GRIEVING DOG GUARDS DECEASED MASTER'S GRAVE

SINCE ITS MASTER WAS BURIED,
DOG REMAINED ROOTED TO THE SPOT

Agencies - People living in a Chinese village have been so moved by a dog that has been guarding the grave of its deceased owner they plan to build a kennel for him. The yellow dog belonged to Lao Pan, a single man who died earlier this month aged 68. After his room in Panjiatun village near Qingdao city, Shandong Province, was cleared his dog disappeared. But villagers later found the dog by the grave of its owner. Reports say that for seven days, the dog stayed there, refusing to leave. Seeing that the dog was going without food, the locals tried to take it back to the village and gave it some buns. The dog took the buns and returned to the graveyard. Now the villagers are taking food and water to the dog regularly and plan to put up a kennel for it near its owner's grave. The story is reminiscent of Edinburgh's Greyfriar Bobby, a Skye terrier who, history recalls, spent 14 years at his master's grave in the 19th century. He is now immortalized with a bronze statue in the city and has his own website.

There are also many more similar cases, for example the story of Hachikō, a Japanese dog with unquestionable loyalty to his master. In 1924, Hachikō was brought to Tokyo by his owner, Hidesaburō Ueno, a professor in the agriculture department at the University of Tokyo. During his owner's life Hachikō saw him off from the front door and greeted him at the end of the day at the nearby Shibuya Station. The pair continued their daily routine until May 1925, when Professor Ueno didn't return on the usual train one evening. The professor had suffered a stroke at the university that day. He died and never returned to the train station where his friend was waiting. Hachiko, not realizing the death of his master, kept coming back to the train station for more than ten years hoping that his master would still show up on the same spot where they last met. The Japanese residents of the town erected a statue to the dog, located outside Shibuya Station, located in western Tokyo.

A dog in the Chinese village of Panjiatun has attracted international attention by refusing to leave the grave of his recently deceased owner. The dog has stayed in place in all weather, and until the villagers started helping him he hadn’t even been able to get anything to eat or drink. There have been other famous similar cases, such as the 19th century story of Greyfriars Bobby in Edinburgh; a dog named Hawkeye refused to leave owner Jon Tumilson’s coffin; and there’s also the story of Hachiko, Japan’s most loyal dog. It is said animals have no sentiments to kill and eat them without remorse.

WHAT DO THE VEDIC TEACHINGS TELL US?

Whatever we think of is really part of our consciousness. And consciousness means person. Everything that we may be conscious of is a person. ... Affection, attraction, sympathy - these things are all the outcome of having a heart. The scientists feel that animals have no real brain, no intelligence. Yet we see that even without much of a brain, an animal can live, but without a heart, none can live. As the brain is a representation of a computer, the animals have no real computer to calculate. Animals may follow intuitive knowledge, and so they can work unconsciously. And we can see that intuition can go above brain calculation. So many birds and beasts can understand that an earthquake is coming, but so far, no human calculation can understand precisely when an earthquake will come. There are many things that our brain cannot feel, cannot catch, whereas even the animals can get some clue about them beforehand.

Śrīla Bhakti Raksaka Sridhara Mahārāja :
"Loving Search for the Lost Servant"
Chapter 7: "Knowledge-Free Devotion"
http://www.bvml.org/SBRSM/books/THELOVING.PDF
http://www.scsmath.com/