Buddhism and Veganism Read online

  For a combination of reasons that I hope can help me better understand the obstacles pre-vegans face, I spent the next fifteen years bouncing back and forth between eating animals and being vegetarian, all the while struggling with myself and the non-vegan world. I think what prevented me from fully embracing veganism was my underlying worldview that the world was good. I couldn’t accept that suffering on the scale that exists within animal agriculture in particular was even possible. With time, I learned more about the dark side of humanity, through media, books and movies, and in my own personal life. I read about the Holocaust and watched coverage of the Rwandan and Serbian genocides as they happened. But still, I couldn’t let go of the Pollyannaish belief that we as a culture had evolved to be better, and that such atrocities were no longer possible here. Humans in other places apparently still did terrible things, I thought, and at one time in our history, we too had committed unconscionable crimes against humanity including massacring native Indians and enslaving African people, but surely we had learned our lesson and were no longer capable of such society-wide acts of violence or oppression.

  I believed that while there would always be individual moral outliers in society, we as a society would not tolerate massive systematic torture of billions of sentient beings. The vegan agenda must be based on misinformation. I could not conceive that we would steal baby cows from their mothers, and then kill most of those fragile, terrified individuals in order for humans to drink the milk nature clearly intended for those babies. I was sure the labels on the dairy products that said “humane” must reflect humane treatment by any reasonable understanding of the word because, again, the government would ensure that.

  My second vegan awakening finally came one day in the winter of 2005. My dog Penelope, whom I’d rescued from the local Humane Society, had been diagnosed with a large cancerous tumor behind her left eye. I’d opted to put her through radiation to save her life. By about three weeks into the treatment, she had a third degree burn caused by the radiation that covered the left side of her face. She was on pain medication, but was still obviously in pain, and the Elizabethan cone she had to wear to prevent her from bothering her open wound only amplified her discomfort. I felt like a horrible guardian/parent, and I regretted my decision to put her through this agony.

  In the midst of this difficult time, I was getting more involved with a local anti-fur group and happened to watch an undercover film about the Chinese fur farm industry. The video included graphic, devastating footage of raccoon dogs being skinned alive, with one precious soul, whom I will never forget, blinking directly into the camera as she lay, skinned and discarded, on a pile of dead animals.

  After watching the video, I remember crying for hours, sobbing and screaming into a pillow. I curled up in a little ball and covered my head trying to block out the world, filled with a sorrow that felt powerful enough to make the earth implode, but also filled with so much love for that one raccoon dog, and for my dear Penelope, and for every other animal in the world that suffered. In that moment, the truth of everything I’d been reading and denying for the preceding fifteen years hit me at once and cracked through the bubble of denial in which I’d been hiding. I knew we really did steal and kill all those babies, the humane labels were lies, and all the other horrors of animal agriculture were all true. The suffering was real, and I could never willingly or knowingly contribute to the suffering of another animal again. And so, for the second and final time, I went vegan, for life.

  In the moment I made that commitment, I felt freed from the hard work of denial, and from all the wrestling I’d done with reality and with my own heart as I had struggled all those years to reconcile my love for animals with my choice to eat them and wear them. I felt that I was finally embracing my heart and choosing to live in alignment with my true nature.

  I no longer had to struggle with myself, but that’s when my struggle with society began. I realized that our whole culture is structured around an idea of human superiority, and built upon the mass exploitation, oppression, abuse, and killing of billions of sentient beings. I think almost all vegans I know have gone through at least a period (which tragically many never move through) of deep depression and rage caused by seeing the world through our new perception, aware of the cruelty and the suffering caused by humans. Many of us don’t know what else to do but scream and yell, and attempt to force our friends, families, and everyone we meet to see what we see so that they will stop contributing to and causing this terrible suffering. But in doing so we’re similar to that person who screams at someone who speaks a foreign language, mistakenly thinking that the louder we yell, the better we’ll be understood.

  For the first couple of years that I was vegan, I was filled with an anger at humanity bordering on hatred. I was depressed and frustrated with my own incapacity to help those in need. I was largely consumed with resentment and crushing sorrow and never seemed to know what to say to people to help make them understand so they would change their habits and stop hurting animals. I attended protests where angry and often intimidating activists yelled slurs at passersby through bullhorns. I watched graphic videos, because as painful as they were to watch, I knew the pain the animals endured was far greater. How could I look away when they suffered so much? I spent many nights lying wide awake with images of bloody slaughterhouses, and sad, frightened, injured animals floating through my mind.

  After I’d been vegan a few years, a friend asked me to go to a yoga class while we were away at the beach for the weekend, and I agreed without realizing what I was in for. I’d taken many yoga classes at the gym in the past, but they had all been exclusively focused on the physical practice. This class was different. During the whole class, the instructor pushed us to find physical strength by looking inward and finding our strength within. He talked about ethics and pushed us hard, and I could feel my ego cracking as my knees wobbled and my muscles shook. At the end of class, he led us in a guided meditation that was intended to help us connect with the infinite peace, love, and light that he promised we all had at our core. But as we closed our eyes and plugged our ears and buzzed like bees (a form of meditation or pranayama called bhramari), I did not connect with peace, love, or light but with darkness and demons, with fear and pain, and I ended up leaving class in tears and sobbing for another two days afterwards. That’s when I realized how much I needed that yoga class, how much suffering I was holding inside, and how much healing I had to do.

