Buddhism and Veganism Page 6
Entering the inner stillness of samadhi typically entails a lot of practice, patiently returning our attention to the present moment, and requires that our mind be undisturbed by our outer actions. This is why the spirit of ahimsa that inspires shojin is important. The spirit of shojin is compassion and sees animals as sentient subjects rather than mere commodities. The practice of shojin liberates us from both outer actions that are harmful, as well as inner mental states that accompany eating animal foods. These mental states—agitation, fear, panic, despair, sadness, aggressiveness, disconnectedness, despair, and dullness—are virtually unavoidable if we are buying and eating animal-sourced foods, brought into us as vibrational frequencies with the foods we are eating, generated within us by our own undeniably abusive food choices and the psychological blocking these actions demand. These negative mental states tend to reduce our capacity to meditate effectively and hinder our ability to reach higher levels of spiritual illumination.
It’s sometimes said that there are three pillars to Buddhist practice and awakening: sila (ethical living), samadhi, and prajna (wisdom). Like a three-legged stool, all three are equally necessary and support each other. Sila, mindfulness of the precepts and careful practice of kindness in our relations with others, is the spirit of veganism and shojin. This creates the foundation for samadhi, the stillness and serenity of mind that lies at the heart of spiritual life. Samadhi leads to prajna, the liberating wisdom that represents the full flowering of human awareness, dissolving the old wall of delusion and bringing liberation, understanding, and compassion. Both samadhi and prajna support sila in an organic way, because the awakening that Buddhism aims for is realizing the essential interconnectedness of all life, which naturally and joyfully propels us to act with sensitivity and respect toward other expressions of life. Vegan living is an essential element of this virtuous circle. Without it, the circle becomes vicious. Causing and eating violence leads to desensitization, which leads to further abuse, disconnectedness, delusion, and suffering.
The Enlightenment Fallacy
Outer compassion and inner stillness feed each other. Veganism and ethical living are essential to our spiritual health because they remove a fundamental hindrance on our individual path and help create harmony in our community. For this reason, there’s an old Buddhist saying attributed to Padmasambhava, “Though the view should be as vast as the sky, keep your conduct as fine as barley flour.” This essential teaching emphasizing vegan values of caring and kindness is an important healing antidote to a damaging delusion common in many Buddhist, yoga, and other spiritual and progressive communities. We can call this delusion the “enlightenment fallacy” because it arises as a false sense of individual license to do as we like because we believe we are spiritually advanced.
This enlightenment fallacy reinforces and activates the basic sense of entitlement and arrogance that is inserted into all of us as products of a culture organized at its living core around the shared ritual of eating foods sourced from animals whom we collectively dominate and exploit. This violence is well understood today to be completely unnecessary and counter-productive to our physical, cultural and environmental health. However, the enlightenment fallacy attempts to justify this by “spiritualizing” our disconnectedness, denial, and daily contribution to violence through propagating what seems to be a more lofty and enlightened perspective. This fashionable perspective clouds our awareness and convinces us that our behavior of buying and eating animal-sourced foods is either not relevant to our spiritual practice, or that it is actually an indication of our spiritual attainments. There are several versions of this enlightenment fallacy.
One is that because of our spiritual attainment, we are now free of attachments and judgments. We are no longer trapped in the net of discrimination, this fallacy affirms, and are therefore free to eat anything we like. We see that everything has “one taste” and so now that we have discovered this and have freed ourselves from the discriminating mind, we can live our lives free from the rules that are only meant for those who are less accomplished. Another version is that because we are more enlightened, we now realize that the whole phenomenal world is but maya, an illusion, and therefore no animals are really killed, and in fact nothing negative ever really happens. Love is the only power, and so we can eat our hot dogs with love and understanding and no harm is done. This narrative assures us that we either transform the negativity with our high vibration, or that we are so awake that we realize that the animals we’re eating are illusory, as is all pain and suffering, so it doesn’t matter what we do in the outer world. All that matters is the quality of our consciousness.
A similar narrative is that we may have attained the “karma-less” state, where we are free from karma, duality and consequences. We realize there is no essential self, and no world, and we are thus free to do as we like. We are no longer bound by conventional morality, which is a system of rules that is artificial and imprisons us in delusions of “good” and “evil.” Now we are free of this confining dualism, the narrative goes, and we can act as we please. There is a saying by Augustine that points in this direction, “Love God and do as you will, and all is well.” Many Buddhists and other spiritual practitioners follow a similarly tempting rationalization as well, proclaiming that spiritual illumination is liberation from dualism and rules, and they are free to do as their “heart” tells them, or to eat the foods to which their “body” guides them. They love the animals they eat. They are blessing them and helping them to have a more evolved rebirth. Or even better, they see that it’s all just a play of illusion and that the One Light is always shining, no matter what is happening in the outer world.
