Implementing a method to control the youkai's diet while promoting the youkai's public relationship among humanity. A pure and saintly Buddhist, yet indistinguishable from a demon in behavior.
Jonathan Smith -- A modest proposal.
To me this Byakuren is very much the truest Byakuren. So awesum
Mr.Obake said: Implementing a method to control the youkai's diet while promoting the youkai's public relationship among humanity. A pure and saintly Buddhist, yet indistinguishable from a demon in behavior.
Jonathan Smith -- A modest proposal.
To me this Byakuren is very much the truest Byakuren. So awesum
This certainly is an interesting interpretation and I like it.
Freya211 said: I'd say it was the morality of desecrating the bodies of dead children.
I'm pretty sure we've dug up many ancient tombs/crypts/graveyards to make way for a new shopping centre, golf course or housing complex and either not thought twice about it or were ignorant to the history behind the location. Imagine how many centuries worth of human and animal corpses you may be sitting on top of right now.
pokerfaced said: I'm pretty sure we've dug up many ancient tombs/crypts/graveyards to make way for a new shopping centre, golf course or housing complex and either not thought twice about it or were ignorant to the history behind the location. Imagine how many centuries worth of human and animal corpses you may be sitting on top of right now.
True, but they probably didn't use the remains as fertilizer for their fields either. The fact that the child just died doesn't help either though. Hypocritical as it may be, desecrating bones and of the such doesn't sound as bad as hacking up one that hasn't even started to decompose yet.
Not that I don't like the series, I think its a good plot and nicely drawn.
Cort321 said: Not to mention using the fossilized remains of dead babies as fuel.
You mean dinosaurs.
Baby dinosaurs.
Freya211 said: True, but they probably didn't use the remains as fertilizer for their fields either. The fact that the child just died doesn't help either though. Hypocritical as it may be, desecrating bones and of the such doesn't sound as bad as hacking up one that hasn't even started to decompose yet.
Not that I don't like the series, I think its a good plot and nicely drawn.
Exactly. Just try to do this on real life without getting scorned for it.
That part where they hit the dead baby to make a fertilizer out of it was just wrong.
If the villagers know about this, well, I won't be surprised that they'll bring their torches and pitchforks to kick those "evil, baby-desecrating youkai" out of the shrine, or at least forbidding them from visiting the village. And frankly, you can't blame them for that.
So much for the peaceful coexistence between humans and youkai.
Let me start by saying that I did like quick story, and I thought that the plot was well presented. But as for the controversy...
Lightdreamer said: Exactly. Just try to do this on real life without getting scorned for it.
If the villagers know about this, well, I won't be surprised that they'll bring their torches and pitchforks to kick those "evil, baby-desecrating youkai" out of the shrine, or at least forbidding them from visiting the village. And frankly, you can't blame them for that.
So much for the peaceful coexistence between humans and youkai.
This pretty much sums up my view of this. I get the fact that there's a practical reason for it. I understand that using the corpses as fertilizer isn't done out of malevolence. Yet it is still is hypocritical to try to achieve peace with the humans while at the same time horribly desecrating their dead. It's sort of like trying to be friends with your neighbor while spitting in his/her mother's face.
Freya211 said: I'd say it was the morality of desecrating the bodies of dead children.
The problem lies in the fact you are attempting to assert your personal sense of morality onto people - characters in this case of course - that are not you and likely very different from you. It's not going to match.
ithekro said: Remember...Buddhists. The body is just a shell for the soul. Once the soul has past...what use is the body?
Also remember, these are not Christians.
This is exactly why this doujinshi hits kind of hard to me. I'm a Buddhist, and quite frankly, in our belief, the body is a possible attachment for the soul-stuff after one dies. In essence, it's supposed to be destroyed to prevent the spirit from lingering near it, lamenting death and being unable to pass on to the next life. Hence why cremation is popular in Asia, in contrast with Christianity, where the body is supposed to be preserved for the day when Jesus comes back to raise the dead (for judgement?).
The thing that makes this doujin bite is how casual and how NOBLE the intentions are.
Byakuren, being a Buddhist serves two populations in this: youkai and humans. By taking the corpses of humans dead from other causes, she provides an outlet for her youkai friends to maintain civility and control over their baser instincts.
For the humans? She provides a spiritual service. She provides them detachment in death. As for the bodies, lifeless and soulless?
She doesn't give three fucks, properly, if rather coldly, being a Buddhist. They're just vessels of attachment to a life already ended.
However, the entire process is completely peaceful. No one got hurt to do it, and less are potentially hurt. The fact that she's brought together a loop of NET-GOOD karma from what is unmistakably brutal but dogmatically defensible and understandable is what amazes and terrifies me. It's at once full of impartial compassion for each being she contacts, and hideously raw.
