by Will Tuttle
—Buddha Shakyamuni, Brahmajala Sutra
In an attempt to justify their appetite for the flesh and blood of animals, some individuals allege that (1) the Buddha permitted the consumption of meat under three conditions, (2) vegetarians are “the sons of the infamous Devadatta”, and (3) the Buddha himself ate meat. These are patently specious claims.
The Pali text of the Jivaka Sutta, the putative source of the infamous ‘three purities’ argument, states:
I say that there are three instances in which meat should not be eaten: when it is seen, heard, or suspected. I say that meat should not be eaten in those three instances.
I say that there are three instances in which meat may be eaten: when it is not seen, not heard, and not suspected. I say that meat may be eaten in these three instances.
Clearly, the Buddha is stipulating here that if a monk inadvertently consumes meat that has been placed in his begging bowl, he is not at fault. His action is pure. However, if he sees, hears, or even suspects that there is animal flesh in his bowl, he must not eat it.
Later commentators calculatingly inserted the phrase “that the living being has been slaughtered for oneself ” after each repetition of the word ‘suspected.’ The phrase does not appear in the original Pali text. It is a spurious addition, making it seem as if the Buddha allowed his monks to eat meat when the animal was not expressly killed to feed them, or at least when they did not see, hear, or suspect it.
This interpolation is linguistically unwarranted. More importantly, it contradicts the unequivocal teaching of the Buddha on the matter. The Buddha gives extensive arguments against meat-eating in the Angulimaliya Sutra, Nirvana Sutra, Karma Sutra, Shurangama Sutra, Mahamegha Sutra, Lankavatara Sutra, Mahaparinirvana Sutra, and others.
In the Brahmajala Sutra, the Buddha Shakyamuni clearly exhorts his followers to adopt strict adherence to non-harming:
Should you willingly and knowingly eat flesh, you defile yourselves.
Pray, let us not consume any flesh or whatsoever comes from sentient beings.
In order to preserve a counterfeit harmony, some persons hold that the Buddha instructed us to be silent in the face of blatant misrepresentations of the Dharma, such as this deceptive reasoning of those who pretend that the cruel enslavement, exploitation, and slaughter of animals is approved by the Buddha if we “do not see, hear, or suspect” that the animals were killed expressly for our sake.
Such persons place the temporary emotional discomfort of their ‘Dharma teachers’ and sangha peers over the unspeakable suffering of non-human animals. This complicit timidity is contrary to the Dharma.
The Buddha said in the Middle Length Discourses:
Such speech as the Tathagata knows to be true, correct, and beneficial, even if unwelcome and disagreeable to others, the Tathagata knows the time to use such speech.
...
Why is that? Because the Tathagata has compassion for all beings.
Another tired and tiresome argument trotted out insistently by those who would misrepresent the Dharma to justify their lust for flesh and blood is the refusal of the Buddha Shakyamuni to accept the so-called “Five Rules of Devadatta.”
The five rules proposed by Devadatta were that monks reside only in the forest, that they depend exclusively on begging, that robes be made from discarded rags, that they dwell under trees, and that they abstain from eating flesh.
These rules were meant to convey the appearance that Devadatta was more austere than the Buddha Shakyamuni, and therefore a more apt leader for the Sangha. In the Cullavagga Sutta, chapter 7, where Devadatta’s intentions are made explicitly clear, Devadatta says to one of his co-conspirators: “It is possible with these five items to make a schism in the recluse Gautama’s Order, a breaking of the concord. For, your reverence, people esteem austerity.”
There are three reasons why the Buddha rejected Devadatta’s “five rules” and none had to do with the merits of the proposal on abstaining from flesh:
1. Devadatta’s concerns were not ethical; they were strictly political. His intention was to split the Sangha and advance his craving for fame and power.
2. The rules of the Vinaya were developed progressively, and always in response to specific doubts or conflicts. They were never issued a priori.
3. The rule concerning the consumption of flesh was redundant, as it was already covered in the very first of the Five Precepts, as well as in innumerable injunctions.
