Buddhism and Veganism Page 5
Meanwhile a series of measures were taken by the government, such as a prohibition of hunting and a ban on leather (wearing animal products.) Apart from the requirement of a vegetarian diet for Buddhists, aspects of Buddhist culture have inspired folk life and still flourish today. For example, there are the folk customs of observing vegetarianism for every breakfast, and adhering to a vegetarian diet six days per month (the 8th, the 14th, the 15th, the 23rd and the last two days of the Chinese lunar month). It can be said that from the sixth century onwards, the campaign related to vegetarianism gradually developed into a kind of cultural habit and became part of the ethical code throughout China, through the operation of national political and cultural influence. Despite the fact that vegetarianism is mostly regarded in China as a sort of life education that is closely related to the Buddhist tradition, it should be noted that vegetarianism is not only a Buddhist commandment, but also more importantly, that it helps humanity develop compassion and encourages the cultivation of human awareness.
Buddhism: The Hidden Thread
WILL TUTTLE
Bodhi and Karuna: Individual and Community
The Buddhist teachings emphasize cultivating the two fundamental powers in our human world: the power of the individual and that of the community. Similarly, two primary ideas in Buddhism are bodhi, the awakened wisdom that is our true nature, and karuna, compassion, the expression and cultivation of this wisdom in our lives, expressed as ahimsa, nonharmfulness toward others. Through our individual efforts and practice we can purify our body, speech, and mind and awaken bodhi within us, freeing ourselves from the delusion of essential separateness. This awakening brings individual liberation from suffering and delusion, and compassion for those in our community. Awakening is seen as the goal and purpose of our individual human life, and is supported by and inseparable from our sangha, the community with whom we share our life. In the narrow sense, sangha is the community of fellow Buddhist aspirants, and in a broader sense, it is the community of all living beings.
Vegan living is similarly based on cultivating both individual and community wisdom, leading to compassion for each other and for all beings. The word vegan was coined in 1944 by Donald Watson with the purpose of accounting for motivation (ignored by the word vegetarian) and extending our ethical concern to every aspect of our relations with animals. The definition of the word as adopted by the Vegan Society reads, “Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude, as far as possible and practicable, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals, for food, clothing, or any other purpose…” It’s clear that veganism and Buddhism share a similar basic motivation and orientation to encourage respect and kindness in both individuals and in our communities, and to extend this respect to all who are sentient, i.e., capable of suffering.
The Power of Community
Veganism and all traditions of Buddhism fundamentally agree that animals are ethically relevant, and that we are called to transform ourselves and our communities so that we treat each other, and animals, with kindness and respect. Significantly, one thing we all understand is that the only reason any of us buys and eats animal flesh, cow’s milk products, and eggs, as well as products such as leather, fur, and wool, and attends rodeos, zoos, and so forth, is because of the communities in which we are raised and educated. The behavior, as well as the supporting narrative, of eating and abusing animals on a daily basis, is injected into virtually all of us from infancy without our permission by well-meaning parents, teachers, relatives, doctors, and priests, as well as by a continuous stream of corporate and government messaging.
It is clear that eating animal foods causes terrible (and unnecessary) suffering to animals, and it’s also clear that we are not doing this out of a free choice but because we are conditioned to do so by our communities. We follow orders that were, and continue to be, ritually inserted into our consciousness by people we trusted implicitly from our pre-verbal past. Questioning such deeply-rooted and pervasive orders is no easy task because we identify profoundly with the “tribe” that gave us our language and made our life possible. Our tribal community today has compelled us all to participate in relentless daily food rituals that reduce animals to exploitable, expendable commodities. This cultural program of animal agriculture installed in all of us by our communities is an invisible “deep state” that operates in the shadows and propels humanity’s unremitting violence against animals that is now estimated to be killing about sixty thousand animals globally every second for food.1
Buddhism, like any authentic spiritual tradition, is profoundly inimical to this violent system into which we’ve all been born. Its core teachings emphasize cultivating universal compassion for all beings, explicitly including animals, urging mindfulness and encouraging us to vigilantly question the internal narratives that drive our emotions and actions. The essential practice is cultivating awareness, and liberating our minds from toxic cultural indoctrination, and discovering the freedom and inner peace of our true nature. In actual fact, Buddhism has been a potent healing force in the world, helping liberate both individuals and societies from eating animal foods and from abusing animals as commodities in general. My own case is a good example.
I was born in Massachusetts in the early 1950s and, like virtually all of us, was brought up in a family that ate the typical diet emphasizing meat, diary products, and eggs. I never questioned it because vegetarianism was unheard of and protein, calcium, and human superiority narratives were relentlessly injected into my consciousness with every meal by everyone in my world. No alternative was conceivable.
When I went away to college, I started to question the violence of the Vietnam War and the exploitative nature of capitalism. I also discovered books on Zen, yoga, and other Eastern philosophies, practices that were intriguing and inspiring, although they did not prompt any dietary questioning. After graduation, I embarked with my younger brother on what we felt was a spiritual pilgrimage, practicing meditation and walking, without money, for quite a few months, heading west and then south on the little back-country roads that led us eventually to a Zen center in Alabama.
