the great vegetarian debate

[Nighthawk]

Oh God now shitty pop psychology? I didn't realize the Dharma was full of such judgmental dogmatic followers. Honestly I think I am done with this board with nutters going on about conspiracies and passive-aggressive pseudo-psychology I have had about my fill. Honestly some of you people are utterly unbelievable. At least it has shown me that the same judgmental people who annoyed me in Fundamentalist Christianity are alive and well in Buddhism too. Maybe Buddhism isn't for me afterall since I'm not a judgmental prick. Thanks for the "enlightening" responses and general douchebaggery.

Even the well educated are fools suffering from delusions, passions, attachment to views etc.

Being Buddhist does not make one automatically enlightened.

[Malcolm]

Butcher ---> Purchaser = bad karma
Butcher ---> Market ---> Purchaser = no problem

The argument is, and it is the Buddha's argument, recall, that meat that was not slaughtered for you specifically, that you have not seen slaughtered, and did not request slaughtered is pure. In case someone feels this is merely a Hinayāna argument, let me also remind you that the Madhyamaka author Bhavaviveka also follows the same argument. Shantideva of course is well known for arguing against meat eating.

While it is true that the lower tantras instruct us that to be vegetarian -- tantras like Hevajra instruct us in the opposite fashion.

So, again, it all depends on what you personally want to practice.

I am a Dzogchen Community practitioner, therefore I practice according to that tradition. I believe that refusing to eat meat is a refusal to extend one's compassion.

In the end, we are all food. Get used to it.

N

[PadmaVonSamba]

No, your argument is that as long as there is a middle man between you and the butcher your hands are clean, that is nonsense.
Butcher ---> Purchaser = bad karma
Butcher ---> Market ---> Purchaser = no problem

Okay, what about this?

practitioner----> pays taxes to maintain highway----> meat truck depends on highway to deliver meat----> practitioner gets bad karma

In a completely interconnected existence, how many degrees of separation are needed before you are free of bad karma?
It's ridiculous.

If you kill an animal directly, you begin the process of separation (of the elements of the body and of the "consciousness" of the animal from those combined elements). That's the point. After an animal has been killed, where is the 'self' of that animal? In the muscle? in the bone? in the shank or shoulder?

It is only the mistaken view of the animal that causes the experience of its existence and thus the pain it suffers from clinging to the elements of the physical body.
Once the physical body begins separation, the mind may still cling to it for a short time.

But when you buy meat at the meat store, whatever "being" once lived in that meat already moved out of that house long ago. There is no karma from buying or eating this meat, except the karma of one's own "self" preservation.

The fact that buying meat keeps the butcher industry going is an important consideration, but is a totally different problem.
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[Bhusuku]

The Hevajra tantra states however "Those who eat meat have compassion."

I'm not very interested in entering this 80-page debate, but I'm curious about one thing: I've seen this quote from the Hevajratantra quite often when it comes to discussions like this one, however, I've always seen only this particular quote from this particular tantra, which leads me to the question if the Hevajratantra is the only one with this perspective on eating meat. It would be interesting to know how many (higher) tantras are in favor of eating meat (of course in the context of nutrition, and not ganapujas, etc.) versus the number of tantras that speak out against eating meat.

And are there any references on this subject in Dzogchen tantras? I'm curious about this because I find it a little strange that two of the greatest living Dzogchen masters - Norbu Rinpoche & Chatral Rinpoche - seem to have conflicting views on this subject.

[gregkavarnos]

When meat is available I eat it. When it isn't I don't. It is pretty simple.

I already pointed out I do not eat meat if it is impure in any of three ways.

When practitioners consume meat with a method, then there is benefit.

Dear N. my question was directed to saltspring (of course feel free to answer anyway, but I'd like saltspring to answer too) and the question was: how is eating grass fed beef more ethical given that (for me) the issue is the purposeful killing of a sentient being and not the carbon imprints related to how they are raised?

Everything is made out of rigpa.

Isn't this a case of considering butter to be milk?

[saltspring]

Hi Greg

Good question. I don't really have a great response. I just feel if I raise my own meat, I actualy eat less meat in the long run. I see the process and know directly that killing for food is a big deal. If there is bad karma to be had it should be mine not fobbed off to some butcher and then my meat comes with a clean bill of karma? Maybe thats the Buddhist teaching and from what Ive seen on this thread and on Dhamma Wheel it is, but it doesn't feel right to me. So I think I am in a slow evolution to being a vegetarian; right now I have kids and I feel that meat is part of a healthy diet and I want to know the source from where it comes from, perhaps when they get older we as a family can make the switch. Anyway thanks for your posts and others it really is helping me sort out some issues.

Chris (saltspring)

[Malcolm]

Everything is made out of rigpa.