  As a child of an atheist dad who’d been raised a Christian and an agnostic mom who’d grown up in an orthodox Jewish home, I was marginally exposed to the Judeo-Christian tradition growing up, but neither the Presbyterian church my dad took me to, nor the reform Jewish temple my mom made me attend ever resonated with me, or even my parents for that matter, in any spiritual way. We stopped attending before I turned ten. By the time I got to college, I basically thought spirituality and religion were for superstitious people, and because all of the spiritual traditions or teachers I’d ever known condoned eating animals, their claims at godliness and compassion rang hollow for me.

  After my cathartic yoga experience, though, I felt some spiritual yearning stirring, a hunger for something I didn’t yet know. I picked up some books on the philosophy of yoga and Buddhism. The teachings felt like they contained truth. Both of these related systems of spirituality seemed to revere the whole of life in a way that made sense to me. The teachings felt somehow familiar, like I was reading a truth that I’d always felt within but had never seen or heard before. They helped clarify what my heart had always sensed was true. Both Buddhism and yoga recognize the value of all life, are based upon a desire to do no harm to any sentient being, and moreover, to live with active, engaged compassion for all beings. Both see the unity and interconnection of all life, and teach that happiness comes from living in harmony with these insights into the nature of reality.

  It was a revelation to realize that vegans aren’t the moral extremists that many in our society w
ould make us out to be, but we are in fact a living continuation of a tradition of non-harm and compassion that goes back thousands of years. The more I learned about the yogic and Buddhist teachings, the more I felt I’d found a whole set of spiritual traditions that deeply resonated with my heart, with my vegan philosophy and my way of life. I especially connected with the Buddhist Plum Village tradition, led by Thich Nhat Hanh, the Zen master and peace activist, who, in 2007, instructed all of the fifty plus monasteries who practice with him as their spiritual head to transition from being vegetarian (as they’ve always been) to becoming vegan for the benefit of sentient beings and the environment (though for the sake of full disclosure, I should note that the monasteries I’ve visited are more like ninety percent vegan).

  In the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, generally considered to be the foundation of classical yoga philosophy, we are given an eight-limbed system to achieve peace, happiness, wisdom, and ultimately union with the Divine both within ourselves and in everything else. The first limb comprises the moral injunctions, and the first of these is ahimsa, or non-harm to any sentient being. This is the heart and backbone of yoga practice and provides the foundation for ethical vegetarianism and especially in the modern world, ethical veganism. Similarly, while there are various Buddhist traditions that interpret the teachings somewhat differently, all Buddhists accept certain doctrines, including the Noble Eightfold Path and the Five Precepts. The First Precept is the injunction against taking any life, human or non-human. While some Buddhists, especially those following the Theravada tradition, believe the Buddha permitted his monks to eat meat if it was offered to them and not specifically killed for them, most Buddhist monks in the Mahayana tradition follow a vegan or at least a vegetarian diet. If we read the Buddha’s teachings as a whole, it is clear that the injunction on taking life applies to what (or whom) we eat, given the emphasis on compassion for all sentient beings that pervades the entirety of Buddhist thought.

  One of my favorite Buddhist stories tells about the enlightenment of the monk Asanga. Seeking enlightenment, Asanga went into the mountains and found a cave suitable for meditation. The story goes that after spending twelve years in meditation trying to see the Buddha, Asanga grew frustrated, gave up his search, and went down the mountain, but when he arrived in the town at the base of the mountain, he saw a woman cutting through a rock with a thin piece of thread. With great patience, she was able to wear down the rock with this thin thread. Asanga was inspired and thought, “If this woman can wear down a hard rock with a little piece of thread, how can I give up on my very important aspiration to see the Buddha?” He went back up the mountain and returned to his cave, where he spent another twelve years in meditation. But still, he did not see the Buddha. So again, he became frustrated, gave up his quest, and went back down the mountain. This time on his way down he saw a large boulder that had a hole in it and saw a tiny stream of water coming down the mountain, which, drop by drop over a long period of time, had worn away this hole in the great boulder. And again, Asanga thought, “How can I give up so easily? This little drop of water makes a hole in this great boulder over time. In time, with patience, I know I will see the Buddha.” So again, he climbed the mountain and returned to his cave. Another twelve years in meditation passed, and still he did not see the Buddha.

