Photo: Hartwig HKD
Vegetarianism in Buddhism: Competing Views on the Ethics of Consuming Animal Foods.
It is 5:45 in the morning, and in a Zen temple in
Kyoto 10 monks sit in two rows on a thatched rice floor facing each other, with the abbot of the temple at their head.
They chant a
sutra
which they recite before every meal, acknowledging the vast chain of
cause and effect that has made food available to them, vowing to use the
food offered as a medicine to sustain them in the quest for
enlightenment. The monks untie the cloth surrounding their
oryoki,
the three bowls from which all their meals are taken, and lay them down
on the low table, waiting for each bowl to be filled with rice gruel,
pickled plums, and ground sesame seeds. This is the first of three meals
for the day, none of which will contain meat. In the Zen tradition, a
specific type of vegetarian cuisine has been developed and refined since
the 13th century.
Across the city in a
Pure Land temple
a large group of ministers (as they prefer to be called) sits down in a
cafeteria in Western style chairs at tables, and after their own
pre-meal chant begin to eat a meal which includes fish, eggs, rice, and
seaweed.
Further west, in Burma, Thailand, and Laos, monks clad in orange and
maroon robes travel through the streets in a single file line, walking
with their alms bowls in hand past rows of lay devotees who fill the
receptacles with sticky rice, fruit, meat, and fish, which will be the
sole meal of the day for the monks. Within the world of
Buddhism
various sects hold constrain beliefs about eating, as well as differing
practices and degrees of ritual in the process of taking sustenance.
There are as many unique sets of beliefs about food in Buddhism as there
are nations and indigenous cultures where the religion has taken root,
and one of the main issues of complication in the western conception of
Buddhist eating habits is the indefinite status of meat as acceptable
fare. The heart of the fragmented beliefs about meat eating arises
mainly from the split between the two textual traditions of the
Theravada and
Mahayana and the contradicting teachings about
meat eating contained within them.
Buddhist monks recieving alms. Photo: Chadica
In terms of core doctrines, both the Theravada and Mahayana
traditions emphasize similar principles, and only with respect to a few
issues are clear-cut divisions really made. Both traditions use
five fundamental precepts
as the guiding principles for living a life in accord with the Buddha’s
teachings, which are: to refrain from taking life, to refrain from
theft, to refrain from harmful sexual relationships, to refrain from
lying, and to refrain from intoxicants. These precepts are all
applications of the greater principle of
ahimsa, or refraining from causing harm, which lies at the core of a Buddhist lifestyle. This principle is elaborated in the
Dhammapada when the Buddha proclaims that
“All
beings tremble before danger, all fear death. When a man considers
this, he does not kill or cause to kill. All beings fear before danger,
life is dear to all. When a man considers this, he does not kill or
cause to kill” (
Bodhipaksa, Vegetarianism). This very basic reasoning for the cultivation of empathy is the key to understanding Buddhist ethics. In his work
Vegetarianism,
Bodhipaksa asserts that
“Once
we understand that another being’s suffering is as real as ours, then
something shifts in our feeling and actions. With the arising of empathy
we become more ethical in our actions, and without empathy true ethics
are not possible” (
Vegetarianism, 43). The working of
empathy
is indeed the crux of ethics as the Buddhist worldview holds that all
forms of life are forever interconnected by chains of cause and effect.
This is how
karma
functions in that causing harm to another will eventually return to
another emanation of the being which initially caused the harm. It is
from this fear of sowing the seeds of one’s own suffering that Buddhism
aims to prevent individuals from harming any sentient being.
This principle, however, represents an ideal that is extraordinarily
difficult to employ in everyday life due to the myriad activities we
partake in which necessarily result in
death and destruction on
some level. Nevertheless the ideal of remaining completely free from
the stain of harming others is maintained, and it is in the hopes of
better fulfilling this goal that some forms of Buddhism have developed
restrictions against eating meat. There are a number of
sutras in both textual traditions of Buddhism that pertain to meat eating. It is uncertain exactly who wrote these
sutras,
and indeed they were written down no earlier than five-hundred years
after the death of the Buddha who sowed the seeds of the teachings .
While memorization and oral repetition of the
sutras were
primary practices of early devotees, it is only logical to assume that
over 500 years certain central tenets and concepts were changed, erased,
and even made up, as per changes in the social order in regions where
the religion expanded, as well as the changing beliefs of practitioners (
Compassion,
59-60). Nevertheless, these changes exist in both sets of scripture
which were largely composed concurrently. Therefore both must be taken
for what they are: attempted approximations of the
Buddha’s teachings
that, despite changes by authors, represent the only available insight
into the man’s actual words. With this disclaimer it is possible to
begin a thorough textual analysis of the Buddha’s varying attitudes
toward the consumption of meat, beginning with the Mahayana
sutras.