Isn't this a case of considering butter to be milk?

No.

[gregkavarnos]

Everything is made out of rigpa.

Isn't this a case of considering butter to be milk?

No.

Care to elucidate?

[Malcolm]

But when you buy meat at the meat store, whatever "being" once lived in that meat already moved out of that house long ago. There is no karma from buying or eating this meat...

This is also Bhavaviveka's perspective.

The truth is that Christians, Moslems, Jews, and Secularists will never stop eating meat. They will never stop raising animals for food. If practitioners refuse to eat meat, they are refusing to create a good cause for the animal whose flesh they are eating.

There is no need to suppose we must therefore decide to eat every kind of dead creature and so on. We can work within the convention of what are considered food animals in our culture and society, i.e. poultry, beef, pork, lamb, goat, venison, wild game, fish and shellfish. It is also ok to enjoy the taste and the flavor of these kinds of foods. We have sense organs, we should enjoy what we eat. We should also be aware, we should not be blind to suffering. Also when we eat a salad, or a tomato, we have to be aware of the suffering the production of that tomato or lettuce, or head of broccoli engenders. When we pick a tomato, we are also picking someone else's food, the food of another creature. When we eat a strawberry, we are stealing it from some bird, chipmonk or insect. When we buy mass produced vegetables in a market, how many creatures died to produce that? When we use sesame oil to cook our vegetarian meal, how many millions of small creatures were crushed to death to extract that sesame oil? The idea that being a vegetarian is less harmful to sentient beings than being a meat eater is deluded. You can, for example, in the same cycle of treasure texts find one text that says you must avoid meat, and in another text from the same cycle, instructions that one must eat meat.

If you have a specific reason for being a vegetarian, for example, you are doing chulen (rasāyana) practice -- then you must avoid all foods that give rise to the three humors and focus only on sattvic foods, essence foods, such as ghee, honey, rice, fruits, etc. You cannot eat garlic, onion, radishes, etc., roots in general. This also has to do with how to cleanse the digestive pathways in the formation of the various tissues of the body. Even so, there are tantras that identify meat as rasāyana, chulen. So meat can even be used for chulen practice.

If one is a Dzogchen pracititioner, there are no rules about what one may eat.

[Malcolm]

Care to elucidate?

The five outer course elements are made out of the five lights of the wisdom of rigpa. Everything (all sentient beings including their consciousness as well as everything we consider inanimate) is made out of the five elements.

[gregkavarnos]

Thank you for the explanation!

[Bhusuku]

The five outer course elements are made out of the five lights of the wisdom of rigpa. Everything (all sentient beings including their consciousness as well as everything we consider inanimate) is made out of the five elements.

Ha! I just read the chapter on the "Five Pure Lights" in Tenzin Wangyal's "Wonders of the Natural Mind" where he goes a little bit in the details on how the five elements, five sense consciousnesses, five sense organs, five sense objects, etc. arise from the five lights ('od lnga).

BTW, is there any book by ChNN where he's explaining the five lights?


PS: Sorry for being as well...

[Thrasymachus]

It seems alot of people here are using a fundamentalist Buddhist approach to justify meat eating. You can always use excuses to not be more compassionate or ethical and one of those excuses can be "this sect, this past practitioner" ate meat, so I can too. Tibet in 1950 when China invaded barely had barely more than 3 million(or even less according to other estimates) people spread over 2.5 million square kilometers.[1] So we are talking about a place that was only marginally inhabitable before modern technology, I don't think you can impute that ossifying and following their diet advice or ethics on meat is to be recommended or laudable for people living in much more inhabitable regions.

Now is not the past. We have new technology like railroads, semi-haul, trucks, refrigeration, we have unlocked the energy potential of oil. What does this mean? People can eat more meat, more often. So what we mean by eating meat has changed. My grandmother almost never ate meat and she lived to 98, but she was a poor Peloponnesian farmer. But now that is not the case, even the poorest can become gluttons of meat. Meat used to be something the majority of settled people could only eat on special occasions, mostly during winter feasts, when it would not spoil quickly. Now in the United states it seems every meal is centered on meat or eggs(the period of a chicken). Alot of countries with high consumption of animal fats have large a population that looks like non-competing sumo wrestlers.

[1] landmass: http://tibetoffice.org/tibet-info/tibet-at-a-glance
population: http://books.google.com/books?id=Ep5l6J ... on&f=false

[Malcolm]

It seems alot of people here are using a fundamentalist Buddhist approach to justify meat eating.

No. Not at all. As with everything, there are a number of views about meat-eating in Buddhism. In my case, it has nothing to do with the traditional diet of Tibetans.