Perhaps the most infamous of all justifications for flesh consumption is the claim that the Buddha ate meat, and that he died from eating contaminated pork. The term used in the (Pali) Mahaparinibbana Sutta to describe the dish that was served to the Buddha at his last meal is sukara-maddava, which literally means “pig’s delight,” a clear reference to a type of mushroom that pigs are keen to eat. The Pali term for pig meat is sukara-mamsa.
Carolyn Rhys-Davids, who served from 1923 to 1942 as president of the Pali Text Society, clearly noted the faulty translation more than seven decades ago, but proponents of carnivorism still trot out this fallacy today. Unless one is grossly ignorant of the Pali language, or is willfully misleading others, it is impossible to assert that “pigs’ delight” means “pork meat,” as if the Buddha had ordered a fanciful dish at a modern Chinese-American restaurant.
Let a person not give credence to the many rationalizations given to justify animal flesh eating. What word-jugglers say under the influence of their addictive craving for animal flesh is sophistic, delusional, and argumentative.
—Buddha Shakyamuni, Mahaparinirvana Sutra
If these words have made you uncomfortable, please ask yourself why. I humbly stand before you, as the Buddha instructed, trembling with compassion for you and for all sentient beings.
CONCLUSION
The Beckoning Path
Will Tuttle
“Flesh free from the three objections, not prepared, unasked, unsolicited, there is none. Therefore one should not eat flesh.”
—Arya Shantideva
Although we are now at the end of our literary journey together, we are also in the beginning stages of contributing to a more mutually-inspiring relationship between veganism and Buddhism. Like most religions, Buddhism is a system of teachings aiming to assist its adherents to evolve spiritually. The underlying idea is that as we cultivate our awareness and awaken spiritually, we naturally help to bring healing and harmony not just to ourselves, but also to our society. Spirituality transcends the particularities of religion, history, and culture, and addresses the dimension of ourselves that is consciousness, and that is not essentially separate from other beings. Spiritual awareness, whatever the religious or non-religious trappings may be, naturally gives rise to compassion for others, including animals, and also to ethical behavior because it’s the lived realization that beings are not merely material objects, but are conscious and sentient manifestations of life inherently deserving of respect.
Animal agriculture is the antithesis of spirituality. It reduces beings to the status of harvestable commodities, stealing their sovereignty through routine sexual abuse, mutilation, and death. This destroys not just their lives, purposes, and happiness, but undermines ours as well. It fosters a desensitized awareness focused on separateness, denial, entitlement, competition, and consumerism. Our freedom is eroded by enslaving animals. Herderism, the core organizing principle of our society for the past ten thousand years, suppresses spiritual awareness in individuals and in our cultural institutions, including our religious institutions. Through acculturation, this has become invisible to us.
When we have religious teachings, practices, and teachers that do not question animal agriculture and eating animal-sourced foods, we have religions that lack spirituality and that tend, ironically, to reduce spiritual awareness in individuals and society as a whole, while contributing to delusion, injustice, and war. The four core practices of animal agriculture are mentally reducing beings to mere material objects; enslaving them from birth to
death; sexually abusing them and stealing their offspring; and pre-meditatively killing all of them. On every level—physically, cognitively, emotionally, sexually, spiritually, culturally, and ethically—animal agriculture undermines our sensitivity and awareness, and promotes materialism and the exploitation of the weak by the strong. The fact that it is so wide-spread, deeply-rooted, and generally accepted makes its relentlessly devastating effects virtually untrackable to their source, even to those of us who consider ourselves to be spiritually oriented.
Because all of us have been raised in a culture organized at its core around herding animals for food, we have been wounded from birth by the medical, educational, religious, familial, economic, and governmental institutions compelling us to participate in animal agriculture. When we eat animal foods, we are not only harming our physical health. We are also eating attitudes that reduce our psychological, cultural, and spiritual wellness. Food is our most intimate connection with nature and with our culture, and being required from infancy to eat foods of terror and toxicity suppresses our innate wisdom and sense of connectedness with the other intriguing and beautiful expressions of life on this Earth. Herderism, because it requires and ritually indoctrinates both desensitization and disconnectedness, reduces our capacities to care, feel, and make connections, eroding our ability to understand the cause of suffering.