The longest exposition of reasons against eating meat is presented in the
Lankavatara Sutra
in which the Buddha responds to a request from his disciple Mahamati to
explain why meat should not be eaten. Upon this request the Buddha
replies:
Mahamati, a loving and compassionate bodhisattva should
not eat meat. It is not easy…to come upon a being who, in the endless
ages of samsara, has not been once your father or your mother, your
brother or your sister, your son or your daughter, kinsman, friend, or
close companion. Your kith and kin in one existence, they have donned a
different shape in later lives…Since Bodhisattvas look upon all
beings…as their dearest children, they must shy away from every type of
meat. (qtd. in Shabkar,Food, 48-49)
This passage highlights the
interconnectedness
of all beings as a primary reason for abstinence from meat. However,
the notion that a being that is an animal in this life was a close
friend or relative of yours in a past life seems to go against the
Buddhist doctrine of
anatman,
or the refutation of an essential or eternally existing self. It is
implied in the above passage that some aspect of consciousness of the
past being is present in the current life form, yet to make this conform
with the doctrine of
anatman it is necessary to view this not
as the reproduction of a consciousness in a different body. Rather it
should be interpreted that in the unlimited time of suffering and
rebirth all beings at some point have an intimate connection with
another, and due to this the view that beings are separate entities with
no relation or obligation to each other is false. Therefore the
practice of seeing your child in the face of animals is a tool for
awakening compassion toward beings that one would not otherwise feel a
particular connection to. Through this basic level of
empathy, the Buddha argues, one becomes so averse to the notion of consuming meat as to finds
repulsive.
Vegetarian meal from Sanchon Temple, Insadong. Photo: Julie Facine
Having bidden the audience to abstain from meat the
Buddha
then elaborated upon what could be eaten by his disciples to show the
vast array of food that was still available for consumption. In laying
out what can be consumed he brings up the problem of future
interpretation of the monastic code he dictates, stating:
For my disciples, I prescribe a fitting nourishment: rice
and barley, wheat and peas, every kind of bean and lentil, butter, oil,
honey, treacle, fruits, and sugar cane. I do this, Mahamati, because
the time will come when fools whose minds are busy with speculation will
chatter about the Vinaya. And strong in their desire for meat due to
habit, the will say that flesh is wholesome fare. (Shabkar,Food )
The acknowledgement that future disputes will arise out of interpretation of the
vinaya,
or the monastic regulations, is telling of the Buddha’s great foresight
(as such disputes still occur today), but raises the question of why he
left the regulations unclear before his death. While this passage
attempts to clarify his policy on
animal foods, which it does with regard to meat eating, it also poses a problem by advancing a
teaching conflicting with another on the acceptability of a variety of animal foods. In this
sutra he stipulates some animal foods as acceptable fare, whereas in the
Surangama Sutra he declares:
How can a bhikkshu, who hopes to become a deliverer of
others, himself be living on the flesh of other sentient beings? Pure
and earnest bhikksus, if they are earnest and sincere, will never wear
clothing made of silk, nor wear boots of leather, because it involves
the taking of life. Neither will they indulge on cheese, because thereby
they are depriving the young animals of that which rightly belongs to
them. (Phelps, Compassion)
Here the Buddha takes the principle of
ahimsa to the ideological extreme that
vegans
today promote, in admonishing the consumption or use any products that
rob animals of life, liberty, or nourishment. While in the
Lankavatara Sutra he expressly names honey and butter are noted as wholesome foods, the
Surangama Sutra
directly contradicts it by implying that no substance obtained from an
animal may be consumed or worn by his disciples. Both honey and milk are
foods meant for the nourishment of their own kind and therefore the
theft of these substances by humans results in either the malnourishment
or deaths of animals, and thus
ahimsa is
violated. This far-reaching declaration that all attire and food in any
way derived from animals is prohibited would certainly complicate life
for many lay and monastic practitioners, and this tension will be
reexamined below.
In the Theravada tradition there is only one primary text in which
the Buddha tolerates his disciples eating meat, and in it he condones it
so long as the meat has been placed in the alms bowl of a monk and
three conditions are met. In the
Jivaka Sutta the Buddha says of meat:
“And
in three cases I allow it – if there is no evidence either of your eyes
or of your ears and if there be no grounds of suspicion that the living
being was killed for oneself” (
Kapleau, Cherish).
