Buddhism and Veganism

by Will Tuttle

  And while climate change gets all the attention because we can measure, see, and feel it, global depletion is just as tragic if not worse. We are depleting our water, land, rainforests, and wildlife animal populations in an unprecedented manner due to the inherent wastefulness of animal agriculture.7 We are depleting and polluting fresh water, which should and could be a renewable resource, but is not, because we use it in such vast amounts.8 We are draining forty major global aquifers faster than their recharge rates.9 We are burning off the lungs of the planet by destroying rainforests at a rate of one to two acres every second.10 Due to rainforest destruction alone, it is estimated that 130 plant, animal, and insect species become extinct daily. Coral reef life is all but vanishing due to pollution and over-fishing. We humans are causing the sixth great extinction, now named the Anthropocene (caused by humans), by killing off more species in just a few decades than in the last 65 million years. Oceanographers predict that the world’s oceans will be wholly devoid of fish by 2048.11 Bees and other insects are dying, and wildlife clings to narrow marginal areas because native forests, grasslands, and wetlands are disappearing under the relentless pressure of animal agriculture.12

  The good news is that we can take 25 to 50 percent of greenhouse gas emissions out of the climate change equation collectively by changing our dietary choices. Not a single company needs to change, not one protest needs to happen, or a single governmental ruling. We can each change our mind, our habits, and spread the word. When comparing a standard American diet with a vegan diet, we find that with a single decision we can reduce our personal environmental footprint to the equivalent of one eleventh of the fossil fuels, one thirteenth of the water, and one sixteenth of the land of animal food production.

  When I learned this in 2010, I realized that my eating habits were directly connected to the killing of our planet, causing extinction, annihilating wildlife, and killing the oceans. Plus, it was the cause of immense negativity and harm to my health. It became clear to me that I must become a vegan because this completely encapsulates the Buddhist path of respect for life, and causing less harm and negativity.

  Feed Conversion Rates and Plant Sentience

  Spiritual practitioners are concerned about all life forms on Earth and thus the question of plant sentience often comes into question when discussing the eating of meat. Vegans often hear, “But plants are sentient too.” This is used to argue that something has to die in order for us to live. Yet, many times it is used to justify the continuation of bad habits, deflecting responsibility, and curtailing open dialogue. The argument goes something like this. “Vegetarians and vegans don’t realize they also are responsible for killing insects, rodents, and other animals when they choose to eat plants. Plants are sentient too.” This is an interesting discussion point, because if we care about the entire Earth including the plants, trees, forests, and oceans, we will eventually realize that plant-based eating minimizes our harm of not just animals but plants as well. This may seem counterintuitive unless we understand feed conversion ratios.

  Agricultural corporations and farmers understand how much plant matter is needed to feed cows, chickens, turkeys, and pigs. To create one pound of beef, it takes about sixteen pounds of soybeans and corn (e.g., grain and feed.) To create one pound of bacon it takes seven to eight pounds of grain and feed.13 Let’s compare this to a family of four eating one meal. If each consumes a quarter-pound beef hamburger, they each just ate the four pounds of beans plus the quarter-pound of animal flesh. Together they consumed the equivalent of sixteen pounds of soybeans and corn in one sitting, plus a pound of flesh. To do less harm, would it not have been a better choice to grow and cook only one pound of beans and give fifteen pounds of beans to others who need the food and save the cow’s life? Or to give the fifteen pounds back to the Earth, never to have been grown in the first place? This would allow the farm land go back to forest, restoring needed habitat to help wildlife thrive, including trees, plants, and animals. The point is, when we analyze all the causes and conditions, we find that we kill much less plant life when we choose to eat only plants.

  When we decide to eat meat, we are being more harmful on every level, and collectively, we cause untold trillions of plants to die.14 Biologists estimate that a vegan saves at least a hundred trees annually.15 The amount of grain we feed to animals each year in the United States alone could feed 800 million people—if we didn’t feed it to animals.16 Essentially we have the ability to end global hunger by simply transitioning from eating animals to plants.

