What is a Living thing?

Buddhitakso

According to our common understanding, living would mean having certain characteristics such as heartbeats, self-motions, self-cultivates, self-assimilates, etc. and non-living would have the characteristics of motionless, no heartbeats, decays, etc. On another perspective, we used to classify that living beings would have souls and non-living beings would have no-souls. However, if one was to view it correctly, everything that exists in the realm of existence is alive in their respective senses. Motion-less does not mean dead and non-growing does not mean non-living.

As mentioned before, all happenings or activities started with the three basic elements i.e. energy, matter and space.  When these elements interacted with each other, a living condition starts from this first dot - regardless whether a thing or being would be self kicking, expanding, contracting or vice versa. We simply could not segregate between what is living or non-living thing without truly understand the law of nature in a thorough perspective. Nature in itself is wonderful that allows all things to assimilate among each other and it becomes too complex for any separation in clean cut manners.

For instance, we like to classify human as living being and other material things such as air, water, minerals are otherwise. If this statement is true, then we would fool ourselves with incorrect perception. From an article pulled out from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, the composition of human body is as follows: -

‘The human body's chemical composition consists of a variety of elements and compounds. By mass, human cells consist of 65–90% water (H2O), and a significant portion is composed of carbon-containing organic molecules. Oxygen therefore contributes a majority of a human body's mass, followed by carbon. 99% of the mass of the human body is made up of the six elements oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus.’

If water, air and minerals are non-living things, how come we are termed as living beings when over 90% of our bodies comprise with these non-living substances? Likewise, we like to portray that when a person is lying dead, only his or her soul would depart from the motionless body, but how true is it?  If this statement is acceptable, then the next question would be - Has anyone ever seen pure naked spirits or ghosts?

So it is appropriate to quote that everything appears in the realm of existence is very much alive.  In fact, these so-called non-living things could well communicate and interact with living beings; like we used to term our Mother Earth reacted to our wrong doings and raging at times. Let us always see and understand our surroundings in wholesome perspectives as what the Buddha taught.