Here the Buddha’s logic is that if a monk partakes in meat it is not
necessarily his fault that the animal was killed because supposedly it
would have been killed anyways; the monk receives the meat by chance,
and whether the meat was given to him or eaten by the lay person
offering it the animal would have been killed anyways. This reasoning is
quite similar to the argument that lay people use to justify purchasing
meat from a market, claiming that they had no role in the animal’s
death, they just happened to purchase it.
Photo: Mark Crossfield
Both of these attempts to shift the blame to the butcher are wrong because they do not take into account the root cause of the
animal’s slaughter.
It is the intent to feed human beings flesh that leads to the death of
the animal, and that intent is usually agnostic to the end-consumer.
Therefore both monks who receive meat as alms as well as lay people who
purchase meat from the market sanction and contribute to the death of
the animal they eat by the very act of accepting that meat as
wholesome food.
Despite the flaw in this logic it still stands today as the
justification used by Theravada monks for their acceptance of meat on
their alms rounds.
The issue of meat placed in an alms bowl, which meets the criterion
of not having been slaughtered specifically for a monk, is brought up in
the
Mahaparinirvana Sutra, a Mahayana teaching
in which the Buddha is asked by Kashyapa if he allows the consumption of meat. The Buddha replies that meat eating
“destroys the attitude of great compassion,”
to which Kashyapa responds by asking if the Buddha had allowed meat
that was not slaughtered specifically for oneself. The Buddha replies
that:
I…established rules of discipline in relation to specific
individuals. Consequently, with a certain purpose in mind, I did give
permission to eat meat regarded as suitable for consumption after it has
been subjected to the threefold examination. In other contexts I have
proscribed ten kinds of meat. And yet again, with someone else in mind, I
have declared that it is improper to consume meat of any kind, even of
animals that have died of natural causes. But I have affirmed, O
Kashyapa, that henceforth, all those who are close to me should abstain
from meat. (Shabkar, Food)
Here the
Buddha
admits to having a shifting scale of ethics that he prescribes to
various individuals, saying that the cases in which he allows certain
kinds of meat to be eaten were tailored in order to aid an individual in
overcoming their addiction to meat. Yet his final sentence in this
passage affirms that from that point on he denounces all meat eating.
The contrast between this attitude and that of hear no evil, see no
evil, do no evil expressed in the
Jivaka Sutta shows that the Buddha most likely had changed his mind on this rule, as he often did regarding monastic codes (
Phelps, Compassion).
In light of these opposing viewpoints, however, it is only reasonable
to err on the side of non-harm as this would certainly be most in line
with the majority of the Buddha’s teachings on
compassion and the interconnectedness of all phenomena.
It is now necessary to return to the Buddha’s sentiment toward abstinence from all animal byproducts expressed in the
Surangama Sutra.
As was mentioned earlier the encouragement to refrain from the
consumption of all products derived from animals would indeed be the
practice that is closest to the ideal of
ahimsa, but this
stipulation brings with it great difficulties for practitioners in all
geographical regions, especially so in the Himalayan regions of Tibet,
India, and Nepal. As most crops cannot be cultivated at elevations
higher than 12,000 feet, animals and their byproducts are absolutely
necessary in order to sustain life there (
Shabkar, Food).
Even if these practitioners believe strongly enough in the Mahayana
Buddhist teachings that are the pillars of their societies, to abstain
from the consumption of an animal’s flesh and their milk would result in
serious issues of malnutrition. In the composition
Food of the Bodhisattvas: Buddhist Teachings on Abstaining from Meat, translated and published by the Padmakara Translation Group, it is affirmed that there are indeed vegetarian lamas in
Tibet who eat only the “three white foods” which are yak milk, yak butter, and
tsampa, a bread made from barley flour (
Shabkar, Food).
In this context the consumption of yak butter and yak milk by humans
clearly robs the yak’s offspring of these foods, and therefore goes
against the principle elaborated in the
Surangama Sutra.
Yet these are the only alternatives to animal flesh and without them
severe health problems would develop in more austere devotees. This
issue hints at the existence of a hierarchical structure of foods in
Buddhism in which some animal foods are worse to eat than others.