  Nargarjuna and the Case for Pure Vegetarianism

  Nargarjuna, the famous Buddhist monk who is held in high esteem for his illuminating treatises on the middle path, is quoted as saying, shunyata karuna garbham, which literally means, “emptiness is the birthplace of compassion.”17 Rather than voidness or emptiness, I prefer to use the doorstep concept of dependent origination. Dependent origination is the understanding of relativity; everything is interrelated, connected, and relative. Direct experience and knowledge of dependent origination comes to us when we realize that everything we do is linked in some way, shape, or form to all other beings and events. All things dependently arise in the web of birth, death, and becoming. We are all joined; what I do affects you and what you do affects me. The Buddha used very simple terms to describe this – when this is present, that arises, and when this is absent, that does not arise.

  When we realize this and understand the concept of dependent origination and causality, we find compassion for others overwhelms us and we wish to find ways to help those others. It is a boomerang effect, a fundamental Buddhist teaching. We realize that hurting other beings is just like hurting ourselves. When we see the connection between all living beings with open hearts, and when we realize we are indeed empty of a fundamentally separate self, Mahakaruna, great compassion, arises within us. Helping other beings, alleviating their suffering, and working to free them from bondage brings happiness, love, and more compassion. When we realize this, we can no longer eat animals because this causes them to be imprisoned and killed for us. When we stop harming others by not eating them, we help them and we feel better. This is an engagement of the heart.

  For example, some Buddhist teachers have verbalized that dairy cows are practicing the paramita of generosity in giving their baby’s milk to us. The reality, however, is that dairy cows yearn to be free and have their offspring near them. They do not want their milk and calves stolen from them, or to live in barren concrete encampments with a life span of only four to five years before being sent off to slaughter, rather than their twenty-five year normal lifespan. Dairy cows, like all other sentient beings, are here with us, not for us.

  The same is true for chickens who lay eggs, pigs who have piglets, and all sentient life forms including wildlife whose habitat is destroyed with every acre we burn to grow more crops for animal food. When we understand our relationship to other sentient beings, we realize that refraining from eating them eliminates the market conditions for their incarceration and death. Thus, not eating them expresses and engenders compassion.

  I went through my life thinking I was a moral and compassionate person. I worked, paid my bills, took care of my family, and tried to learn as much about Buddhist practice as I could. Then, I implemented this practice in my life, trying to be good to all humans, fair and open. It wasn’t until I stopped eating beings and their secretions that the profound realization occurred that I had been living a lie. I was contributing to the structural violence that relentlessly enslaves, rapes, and slaughters billions of animals every year, and realized I had been blinded by my upbringing, culture, and personal tastes, and that my inner values did not match my outer actions. It was the Buddhist practice of awakening.

  The Four Noble Truths From Vegan Eyes

  Following the Buddha’s teaching on the Four Noble Truths helps us to change our habits. These four truths are broken into two sets: two negative truths (the truth of suffering and of the cause of suffering
) and two positive truths (that there is a way out, and the path to do so). To become an ethical vegan, we simply follow the Buddha’s instructions by looking at the Four Noble Truths through the eyes of animals. First, we find the truth of suffering and nowhere is this more evident than in the billions of animals we raise only to kill. They die, we die, wildlife and hungry people die, and the planet dies. This is the truth of suffering; this is negativity.

  The second truth informs us of the cause of suffering, that is, our own ignorance, due to our conditioned response to like some, dislike others, and become indifferent to many. This is sometimes explained as attachment and aversion. We are indifferent to animals’ lives and their suffering because we are attached to their flesh, milk, and eggs. This is ignorance.

  The third truth informs us that there is a way out of this suffering. We can be free of eating animal foods and live a vegan lifestyle. The fourth truth is the actual path to freedom that is built on the awareness that we have the capability to be mindful in the face suffering and to choose to be an ethical vegan. This is the path to becoming a fully awakened Buddha.

