was influenced towards pro-vegetarian because of watching Ven. Hai Tao's DVDs advocating vegetarian a couple of years ago but they are actually intermediate compared to the young days when I visited the corner Picture book section at the library of S'pore Buddhist Lodge.

Those are the days when I will go there to study for exams but getting tired of studying, I will relax by reading the picture books at the corner. Back to the library recently, there had been some changes, but the corner is still there, the familar titles on the stories of Buddha & Bodhisattva and yes, books advocating vegetarian and life releases are also there.

Gratitude to S'pore Buddhist Lodge, for the conducive environment to study & read.
Amituofo...