Prayer flags in Tibet. Photo: Desmond Kavanagh
The view that some types of animal foods are more laden with negative
karma than others appears in a number of regions. In Tibetan texts it is mentioned in the tantra of
The Compassionate One, Churning the Depths of Samsara, from a tantric form of Buddhism practiced only in parts of the Himalayas. The text says:
Actions motivated by stupidity are performed if one
drinks blood…A greater defilement comes from eating even a small
fragment of meat than from drinking alcohol. It is a greater evil to
drink one drop of the blood of an animal killed by oneself than to eat
meat for a hundred years the flesh of animals killed by others. (Shabkar, Food)
This passage begins the highly technical and entirely subjective
process of detailing exactly what the negative consequences of eating
certain foods are, and reveals the opacity of
Buddhist ethics
as applied to food. Yet this process performs a necessary role for
Buddhist practitioners by allowing them to make excuses as to why some
forms or life are less harmful to eat than others, however arbitrary or
obtuse the reasoning behind these justifications may be.
Out of this psychological need to classify beings according to the
value of their lives large and elaborate hierarchies of foods that are
shunned have been created that vary according to region.
Yudru Tsomu,
a doctoral candidate of Tibetan Studies at Harvard, is originally from
Tibet and is lay Buddhist practitioner. When asked about meat eating in
Tibet, she remembers of her time there that:
My grandmother would never eat fish, shrimp, insects, or
chickens when they were available. Only rarely would she eat the meat of
larger animals like a cow or yak, claiming that this was not so bad
because these animals could feed with its one life many more people than
could hundreds of fish or hundreds of thousands of insects. Even so,
after eating the meat she would pray for the animal to obtain a better
birth in the future.
Whether this view was inculcated by the Buddhist teachers whom
Yudru’s grandmother received instruction from, or whether it was a
creation of her own logic is unclear. In either case it is clear that
the sentiment is motivated by the principle of
ahimsa, and in
this example the logic on which the hierarchy of shunned foods is based
seems quite clear – large animals are better to eat because they can
feed many more people, and therefore net destruction of life is reduced.
Beyond Tibet the hierarchical demarcation of animal foods appears in
Sri Lanka, albeit in a more obtuse form, where:
…Animals [have] different degrees of value. For example,
beef was the worst to eat, meat itself was worse than fish, and eggs
were also worse than fish but not as bad as meat. There was also a
general hierarchy based on the size, value and apparent closeness to
humans of the animal in question. (Kembel, Restrictions)
The stigma of different foods in this instance has little to no
correlation with the amount of lives being expended which the Tibetan
example displayed. While this example claims that the hierarchy is
affected by a number of factors these factors seem unwieldy in their
application to the relationships in this example. For instance how could
an
egg
(which does not necessarily result in the death of an animal) be
considered worse to eat than a fish? This demonstrates the unique
criteria and logic that each culture brings to its food discriminations
which transcend any rigid set of rules as no authoritative textual
elaboration seems to exist.
Thus far it has been shown that the main tradition of Buddhism which
seems to be indifferent to meat eating is the Theravada tradition, yet
in Japan there is a regional sect from that Mahayana tradition that
practically
embraces meat.
When in Kyoto I stayed at the headquarters of the Nishi-Hongwanji Ha,
one of the two main temples of the Japanese Pure Land Sect, for a five
day retreat. I had assumed, wrongly, that all traditions of Japanese
Buddhism adhered to a vegetarian diet, but at the first meal I attended
at the temple it was clear that this was not the case. However, after
informing the cooking staff that I was
vegetarian
they were more than happy to provide me with meatless dishes, although
on a few occasions I was served a pounded fishcake indicating that they
were unaware that I considered fish to be a meat. The reason that the
sect rejects a vegetarian diet is based on the main philosophy of the
school. Its tenets are characterized by the sect’s founder Shinran is
his work
True Teaching, Practice, and Realization of the Pure Land Way, in which he declares that:
Thoughts of greed and desire incessantly defile any
goodness of the heart; thoughts of anger and hatred constantly consume
the Dharma-Treasure. Even if one urgently acts and urgently practices as
though sweeping fire from one’s head, all these acts must be called
“poisoned and sundry good,” and “false and deceitful practice.” They
cannot be called “true and real action.” (Shinran)
Wat in Mae Hong Son, Thailand Photo: onourownpath.com
This interpretation posits that human beings are inherently evil and are products of
karma
from past lives. As wretched beings it is therefore impossible to
commit any form of good deed in this existence, and due to this the Pure
Land sect rejects any precepts or attempts to guide the morality of its
adherents. Therefore the principle of
ahimsa could not be less important to them, and as such they reject that any good could come of
abstaining from meat. While in this instance there is a textual and doctrinal justification ignoring the principle of
ahimsa, there are other anecdotes about Japanese Buddhism that suggests that meat eating is tacitly condoned.