Padmasambhava’s wisdom (and there are many other examples of this wisdom in the Buddhist teachings) specifically addresses the devastating fallacy in these hubristic narratives. When our view is as vast, deep, bright, and all-encompassing as the sky, then we keep our conduct as fine as flour. It’s precisely because our view is vast that we are more sensitive to the consequences of actions, and take them seriously. We experience the infinite interconnectedness of all manifestations of life, and our heart is naturally bursting with compassion for others, even as we see they are not “others” at all, but essentially inseparable from us. This realization is the foundation of authentic morality, kindness, spiritual awakening, and of all the precepts. We naturally delight in helping and blessing others as best we can, and recoil from actions that exploit or abuse others for our own advantage.
We should be suspicious of any narrative that allows or encourages harming or using others because of seeing they are not separate, or seeing they are eternal and undamageable, and so forth. Clinging to either duality or non-duality is still clinging. There are many aspects to the enlightenment fallacy, and the various rationalization narratives are all the more insidious because of the armor they bestow, hardening hearts and conveying a toxic pseudo-spirituality that harms not just the animals but everyone in any way touched by these delusions and their resulting behaviors. While it certainly may be helpful and healing to practice viewing the pain and loss that we personally experience as transient and illusory, it is the height of delusion to discount the pain and loss we inflict on others by rationalizing it as being transient and illusory. We may often add further layers to the narrative, for example that it’s just for their own good, or it’s just their karma, or that we’re just not attached to outer forms, or that we’re just reflecting back to them their own violence. The “just” in all these narrative excuses is the just of justification.
To the degree we are wounded and abused as children, we tend to grow into adults who are unfortunately propelled to likewise inflict abuse on others. As products of a technocratic herding culture, we are all harmed from infancy in countless ways, and our woundedness can erode our capacity to be mindful of our conduct, and sensitive to our inner wisdom and to others. The Buddhist teachings call us to heal, to look deeply and mindfully, and to question the fundamental narrative of t
he herding culture into which we’ve all been born. This herding narrative that reduces beings to commodities is the utter antithesis of both bodhi and karuna, wisdom and compassion, the prime teachings of Buddhism that free us as individuals, and create the foundation of communities where harmony, joy, equality, and abundance are possible for all.
Awakening from the desensitizing stupor inflicted on us from infancy by the herding culture that exploits not just animals and ecosystems but us humans as well is a monumental effort. It calls us to question virtually all of our inner narratives, explanations, and stories, and to cultivate our capacity for inner silence so that we can be guided in our life in a way that is free from this harmful conditioning. In receptive awareness we find that intuitive insight emerges, and this can be seen as the foundation of the wisdom and compassion that are at the heart of the Buddhist dharma.
The transformative insight that the historical Buddha experienced and shared as best he could is a direct understanding of the deeper truth of our nature, bringing peace, joy, and freedom. It is insight into the cause of suffering in the delusion of essential separateness, which compels us to try endlessly to get what we want and keep away what we don’t want, and to see others as instruments in this miserable struggle. This is samsara, the suffering that never ends in countless lifetimes until we awaken our heart and mind and realize that we are all waves on the same ocean. This awakening and teaching, the hidden thread that has brought healing through the ages, is available to each and every one of us now. May we give thanks every day for another opportunity to awaken, and to contribute to our community, and to cultivate our mind and heart so that our view becomes as vast as the sky and our conduct as fine as barley flour.
References:
1. This number is arrived at by simple division of the 75 billion land animals and two trillion marine animals conservatively estimated to be killed annually for food.
Engaged Veganism and Interbeing with Other Animals:
Mindful Consumption as Practice for Liberation
MARION ACHOULIAS
My karmic entanglement with other animals has no beginning and from where I stand at this moment, I do not see an end. It started when I was an embryo in my mother’s body and was exposed to traces of animal products, not to mention tar and lead from her cigarettes.
I have struggled with the pain of knowing about the ongoing injustices of slaughterhouses and vivisection laboratories throughout my adulthood. At times, I have refused to acknowledge it, and at other times I have managed to suppress my horror and somehow get myself to act. I became a vegan, wrote letters to companies, volunteered for animal refuges, and attended and organized outreach events. Bouts of action were punctuated with long periods of despair in which I succumbed to hopelessness and self-pity that I should have been born into such a mad world.
My life has been fragmented by my struggle with the reality of unspeakable cruelty and I wish for it to become whole. I am ready now to look into my own suffering and the ways in which it is connected to the suffering of others, both nonhuman and human. Animal suffering is still part of my deep consciousness, partly because I ate animal products for so long. Anger is still in me as I continue to live and participate in a society built on injustice. It has been painful to realize that even though I am involved in social justice work and eat a plant-based diet, I am nevertheless entangled in the same causes and conditions that give rise to exploitation and violence. But how could it be any different? I am only at the beginning of a true vegan awakening.