  Taking a 30-day vegan pledge as a path to becoming more ethical can help us transform and renew our mind. As we stop eating animal foods, more compassion arises and a sense of connectedness can be born in us. This is what is needed in today’s world—a greater sense of connectedness—and when we connect to all, we can bring about both inner harmony and world peace.

  References:

  1. Remembering Gelek Rimpoche, Lions Roar: https://www.lionsroar.com/remebering-gelek-rimpoche-tibetan-buddhist-teacher-and-author-1939-2017/

  2. T. Colin Campbell, “Casein Consumption,” February, 2010. http://nutritionstudies.org/casein-consumption/

  3. “Heart Disease Facts,” Centers for Disease Control, Underlying Cause of Death 1999-2013 on CDC WONDER Online Database, released 2015. https://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm

  4. See, for example, these documentary films: Forks Over Knives; Eating You Alive; Food Choices; and What the Health.

  5. “Livestock a major threat to environment,” FAO Newsroom, United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, November 2006. http://www.fao.org/Newsroom/en/news/2006/1000448/index.html

  6. Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang, “Livestock and Climate Change,” Worldwatch Institute. December 2009. http://www.worldwatch.org/node/6294

  7. Richard Oppenlander,“Freshwater Abuse and Loss: Where is it All Going?“ ” May 2013. https://www.forksoverknives.com/freshwater-abuse-and-loss-where-is-it-all-going/

  8. “Irrigation and Water Use,” U.S. Department of Agriculture, April 2018. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-practices-management/irrigation-water-use/

  9. “The Water Footprint of Food,” Grace Communications Foundation, 2018. http://www.gracelinks.org/1361/the-water-footprint-of-food

  10. “The Disappearing Rainforest,” http://www.savetheamazon.org/rainforeststats.htm

  11. John Roach, “Seafood May Be Gone by 2048, Study Says,” National Geographic News,November2006. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/11/061102-seafood-threat.html

  12. “Meat-eater’s Guide to Climate Change and Health,” Environmental Working Group, 2011. http://static.ewg.org/reports/2011/meateaters/pdf/methodology_ewg_meat_eaters_guide_to_health_and_climate_2011.pdf

  13. John Robbins, “The Truth About Grass-fed Beef,” December 2012. https://foodrevolution.org/blog/the-truth-about-grassfed-beef/

  14. “10 Rainforest Facts for 2018,” Mongabay Rainforests. http://rainforests.mongabay.com/facts/rainforest-facts.html#8

  15. “Measuring the Daily Destruction of the World’s Rainforests,” EarthTalk, Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earth-talks-daily-destruction/

  16. “U.S. could feed 800 million people with grain that livestock eat, Cornell ecologist advises animal scientists,” Cornell Chronicle, August 1997. http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-million-people-grain-livestock-eat

  17. Robert Thurman, The Jewel Tree of Tibet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), p. 111.

  Born to this World a Bodhisattva

  ALAN DALE

  My childhood was full of animals. Our house in the country was surrounded by farms with animals and fields of wilderness with an abundance of wild animals. One of the few businesses in the area was a large wholesale pet supply company that had warehouses of just about every animal you could ever imagine that could be a pet. Both of my parents worked there. This place would occasionally discard live animals into the dumpster if they were deemed not sellable. Being a curious child, those thrown away beings would often end up rescued by me and taken home for care.

  When I was an infant, my mother would sit my highchair facing the large family aquarium and I would watch the various aquatic beings swimming about in the tank. This would go on for hours almost every day for a better part of my early life. Often my consciousness would eventually project itself into this wondrous world. What I mean by this is that the center point of my consciousness was no longer operating from the viewpoint of my body, but from the viewpoint of the various creatures swimming about in the water. I would become aware of the world through the senses of the fish, shrimp, eel, sea horse, or turtle.