N

[Thrasymachus]

You can always make excuses to not move to be more ethical and one of them can be tradition and Buddhism and that is what I see you are doing. A better approach is if would you want to ever be treated as fodder animals for slaughter are or see your mother treated like that. What you are trying to argue is that ethical approaches are ossified in time and we should look into what past Buddhist schools wrote and codified for ethics on meat. But to me ethics should be part of a teleological movement always evolving and improving. Now that we have oil the illusion we need to enslave animals to maintain our way of life or maintain our population levels should have abated if ethics mattered. However money and gluttony matter more.

You search for manipulated facts to make meat eating more acceptable. For example earlier you railed on soy, citing this article: http://civileats.com/2009/01/27/a-vegan ... rspective/
But that article itself mentioned most soy, 80%, goes to feed livestock. Then you try to mention bugs being killed and that vegans are not ethical, when far more bugs are killed for meat, because instead of feeding huge steers which will shit and piss and expend calories just moving or on their metabolism, you can feed much smaller humans, using much less grain and resources. So even on your bugs and micro-organisms reductionist argument abstaining from meat is still superior.

You also mentioned Polyface farms of Joel Salatin popularized by Michael Pollan, but on pages 222-5 of his book the The Omnivore's Dilemma, Pollan, says that of the 100 acres of Polyface, the adjacent 450 acres of forest are essential to the health and productivity of the actual farm. So counting the forest so essential to this "ideal" meat eating enterprise, you can only feed about 2 people per 10 acres. In other words, most the world would starve using the model of the this much lionized livestock farm.
See: http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2010/0 ... 641159.php

[Dechen Norbu]

Thrasymachus,

I would appreciate if you stopped insulting others by saying they are making excuses or using Buddhist fundamentalist approaches and actually read what they say.
You are free to disagree, but not to attack others calling their arguments mere excuses or fundamentalism when these arguments are well explained. Counter the argument, not the intentions you believe are behind it.

Get down from your high horse, if you please. I won't allow such line of argumentation.

Thank you.

[PadmaVonSamba]

It seems alot of people here are using a fundamentalist Buddhist approach to justify meat eating.

People may try to justify eating meat or not eating meat.
The purpose of any method of justification is ego clinging.
That's all being right is about.
Eating meat or not eating meat may be good or bad things to do for a variety of valid reasons.
But if it is not about liberation from samsara.
for others as well as for oneself,
then it's just more running around in circles.
Unless one sees their own true nature, eating meat and not eating meat both take you back to the same corner.
you'll be dead before this issue is ever resolved.
When it is your time to be the meat, what will your opinion be?
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"When you can snatch the cheeseburger from my palm, it will be time for you to leave"

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[Thrasymachus]

The argument that equates being vegetarian to making insects and micro-organisms suffer and die is moot. You could hypothetically only move by crawling with a magnifying glass to your eye, but even then you would fail at that and you would be paralyzed. We can never see and perceive on that microscopic level. Those who come the closest are Jainists. But you we are physiologically and ethically capable of extending compassion to animals by not killing many animals by refusing meat. You can view this disturbing non-safe for work Filipino Pig Slaughter video and clearly notice the animal crying out in pain, fidgeting to get free, in distress. But you cannot notice most bugs and all bacteria(and killing bad bacteria is just self defense done by the immune system) due to physiological scale -- the best you can do on that is kill yourself. Comparing the two thus seems dis-ingenious no matter who does it.

@DechenNorbu:
I don't see how it is an ad-hominem or insulting, infact earlier there was much invective against vegetarians and vegans. You can use everything to be more ethical or less ethical, the choice is up to you, not any tradition or text. It is a simple truth. To me and perhaps others arguably, putting the onus and responsibility on your teacher or a tradition is fundamentalism.

@PadmaVonSamba:
I don't think if any food animal would be capable of human language, that they would narrowly equate eating their mothers and sisters with just the egos of the followers of carnism whose plate they would end up on. Nor would they care if you can become enlightened either way. Thus it has bigger consequences than just ego.

[Malcolm]

You search for manipulated facts to make meat eating more acceptable. For example earlier you railed on soy, citing this article: http://civileats.com/2009/01/27/a-vegan ... rspective/
But that article itself mentioned most soy, 80%, goes to feed livestock.

I do not eat industrially produced meat for environmental as well as ethical reasons. I made that clear.

So counting the forest so essential to this "ideal" meat eating enterprise, you can only feed about 2 people per 10 acres.

Where do you derive this figure from?

[Malcolm]

But you we are physiologically and ethically capable of extending compassion to animals by not killing many animals by refusing meat.

I don't agree with this perspective. When a practitioner eats meat with presence and awareness, there is a connection made with that sentient being that serves to benefit that animal.

You do not have to accept this point of view for yourself, but it is my point of view.

N