Tobias wrote: “Plants are alive but not sentient. They do not have a mind. There are people who lovingly or evilly speak to cooked rice. The rice reacts with a certain consistency or just rottenness. How can this be explained in terms of Buddha Dhamma?”
As Christian says, the mind can affect our environment too. I think Tobias may be referring to the following video posted by Eric (we have not heard from him recently!): “The Rice Experiment (Video)“.
– See my comments there.
Regarding the recent post, “Human Life – A Mental Base (Gandhabba) and a Material Base (Cell)“, Tobias asks:
“Under #9 it is said: “…However, the first cells that appeared in the Earth were created by kammic energy (in javana cittas)…”
Also somewhere on this website Lal said that the evolution theory of Darwin is not correct (evolution through natural selection).
I do not understand how the first dinosaur or the first elephant or the first human appeared on earth.”
This is a very good question. But a proper answer requires more background. I am in the process of laying out that background.
– Darwin’s theory of evolution is not correct only for the evolution of a human. Humans were the first to appear on the newly-formed Earth. But those humans had “brahma-like” bodies, and no physical bodies with cells.
– Humans actually evolved “downward”, losing their ability to travel through the air like brahmas, ability to see and hear without eyes and ears, etc. They did not have to eat, just like brahmas.
– But over billions of years, they gradually evolved to have physical bodies, as I mentioned briefly in the last post.
– The rest of the species are likely to have evolved according to Darwin’s theory. First came bacteria and helped to generate oxygen in the atmosphere. Then came plants, and then came the animals who needed plants for their survival. By that time, humans had evolved to have bodies like ours and humans needed food via plants too. That time sequence is also laid out in the Agganna Sutta (without such details).
That is a brief summary. I hope you can get a rough idea. As I said, there are many other factors coming into play. It is wonderful to have the modern scientific knowledge available to clarify those teachings in the Agganna Sutta.
P.S. Nature (driven by laws of kamma), does the minimum necessary to get the “ball rolling”. The first cells were created by kammic energy. Everything is consistent with modern science. It is just that modern science does not yet know the power of mind energy (kammic energy) created by those javana citta.