It was 1975. While walking through Tennessee, we stopped for a few weeks at a community called The Farm, which was the largest hippie commune in the world with about 900 people living there. They called themselves vegetarians but were actually practicing what we would call veganism today (a virtually unknown word then). They didn’t eat meat, fish, dairy, eggs, or honey, and many even avoided leather and other animal-sourced products. Their motivation was based on ethical concerns about the abuse of animals used in the animal agriculture industry, the suffering of hungry people, and the violence of war. They told me they were eating lower on the food chain so there would be enough food for everyone to eat, explaining the inherent wastefulness of feeding grains to animals, and that the injustice of food shortages worldwide was a primary underlying cause of human conflict. Their inspiring example, and participating with them in eating daily plant-based meals together, transformed my food orientation and I have not eaten meat since. About five years later, in 1980, after learning more about the routine abuse of hens for eggs and cows for dairy products, in addition to the devastating impact of human exploitation of animals in general, I became a vegan.
What is clear to me is that this fortuitous transition to vegan living was due not just to my individual yearning, questioning, and efforts, but also to the positive influence and example of the community at The Farm, and the other Buddhist sanghas I’ve lived in. The Farm was not a Buddhist community on the outside, but I realized with time that in many ways, it was. The Farm’s leader and spiritual teacher, Stephen Gaskin, had originally started the community that eventually became The Farm in Tennessee by offering his “Monday Night Class” in San Francisco, which inspired hundreds of young people to convert old school busses and go on the road together in search of land where they could co-create a community to put his teachings into action.
Stephen c
onsidered himself a student of Suzuki Roshi, founder of the San Francisco Zen Center. When I was at The Farm in 1975, Suzuki Roshi’s book, Zen Mind, Beginners Mind, had just been released and was the most popular book among the residents. It was widely discussed and embraced by the community. The Farm’s vegan orientation was a manifestation of its willingness to question many of the dominant cultural narratives surrounding gender roles, food, livelihood, meditation, birthing practices, consumerism, and war, and it did so from the framework of a Buddhist orientation emphasizing personal responsibility, compassion, regular meditation, and cultivating awareness and respect for animals, ecosystems, and other people. Later, I lived and practiced in Zen and Vajrayana Buddhist meditation centers in Huntsville, Atlanta, and the San Francisco Bay Area, all of which were vegetarian. These living situations taught me about and deepened my commitment to practicing nonviolence and cultivating compassion for other living beings.
In 1984, when I went to South Korea and lived as a Zen monk at Songgwangsa Buddhist temple, I found myself in a spiritual community that had been practicing vegan living since the thirteenth century: no meat, dairy, eggs, wool, silk, leather, or any killing of mosquitoes and other insects. It was obvious to me that this practice of mindful consumption and action—striving to practice ahimsa as the fundamental guiding ethical light—was both a result of centuries of cultural spiritual wisdom, and also the basis for the propagation and continuation of this wisdom into the future.
We were practicing sitting meditation for about twelve hours daily, and as the weeks and months passed, it became clearer that any action that harms others tends to destabilize the mind, disrupt inner stillness, and impede progress in meditation. Refraining from manipulating, exploiting, deceiving, and harming others, including both humans and animals, and striving to treat them with kindness and respect, not only helps them be happy and free, but also brings happiness and freedom to myself, and co-creates a culture of respect, equality, and justice.
I grew to understand more deeply the importance of the precepts, which serve as guides to ethical conduct. Just as our consciousness affects our behavior, so also, our behavior affects our consciousness and indeed, our consciousness can never rise higher than the level of our behavior. Eating animal foods places an unrecognized and invisible ceiling on our spiritual capacities, desensitizing and disturbing us both physically and mentally, spiritually and ethically. Though I’d already been a vegan for a few years when I went to Songgwangsa, I felt that living there nourished the roots of vegan living, helping them reach more deeply into my heart.
Since then, continuing with Buddhist meditation practice and study for the past forty years, there’s a clear sense of the profound degree to which our minds are colonized by our cultural upbringing. In inner stillness and receptivity, the eternal, sky-like nature of the mind may become apparent, giving rise to luminous joy. Released from the prison of deluded self-oriented ambition, craving, and fear, the mind rests in wholeness, no longer essentially separate from the world it perceives. For virtually all of us, this basic wisdom is repressed and covered over by the culture into which we are born, a culture that colonizes our minds and compels us to relentlessly eat animals. This cultural programming wounds our awareness and sensitivity, hijacks our thoughts and actions, and leaves us spiritually lost, herded into a societal mentality and lifestyle based on competition, manipulation, and disconnectedness from animals, nature, and ourselves. Though covered over by clouds, thick smoke, and fog, our minds are essentially undamageable, like the infinite sky, clear, bright, and eternally unhindered by the fleeting clouds of human experience. Wisdom teachings can be rays of light that reveal and thus bringing healing.
