The Buddhist ritual of fang sheng (release life) is the practice of buying captured animals and releasing them back to the wild. This practice is supposed to acquire good karma, as it is considered a gesture of compassion.
But when a woman in the southern Chinese province of Sichuan wanted to practice the fang sheng, the exercise went horribly wrong.
The woman, who calls herself “Cool Mandy,” on the Chinese online forum Weibo recently decided to release 200 snakes -- some of them venomous -- into the wild near Sichuan. In boasting of her great feat on Weibo, she estimated that their number quickly grew from 200 to around 900.
The liberated snakes slithered their way to the nearby village, where pandemonium ensued as agitated residents were forced to beat the snakes to death by the dozens. The villagers said they have had a restive few days, with one man saying he circled his house every hour to make sure there were no more snakes.
The woman’s actions have gotten considerable backlash on websites and social media. One Weibo user stated, “She must have done some pretty bad stuff to be so desperate for good karma.”
Other users were not as mild in their criticism saying, “Why didn't she just release them in her own bedroom?”
It would seem that by indirectly killing many of the snakes she intended to free, this woman called down some very bad karma on her head. The terrorized citizens of Sichuan probably aren’t too happy with her either.
One things for sure though: this event will go down in Sichuan hisssstory.