Thich Nhat Hanh developed socially engaged Buddhism in times of war. He decided to take his spiritual practice out of the monastery and into the world to help relieve the suffering he witnessed around him in his home country of Vietnam. Decades later in the West, in the midst of the suffering caused by carnist consumer culture,1 the Zen master and peace activist is showing us the path to healing and peace2 in his contemporary interpretation of a key classical Buddhist teaching on the consumption of the four main nutriments or fuels, namely edible foods, sense impressions, volition/intention, and consciousness. The original text teaches that each mental state and all phenomena can only manifest if we continuously feed them.3
In the first part of this essay, I present Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings on veganism as wholesome nutriment. I will then briefly describe the ways in which I apply the principle of the four fuels to my experience as a vegan who believes in the multidimensionality of vegan mindfulness practice. Engaged veganism is a vast dharmic door for liberation based on the understanding that it will enable uncountable beings both human and nonhuman to dramatically reduce suffering and to live fulfilling lives. It is a perspective that addresses social, psychological, and environmental problems from a radically inclusive perspective. We are karmically intertwined with all species, and yet we are just recently becoming aware of the great extent to which the consumption of animal-sourced foods affects us all.
The Fuel of Edible Food
Transformation begins the moment we become aware of the elements we allow to enter our body and mind. What am I eating? Is it some-thing or is it some-one? Are we feeding joy or harm in ourselves or others? To wake us up, Thich Nhat Hanh uses strong words: “Eating meat and drinking alcohol with mindfulness, we will realize that we are eating the flesh of our own children; we are eating our own planet earth,” he writes in his influential Blue Cliff Letter from 2006.4
Note that his definition of vegetarianism includes the avoidance of dairy and egg products, “because they are products of the meat industry. If we stop consuming, they will stop producing. Only collective awakening can create enough determination for action.”5 Nhat Hanh further announced that all retreats and practice centres of his Plum Village tradition in Asia, Europe, and North America from then on will only serve plant based meals and he “trusts that lay practitioners will understand and support this decision wholeheartedly. We know that if there is no collective awakening, then the earth and all species will not have a chance to be saved. Our daily life has to show that we are awake.”6 Already five years prior, in the fateful year of 2001, the spiritual leader recognized that mindful consumption is the primary way we have of “preventing violence to penetrate and grow in our body and consciousness.”7 During a public talk at the University of Massachusetts, he described in detail the suffering of chickens languishing in battery cages with the warning that the ingestion of the products of such agony means swallowing the animals’ frustration and despair. A daily diet of misery must leave its traces, especially if we believe, as many Buddhists (and some scientists) do, that consciousness is not confined to the brain but that all information is contained in each cell of our body.8 With each bite of food—the building blocks of our body-mind complex—we are connecting deeply to the causes and conditions that produce the things we take in, digest, and absorb. We cannot escape their effects.
Buddhist psychology gives us the tools to confront our habits of denial and the tendency to rationalize our often quite irrational actions post facto. Studies show consistently that behaviour determines thought, rather than the other way around.9 While we are caught in habitual patterns, we are not free to clearly see their implications. The more animal products we eat, the more we will feel the need to justify this choice, and the more we distance ourselves emotionally from the victims of our food preferences. This vicious cycle cuts us off from the world and makes it increasingly difficult for us to be in touch with other living beings in the world. Hence the Buddha advised us to eat in such a way that allows compassion to be possible.10 Maybe not surprisingly, it was only when I decided to become vegan that I found the courage to watch undercover footage of animal slaughter.
For me, going vegan has also meant consuming in a way that makes honesty possible. Or, in Nhat Hanh’s words, eating mindfully means “to only eat what does not make a war in your body and your mind.”11 He says, “If you eat meat it is as if you eat your son’s flesh.” This acknowledges that eating mammals, fish, and birds comes much clo
ser to cannibalism than plant eating. In addition, the use of animal products hurts other people and the environment in ways that a plant based diet does not. The Middle Way of living well, while reducing violence, is veganism.
But how is it even conceivable that we look at a fellow sentient being and see food? What is the mechanism of reducing animals to the category of killable? Eating animals impoverishes us and deadens our world because it cuts us off from the richness of life in its many diverse embodiments. Meditating on our ingrained habit energies fed through consciousness, volition and sense contact may shed light on the ways craving, fear and other negative mental formations can distort our perception of the other. Due to lack of mindful consumption, we feed a cut-throat mentality, and from its manifold manifestations grow seeds of despair that can blind us to the kindness and respect that are also always available and present.
The Fuel of Consciousness
According to the Yogacara tradition, our store consciousness holds all human potential for anger, fear, compassion, and transformation in the form of seeds that push us to react to internal and external triggers.12 These seeds are not only shaped by our actions, perceptions, and experiences but also by those of many generations of predecessors along with those of countless individuals who are alive today.13 The circumstances of historical events, institutions, and the natural environment further complicate the feedback system of consciousness. Perfect free will is an illusion, because our thoughts, inclinations, and actions are not ours alone. They are manifestations that have their origins in the seeds planted by many factors, from personal upbringing to society to global history.