When visiting Eiheiji, the head temple of the
Soto Zen
sect in Japan, my professor told me a story about his time at the
temple. He had trained as a monk at Eiheiji for two years, and one day
he was asked to deliver a message to one of his teachers who was in a
nearby town. His teacher was at a meeting of all the heads of temples
from the area, and when he entered the building where the meeting took
place he was astonished to see thirty abbots of
Zen temples,
each dining on a large beef steak. The abbots were stunned to see a
foreigner walk in and were quite embarrassed that they had been caught
in the act of eating meat. Also, feeling bad for the new arrival who had
missed lunch to deliver the message, they each cut a portion off of
their steak and passed them to him, asking him politely to refrain from
mentioning the incident to his peers. On another occasion in a Zen
monastery I was presented with a meal of soup and in addition to the
soup a fish based sauce was passed around with it, with a warning given
to
vegetarians
in the room that it was derived from fish. These incidents demonstrate
that even within sects that follow Mahayana traditions of abstaining
from meat there is a lax attitude toward actually dedicating oneself to
the principle of
ahimsa. Meat eating is such a culturally
ingrained phenomenon that many either do not consider the effects that
their consumption has on animals, or they simply do not care.
It is evident that in many parts of the Buddhist world vegetarianism
is the ideal means of sustaining oneself. However, both lay and monastic
Buddhist devotees seem to be largely unable to maintain such a diet, in
some cases due to lack of adequate vegetarian foods, and in others due
to a strong preference for meat foods. As time goes on and new debates
about Buddhist ethics continue this attitude may or may not be changed,
but an interesting phenomenon is the rise of Buddhism in the western
world where
vegetarianism as a part of
ahimsa
seems to be slightly more accepted and encouraged. Indeed in many Zen
temples in the United States strict vegetarian diets seem to be the
norm, and
vegan options are often provided for those who desire to take
ahimsa
to its logical conclusion (Schneider). As a dialogue grows between
Buddhist communities in the east and west an interesting exchange if
ideas on ethics is sure to occur, and through this there remains some
hope that at the very least a universal understanding of the application
of
ahimsa through a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle will be
reached. Nevertheless it remains unlikely that the extensive changes
needed to make abstinence from animal foods the norm will occur.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
After
graduating from school in January of 2009 from Harvard University with
an AB in the Comparative Study of Religion I moved back home to the
San Francisco Bay Area and worked in a variety of trades from college
test preparation to coaching a high school rowing team. I later
co-founded and spent a year working as the Director of Logistics and
Operations for Quetsol S.A., a micro-scale solar company in Guatemala
aiming to provide 500,000 families without electricity with access to
LED illumination and cell phone charging systems. I also served as a
consultant for Core Foods which produces an organic, whole food meal
replacement bar called the Core Meal, now available in Whole Foods and
Costco in the Bay Area. The path of spirituality kept calling me and so I
earned RYT – 200 Yoga Teacher certification at the end of February
2010, which I did through Laura Camp’s Camp Yoga at the Monkey Yoga
Shala in Oakland. After moving to Guatemala I continued to pursue the
path of sharing yoga with others and earned RYT-500 hour certification
in July 2010 with Vedantin Ping Luo
of
School
Yoga Institute in San Marcos la Laguna, Guatemala. I was blessed to
live and teach/facilitate two yoga teacher trainings in Guatemala on
Lago de Atitlán from July-December of 2010 where I began studying
ayurveda, herbalism, Sanksrit language, Mayan cosmology, and shamanic
energy healing with Vedantin and Mayan Elder Tata Pedro Cruz as well as
through personal study. I have now returned to the San Francisco Bay
Area and my mission is to share my experience in entrepreneurship,
business, yoga, meditation, ayurveda, shamanic energy healing, and
Buddhist studies with businesses, start-ups, NGOs, and yoga studios
around the Bay.
After a few grim head shakes, he let me know the right answer was, I will be taking a vacation. He went as far as to mention the b word
next, saying, and I quote, “If it’s not a vacation then you could be
lying on the beach reading and making a bomb.” (I swear, this is a true
story).
Being
childless by choice, I’ve faced questions, accusations, controversy,
and envy. Those who choose not to be parents have many different
reasons, all very personal.
