--- Stephen Hodge <s.hodge@...>
skrev:

> Gunnar Gällmo wrote:
>
> > so parricide must mean killing ones father ...
>
> Sorry to be pedantic, but patricide is the killing
> of one's father.
> Parricide is the killing of either of one's parents
> or other close
> relatives. Hence all patricides are parricides, but
> not all parricides are
> patricides.

All right; so read "parent" instead of "father".

An interesting question might be whether, from the
standpoint of Buddhist ethics, the killing of a foster
parent who did take care of you is parricide, and
whether the killing of a biological father who didn't
is.

And, in the later case, if there is a difference
between killing a parent knowing him or her to be a
parent, and doing so without knowing it. (Leaving
Oedipus aside - who is probably a fictive person
anyway - we have in the modern world the case of
artificial insemination where sometimes the biological
father and his offspring never know each other's
identity. Already earlier than that, there were cases
where a promiscuous woman actually didn't know who was
the father of her child, and so couldn't tell the
child; or knew, but didn't tell anyway, or lied about
it.)

If kamma, according to the Buddhist interpretation of
the concept, works mainly psychologically (the kamma
being the intention behind the action rather than the
action itself), then I think there is, and that
murdering a parent without knowing him or her to be
one's parent must work as "only" a murder, which is
certainly more than bad enough.

Gunnar







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