It hasn’t been difficult to see that the same basic truths shining through the Buddhist teachings also illuminate teachings of many other traditions, including Christian, Sufi, Jewish, Jain, Hindu, Taoist, Confucian, and others. The underlying wisdom is similar: to connect authentically with the deeper level of our mind, and to be loving and respectful in our relations with others. In Buddhism, we are told that we are called to leave home in order to walk the path of awakening, and metaphorically this points in the same direction: to question the official narratives that have infected our minds and that compel us to slavishly collude with a system that is devastating every dimension of our individual and collective health. There seem to be three basic steps:
1. Make efforts to question and free ourselves internally from the existing cultural framework;
2. practice meditation, mindfulness, and introspection to develop our capacity to understand directly the unimpeded freedom, compassion, and harmony of our essential nature;
3. co-create and support communities that foster this liberation and respect, to help our entire culture be positively transformed.
These three steps continually loop back and reinforce each other.
The Hidden Thread
The Buddhist teachings, like all authentic spiritual teachings, are potent and effective in their capacity to heal and liberate because they insist that we devote ourselves unflaggingly to mindfulness and self-inquiry on every level, including our relationships, emotions, behaviors, and purchases. I now realize that it was the Buddhist teaching of non-harmfulness that was shining through the vibrant example of vegan living that I walked into on The Farm and that ended forever my consumption of animal flesh. Living in Buddhist centers and practicing and studying the Dharma teachings have deepened this transformation and have also led to creating books, essays, trainings, workshops, and presentations that have helped people of diverse backgrounds transition to vegan living. These people, in turn, have gone on to create films, classes, study groups, sanctuaries, conferences, and other innovative means of sharing the vegan message, reaching even more people who similarly share and contribute to the awakening of humanity and the promotion of the vegan message. The hidden thread in all this is the underlying Buddhist teaching of questioning narratives and cultivating awareness and respect.
It’s well understood that the awakening experienced by the Buddha 2,600 years ago in northern India helped transform Indian society away from animal sacrifice and meat-eating, and toward the vegetarianism for which India has been renowned for the past two millennia. Because of the continuous efforts of innumerable people in every generation for the next roughly 130 generations until today, this thread of including animals in our sphere of moral concern has not been lost, and continues to bring healing and awakening to our world. Visiting China, Taiwan, Korea, Vietnam, and many Buddhist centers in the west, I’ve seen that vegan living is mandated and encouraged for both monastics and lay Buddhists as an integral part of the Dharma teachings in many lineages and traditions. Its beneficial effect on the wider society is incalculable.
Just as I was transformed by the Mahayana Buddhist-inspired communities, The Farm and Songgwangsa, and just as others have been transformed by reading The World Peace Diet, and have gone on to help transform others who will transform others, so also Thoreau, Emerson, and Alcott in my hometown of Concord, Massachusetts, were transformed by their pioneering discovery of Buddhist texts. The Concord Transcendalists created one of the first western communal experiments in vegan living, “Fruitlands,” in the mid-nineteenth century, and went on to inspire countless more people with their writings and example. The same hidden thread continues to wend its way through our culture today. If we look deeply enough into the ethical foundations for vegan living, their sources, and their sources’ sources, we usually find threads leading back sooner or later to Buddhist teachings.
Already, in the first century BCE, Buddhist monks had travelled far from India, bringing the Dharma teachings to western Asia, Greece, and as far as the British Isles. There have been surprising levels of global cross-fertilization of ideas over the millennia. Even in more recent times, we can see this interconnectedness, for example, in how Buddhist and Asian spiritual ideas influenced Thoreau and the other Transcendentalists, who influenced Tolstoy, who influenced Gand
hi, who influenced Martin Luther King and Thich Nhat Hanh, who further influenced many more. This is but a tiny glimpse into a vast web of influences that unite humanity and demonstrate how, as individuals, we are both the products, as well as the creators, of communities and societies, and the web of relationships that underlie them.
We cannot say that the Buddha’s teachings of vegetarianism and veganism are the only source. It is likely that he was one of several, perhaps many, voices that helped usher in vegetarian living in India during the Axial Age and subsequently into the yogic and other spiritual and cultural traditions of the Indian subcontinent. Mahavir, the great sage of the Jain tradition who lived concurrently with the Buddha, is certainly another force, as were their contemporaries, Confucius and Laozi in China and Pythagoras in the eastern Mediterranean, all planting seeds of ahimsa and perhaps carrying them forward from much more ancient traditions that have been lost to us today.
The essential point is that the Buddhist teachings, like all spiritual teachings, can only be understood when lived and practiced, and that our generation, like every generation, is called to re-create the teachings in order to pass them on and to discover them anew in the uniqueness of our present circumstances. For example, there is the ancient Japanese Buddhist teaching of shojin that is being rediscovered by people today. Shojin is “religious abstention from animal foods” and is based on the core teaching of ahimsa, and is understood to support samadhi. Samadhi is deep meditative stillness in which the mind transcends its usual conflicted, anxious, and busy condition, quiets down, and becomes clear, bright, free, and serenely poised in the present moment. Shojin and samadhi are seen to work together, with shojin purifying the body-mind and allowing, though certainly not guaranteeing, access to the spiritually enriching experience of samadhi.