We have been told from childhood that hot dogs, hamburgers, cheese, eggs, and fish sticks are our tasty friends, giving us needed protein, calcium, and other health benefits, and that ranching and fishing are natural and noble activities that help to feed us and keep our world healthy. Fortunately, we are waking up from this erroneous narrative and realizing that our friendly foods, and the industries based on animal exploitation, are actually our deadliest enemies, as cows, pigs, and chickens have certainly long realized. They harm every dimension of our health relentlessly, but this reality—and our capacity to awaken and understand it—is suppressed by all our social institutions.
Religion is the social institution that is perhaps best suited to upholding ethical standards and demanding protection of the weak, but it is also the most divided and compromised by two competing loyalties. It has a mission to support and transmit the prevailing cultural norms and values from generation to generation, but it also has a second mission, which is to encourage the spiritual impulse in people. Spirituality, however, has no such divided loyalty, and propels us only to discover our true nature, even if it means questioning cultural narratives and norms. Spirituality easily recognizes the pig in the bacon, the cow in the cheese, and the injustice and trauma that we are causing by eating these foods and feeding them to our children. Spirituality categorically rejects this unnecessary violence and calls for an awakening from the abusive behavior as well as from the underlying materialism and reductionism that enable and inform animal agriculture.
This is the great tension between spirituality and religion. Spirituality can never condone the culturally-approved practices of animal exploitation and abuse for food, clothing, entertainment, research, or any purpose because it is rooted in respecting the interconnectedness and unity of life and consciousness. It is not concerned, as religion is, with supporting the existing cultural traditions and values. Spirituality includes animals because they are endowed with sentience as we humans are. Thus, teachers and teachings are fully spiritual when they explicitly renounce all forms of animal agriculture, animal-sourced foods and products, and other forms of animal abuse. There may be religious teachers who do not question animal agriculture because their primary aim is to maintain the prevailing cultural narratives, be popular and be financially successful. However, as soon as spirituality comes into play, materialism and practices of exploitation are vigorously questioned and abandoned, and replaced by teachings that cultivate respect, kindness, and freedom for all.
Buddhism seems to have begun as a fully spiritual teaching in this sense, questioning injustice and violence, and helped shift the ancient Indian culture away from the practice of animal sacrifice and toward vegan living based on respect for all. This may have been somewhat easier at that time because Indian cuisine was more organized around plant-based foods then, except for the practice, apparently brought by ancient immigrants from Egypt and central Asia, of exploiting cows for their milk. When Buddhism later spread to east Asian countries like China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, which had no tradition of using cows for milk, the Buddhist teachings and teachers evolved to explicitly encourage vegan living, a practice continuing to this day.
Buddhism, rooted as it is in ahimsa, has thus been an often hidden thread in the centuries-old tapestry of vegetarianism and veganism as they have evolved throughout the world to the present day. As the authors in this volume have demonstrated and discussed, both Buddhism and veganism are living, transformational forces in peoples’ lives. The gift that veganism brings is the insistence on practicing ahimsa in daily life by explicitly including animals within our sphere of mindful caring and kindness. However, veganism lacks a foundation in cultivating deeper awareness, inner stillness and receptivity. As vegans, we can fall prey to despair and anger because of our unique and still unaccepted orientation, and may become mired in depression, anger, or alienation, or in blaming, shaming, and criticizing behaviors that are harmful to us and to our cause. Buddhism brings the gift of mindfulness and the cultivation of meditative awareness, and though Buddhism has a strong foundation in ahimsa, this has been watered down in many cases due to the usual influences of corruption, convenience, conformism, fear, hubris, taste, ambition, hypocrisy, and sloth. Just as vegan practice can bring an essential clarity and accountability to Buddhist practice, Buddhist practice can bring depth, mindfulness, and resilience to vegan practice. Together, they can contribute to co-creating a more comprehensive framework for both personal and social transformation.