  As I grew up and started walking on two feet I would use this same technique with other beings such as the cats, dogs, horses, chickens, cows, and goats. I also had a large menagerie of wild critters that I would catch in the nearby fields and countryside as temporary pets, eventually to be released back to the wild. I understood that there was not much difference between how I experienced the world versus how they experienced the world. The main difference was their viewpoint and their way of understanding.

  This projection of consciousness was, as I now understand, an aspect of a yogic process called samyama which is a combined simultaneous practice of dharana (concentration), dhyana (meditation) and samadhi (union). It is a term summarizing the combined process of psychological absorption in the object of meditation. It starts as a witness state leading to mindfulness, and then eventually leading to transcendence. These transcendent experiences started in my childhood and have continued to this day.

  These mystical episodes led me to explore and study comparative religions, various spiritual traditions, altered states of consciousness, and different yoga and meditation practices. This brought me eventually to a spiritual group in my teens called informally “the meeting of the mystics.” Here I met the poet Allen Ginsberg who then introduced me to Chogyam Trungpa, a meditation master and holder of the Kagyu and Nyingma lineages in Tibetan Buddhism. I became a disciple of Trungpa Rinpoche, and later became a lama in the Kagyu, Nyingma, and Gelug lineages. My teachers have included the Dalai Lama, Khensur Rinpoche, Choden Rinpoche, Garchen Rinpoche, and Chetsang Rinpoche.

  Not Killing Other Beings

  Butcher day on the farms were the most ominous and dreaded times of my early life. Oh, how I hated those days and would try to disappear and hide. In those times, farmers would often butcher and prepare the carcasses for the ice trucks to take to market. The day would be focused on a particular species, with chickens, cows, and pigs being the most common. Everyone on the farm would participate along with neighbors and nearby kinsfolk. Everyone young and old would be assigned a task, part of the assembly line of duties to be performed. Many of the tasks were repetitive and people would trade tasks to relieve the monotony.

  I remember the first time I was deemed old enough to participate in the butchery. It was chicken day and all the chickens were in stacks of wired cages waiting near the chopping block. I was first told to watch and learn how it was done. I could not believe the horror of what I was witnessing. I wondered why humans were so primitive, cruel and nonchalant about killing these poor chicken beings. It was just the day before that I was feeding and playing with these very same chickens. These chickens were joyful and innocent, and were my friends. Now these doomed chickens were meeting their end of life, cut short by the hunger o
f humans.

  After observing the madness for a while it was then my turn to chop the heads off the chickens with an axe. The axe was covered in blood and put into my shaking hands. First, I was tasked with a test run by chopping a thick twig in two. Then, one of the assistants grabbed a live chicken and held the body down on the chopping block with her neck exposed. The air was full of the overwhelming smell of wet feathers from the blood of prior deaths and everything repulsed me to the core of my being. Next to the chopping block was a basket of chopped off heads from the previous victims.

  When chickens are on the chopping block, they are not quiet. They often seemed to be pleading for their lives. When the axe falls, the head pops off and blood spurts everywhere. The head falls into the basket with the eyes still wide open and moving about. The beak is still moving but there are no more cries for help to be heard. The headless body is still very active and, if it gets away, it can run for a long distance.

  When my eye met the eye of the chicken on the death block with her body struggling, her sounds of panic, and her rapid breathing, my heart stopped and I felt the soul of the chicken. I instantly recognized that this was one of the chickens I was happily playing with the day before. I dropped the axe to my side and took off running like a bolt of lightening. I had no idea where I was running to but ended up in a nearby house where I hid until sun down. From that day forth, refraining from killing or harming other beings would be central to my spiritual practice.

  Meat as Addictive Poison

  My mother would often take me to doctors to determine the cause of my chronic childhood sickness. When doctors could not find a cause, they often labeled me as an overly sensitive child. Later in my teens one doctor made a discovery after getting some blood test results back from the lab. He was convinced that I was suffering from small doses of poison over time. He could not determine the type or cause of poisoning so he sent me to a blood specialist who had five doctorate degrees in fields relating to the study of blood.