Real Tibetan funerary ritual itself has the monks ritually taking apart a corpse with prayer and knives to vultures and hatchets much like Myouren and her gardening tools and her garden.
It took me a day or two of hard reading the raw of this doujinshi to get a spiritual handle on it, even it being fiction.
As for if Byakuren is using this as a method for eternal youth, could be exaggeration (since peaches are the fruit of immortality in Chinese myth), or...could very well have a selfish purpose (good karma or not in helping human-eating youkai like Shou, cannibalism, even offhand, is definitely not good mojo in Buddhism).
Hebrews and Christians traditionally bury or entomb the dead, but that's a cultural thing rather than doctrinal. I don't recall the Old Testament listing a law against using human corpses as fertilizer. Speaking as a Christian.
Scripture says that God will empty the graves and take back the bodies, but he'd not going to be thwarted if there is nothing of the body left. (And consider how little of most bodies would actually be left anyway. You think the God as described in the Bible would call it Paradise if most of his subjects spent forever as cremated ashes or worm-gnawed scraps?)
Graveyards are for the sake of those who have not yet died. Emptying the graveyards is a warning sign for the sake of those who have not yet died. Those who have already died are past caring.
The real crimes in this story are the on-going deceptions.
They really need to find a way to convince Shou that it's not healthy for her to abstain from meat; all they need to do is point out how ravenous she gets during the full moon and convince her that she's going to go berserk without meat. They don't even need to tell her that it already happened once.
Likewise, the problem isn't what they did to the baby's corpse, or even how they did it. (Some of them had a proper attitude of giving respect and thanks.) The problem is that they are decieving the living, who are the only ones who really care about what happens to the corpses.
The baby will not care, but the parents who wanted the corpse treated much differently...
(On another note, if it's just "meat", why human corpses instead of livestock? Well, that wouldn't have the dramatic punch the artist wanted, I suppose.)
On another note, if it's just "meat", why human corpses instead of livestock? Well, that wouldn't have the dramatic punch the artist wanted, I suppose.
Youkai are beasts risen specifically from human fears and such evidently they need to feed on them.
I like how this wouldn't even be half as controversial if it had been the corpse of a grown man, as not a single eyelid being batted at the wheelbarrow 4 pages ago proves.
I'd suggest anyone who enjoyed this should go read Souku no Kiba by the same artist, I liked it even more.
Good subject for a moral debate. "The use of the bodies of the dead for the good of the living."
The funny thing is, in many East Asian cultures of the associated time periods, it WASN'T a subject for moral debate. It was what it was, and what it was was necessary and in a way, cathartic.
This pretty much sums up my view of this. I get the fact that there's a practical reason for it. I understand that using the corpses as fertilizer isn't done out of malevolence. Yet it is still is hypocritical to try to achieve peace with the humans while at the same time horribly desecrating their dead. It's sort of like trying to be friends with your neighbor while spitting in his/her mother's face.
no, it's not. here's what would actually happen and why:
1. the villagers never actually find out. peace is complete bullshit created by complete bullshit. that's one of the biggest morals out there. "ignorance is bliss" is a phrase that actually means something.
2. the villagers find out and mindlessly rabble rabble about shit they don't really care about. they don't care about anyone's "intentions" or "morals", they only care about their stupid fears, which by the way make more youkai.
there is absolutely nothing hypocritical about what's going on here. what is hypocritical are the broken reasonings the humans have for their point of view.
I'm a strange man. Although I myself don't really think that what she is doing is very normal, I didn't even think that she is "wrong" or "bad" here. Nobody can be sure about Byakuren's past, we know it wasn't a happy one, but that's that. What happened to her and how it affect her view on everything is still a mystery. Her purpose is quite clear that she wants human and youkai to be equal. However I still don't know how she defines "equality" here. If it's like how "equal" we want to treat women and coloured people, it's not really equal from my viewpoint (I think they're just being given a ton of advantages, women for example, you want to give them equal benefit as if they were men, but how about punishment? With the same "wrong-doing", you can punch a man in a face but never a woman. And the world just works that way nobody asked why.)
Here, it seems to me that Byakuren is just doing a good case of equality: youkai doing things to human like what human was doing to youkai. From Asian folklore and story, you'd be surprised how we (yes I'm an Asian) treated "youkai" back then. Maybe you can compare it to the "witch hunt" thing in EU. Babies doesn't mean shit back then, if your kid looked deformed or something like they were possessed/youkai nasty stuff might happen.
Back to topic: she is probably not doing that because she wants equality, I'm just saying the method isn't "morally wrong" to me. She was trying to help Shou and herself as I can guess here. So, nice doujin. I just don't like the size of the boobs.