  For the last time, he decided he was really done for good and went back down the mountain and back to the town. When he got there, he saw a starving, mangy dog lying in the street, near death he was so weak. No one would touch the dog because he appeared diseased and dying. Asanga went to the dog to give him comfort and offer him something to drink, but as he approached, he saw the dog had a large gaping wound on his side that was filled with maggots. He wanted to remove the maggots to alleviate the dog’s suffering, but he didn’t even want to harm the maggots because they too were sentient beings, so he bent down, and as he gently stroked the dog, he stuck out his tongue in order to allow the maggots to crawl onto it, and in that moment, the dog disappeared, and in his place the Buddha Maitreya (the coming Buddha) appeared before him. Asanga jumped up and bowed and said “Lord Buddha, I have been meditating for so many years to see you. Why do you appear now?” The Buddha smiled and replied, “I was there with you all along, but it wasn’t until you opened your heart in deep compassion that you could see me.”

  Again, we see in the Buddhist tradition how vital a role compassion plays in our path towards awakening. If we have compassion in our hearts and we are in touch with that compassion, we are already on the path towards enlightenment, and we cannot do anything intentionally to unnecessarily harm another living being. When our compassion is alive, the Buddha within us is present. This is why before every meal at the Plum Village monasteries, we contemplate our food with the prayer that “we keep our compassion alive by eating in such a way that reduces the suffering of living beings, stops contributing to climate change, and heals and preserves our precious planet.”

  I was drawn to Buddhism and yoga, and felt I’d found a safe space within these traditions, because of their emphasis on non-harm and compassion for all sentient beings. But more than just reinforcing the compassion I had already discovered within myself, they’ve helped me develop more understanding for humans, and they’ve helped me cope with the suffering of the world in a way that I believe helps me be a more effective activist, a force of light rather than darkness. As the Buddha says in the Dhammapada, “In this world, hate never yet dispelled hate. Only love dispels hate.”

  It seems to me entirely natural that in the face of abuse of innocent beings, we instinctively feel anger. When we see what’s happening behind the closed doors and boarded up windows hiding the chickens, pigs, cows and other animals we use for food, or the fur-bearing animals we kill for their beautiful coats, or the animals we exploit for entertainment, and when we see into the laboratories where monkeys, mice, and other animals are being tortured, or the beautiful wild animals both large and small who are being hunted for sport or for food, it seems a perfectly reasonable response to be enraged or devastated, or to become depressed. I know that when I witness any form of cruelty or suffering, especially the kind that is routinely captured in undercover videos, I can become so overwhelmed with anger and sadness that I have often felt I simply could not bear this world anymore. The word compassion means to “suffer with.” But as Thich Nhat Hanh says, we cannot drown in our own suffering. We cannot offer happiness if we don’t have it within ourselves. Many animal activists seem to think that we need to suffer because the animals suffer. And of course we do suffer with them, but we also need to learn to cultivate enough peace and love within ourselves that we can help heal the world.

  There is a story the Buddha once told to his monks about the capacity of our hearts. He said, “If you have a handful of salt and you throw it in a glass of water, can you drink the water?” And the monks responded “No, of course not. It would be too salty.” “But,” the Buddha said, “if you take that handful of salt and you throw it into a big river, then could you drink that water?” And the monks reply “Yes, of course because the river is so big and flowing, and it can dissolve that little bit of salt.” So too, the Buddha says we must have hearts like a great river, and cultivate so much compassion, joy, and equanimity within ourselves that we can dissolve the salts of fear and delusion, and in that way be a source of liberation and happiness to others.

  About two months after the Buddha’s enlightenment, he delivered his first discourse to the five monks who formed his original forest dwelling sangha, or spiritual community. In this first discourse, he established some of the most important and defining teachings thereafter associated with Buddhism. He taught the importance of avoiding two extremes. On one hand, he taught, we can be caught-up in worldly pleasures and pursuits, driven by personal desire, decadence, and the never-ending search for pleasure, which is based in ignorance of the true nature of reality, and which ultimately and inevitably leads to unhappiness. On the other hand, we can also be caught
by the other extreme of self-deprivation, mortification, and self-sacrifice to the degree that we have no joy or happiness and are still doomed to suffer, and make others around us suffer too. The Buddha taught that there was a middle path that was preferable to these extremes, one that could free us from personal suffering, and help us lead others out of suffering as well.

  I look back on my pre-vegan years as largely being characterized by the first extreme, seeking pleasure and personal happiness, ignorant about the effects my actions had on other beings, and despite seeking personal happiness, never really attaining it in any lasting or meaningful way. I also now see that during the first few years of my life as a vegan, I bordered on the second extreme, self-flagellating by watching all those videos and thinking about the animals’ suffering all the time, as if I needed to suffer constantly to help them.

  Gradually, as I began to deepen my yoga and meditation practices, I began to find that middle path. I’m still making adjustments, but I’ve learned that I can do much more for the animals by finding balance and happiness in my own life. Once we become aware of the effects our actions have on others, we no longer derive happiness from activities that harm others. Our happiness is no longer selfish or harmful. Rather, it is found in being kind, in opening our hearts, in making meaningful, loving connections with others and the natural world, and appreciating and supporting the beauty and joy in the world. I still feel the pain of the world, but I also see the beauty of it and understand that I don’t have to be unhappy to help others.