For example, a primary danger for Buddhist practitioners is sometimes referred to as “Zen sickness,” which is a dull, pseudo-serenity in which our routinized meditation and way of thinking keep us stuck in a detached, enforced calmness. Buddhist practice calls us to an awakening out of any enforced mental state to full aliveness and responsiveness in the moment-to-moment awareness of our lives. Eating animal foods dulls our sensitivities. Mindful vegan living can help reconnect us with the purity, passion, joy, and aliveness that our cultural wounds have repressed, and reconnect us with the compassion and awareness that have been covered over by years of indoctrination in narratives of repression.
On the other hand, even as veganism continues to grow, some of us try to justify eating animal foods because we tell ourselves we are bringing the Buddhist practice of mindfulness to our non-vegan meals. Not far from where we live in northern California, for example, there’s a local slaughter facility advertising that it provides “mindful meats.” This humane-washing and co-opting of Buddhist terms and ideas is readily apparent. We would never consider promoting mindful raping, mindful stealing, mindful harming, and so forth, because mindfulness is the antithesis of these behaviors. Mindfulness is the cultivation of awareness, and to willfully abuse others requires that our awareness be submerged beneath a distorting narrative that rationalizes toxic attitudes and behavior. Buddhist practice is an effort to liberate our minds from the narratives that hold us in delusion and cause violence. Veganism is clearly a helpful ally in this effort.
The world’s religions promote the Golden Rule of ahimsa, and yet virtually all of them, even Buddhism and Jainism that seem to champion it, continue to be hijacked into justifying violence toward animals by the pervasive and prevailing demands of animal agriculture as the core organizing principle of our planetary culture. As we as individuals make efforts to awaken from the cultural trance of herderism and routinized animal abuse, our transformation is our contribution to our collective transformation, helping our spiritual and religious communities reclaim their authentic foundations. We liberate animals from the violence of “mindful meats” and liberate Buddhism from this violen
ce to its teachings as well, freeing it to illuminate and inspire compassion and liberation for all as originally intended.
We live in challenging times. Animal agriculture continues to devastate our Earth’s ecosystems, our culture’s harmony and sanity, and our physical health. More insidiously, it also erodes our cultural and personal intelligence, and our awareness, empathy, and creativity. Our short-term future is in question at this point. It’s well understood that we could go extinct soon, without, ironically, ever understanding why it happened. The vegan dimensions of many traditions of wisdom, including Buddhism, have been repressed for too long under the strident din of animal agriculture’s narrative of domination, greed, and elitism.
Nevertheless, by opening our eyes and looking deeply, we can discern a bright and beckoning path that leads to a doorway into a positive future. Increasing numbers of us are being called to this path and are calling others to join us. There is nothing objectively stopping us from collectively proceeding along this bright path to new dimensions of peace, abundance, and freedom. Fear, delusion, attachment, and conformism are the primary obstacles.
As mentioned in this book’s introduction, virtually all traditions of Buddhism (and of most religions as well) are open to becoming more explicit about the essential importance that a commitment to respect and kindness for animals has in their teachings. Each of us can contribute in our unique way to this opening of awareness about the universality and primacy of the vegan message. We are called to more fully embody the values of kindness in the crucible of our relationships, with all kinds of animals, including the most difficult ones, humans. It is through congruence and transparency that living truths are transmitted.
The Earth we inhabit is beautiful and abundant, and can easily feed and support all of us. When we awaken from the consumerist trance of animal agriculture, the land and waters will heal, along with our minds, bodies, relationships, and communities. This is the vision of engaged and caring awareness and action implicit in Buddhism and veganism. Buddhist teachings call for vegan living, and vegan living calls for the same awakening from deluded narratives toward which Buddhist practice aims. May we succeed in our efforts to bring awakening to ourselves and our world, for the benefit of all beings.