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Is Vegetarianism valid?
Ethan_McCune
Explorer
I read a study that showed that plants, just like animals, demonstrate sentient behavior. So, does this make vegetarianism unnecessary? Or does this even prove the sentience of plants at all? Your thoughts please.
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Have these religious nut jobs no sense of propriety?
As crustaceans we are taught that fish are a form of evolved seaweed. How wonderful.
Just my opinion but I think if plants have a self, it includes the entirety of the universe.
Thanissaro Bikkhu makes a good point, that this realm of existence we are living in now is one where we must eat each other to live. Not just chewing each other up and swallowing the flesh, but we 'eat' each other emotionally and mentally as well. We 'consume' another person's time and energy when we ask them for advice, and we 'feed' others when we give it.
In Lobster's line of thinking, we birth energy or thought 'offspring' and give them to other people to eat. All I have to say about that is it's a good thing to not take too literally, else there would be unending angry admonishments to CLEAN YOUR PLATE. I don't want to see my kids' legs go in the trash just because you only like the soft parts, you know?
This is why it's exhausting taking care of someone who is physically ill or psychologically needy. You are feeding them, they are feeding from you.
In a weird way, I like feeding myself to other people but only when I WANT TO. Under controlled circumstances, thank you very much. When my energy is low, I don't want to go giving what's left to other people. Especially when they might not clean their plate!
More from Thanissaro Bikkhu (my personal unpacking, but I'm pretty sure he is saying this explicitely); in embodying the Brahmaviharas, in 'taming' the mind via concentration meditation to experience jhanic states, and growing in wisdom via vipassana meditation, we learn to 'feed' ourselves directly, and thus decrease our need to 'feed' on others.
It's also no joke that I ended up meeting and marrying a stunning lawyer, who also wanted to study medicine but felt incapable of dealing with the suffering. She now works in the domain of Employment law, discrimination, LGTS alliances and whistleblowing. Who says lawyers are all blood-sucking leeches, some want to help. Nelson Mandela was of that ilk, bless him.
Oh where was I? How did I get on this soap box?
Jainism - take a look at it and see if you can live your life in that way.
Here you go, guys. The link to the studies.
I'm calling this an insincere zinger. It's an argument where the person who posed it, isn't suggesting we follow through with the consequences, the author really isn't promoting Jainism (as mentioned in posts above, the most radical form of ahimsa)-- this is promoting complacency, status quo-- notice the author equated eating carrots and chicken-- so hey, they're morally equivalent right? So might as well eat the tasty chicken because it's on sale at Safeway and it's too inconvenient to change habits.
Another example of an insincere zinger is "well, harvesting grains kills numerous mice, while cattle raising and slaughtering is comparatively few"-- this is normally put forward as an anti-vegetarian argument, an attempt at reducio ad absurdum since the sort of person who raises these gripes isn't going to follow through and eat only whales and elephants (and minimize the # of animals killed)-- the goal is to get the opposing side to say, "oh gee, trying to save the animals is futile, so lets just enjoy eating them"
And on the tangent of field mice, one of the minor precepts in the Brahma Net Sutra is to not do controlled burns of agricultural fields except when field mice and the like are least likely to be out and about.
Number of Animals Killed to Produce One Million Calories in Eight Food Categories
Chicken = 251.1
Eggs = 92.3
Beef - 29
Pork = 18.1
Milk = 4.78
Vegetables = 2.55
Fruits = 1.73
Grains = 1.65
http://www.animalvisuals.org/projects/data/1mc/
That said, even though I think vegetarianism is valid, it's not a requirement. And simply abstaining from eating meat doesn't free one from the web of killing and death. Assuming plants aren't sentient, the cultivation and harvesting of crops still directly and indirectly leads to the death of numerous animals and insects. I think being more socially active in our respective practices is an admirable thing to do, but the best that can do is limit the potential harm to other sentient beings. In his introduction to The Four Nutriments of Life: An Anthology of Buddhist Texts, Nyanaponika Thera echoes:
Others should get involved only when the food is threatened, like with shark fins and some types of caviar, for example. That's my opinion.
But I wonder, does the sentience of a species mean that it clings to self like we do?
Buddhists here are forever discussing the absence of, or the clinging to, an illusory self.
What is it that we are robbing an animal of when we kill it?
Or is it all about the suffering whether there is actually a self that retains a memory of it or not?
Or is it more about the uncompassionate and insensitive attitude that one must have in order to mercilessly kill creatures to eat? That is the issue for me, as a killer, at this point.
That's one bitch of a Koan for a Buddhist fisherman.
Instead, we are wagons that can be disassembled without a single part that is us, at least not in the sense of that eternal Hindu-style soul. At after dissembling the wagon, we look at what's left in front of us-- nothing! Sunyata! And then we erroneously conclude that nothing exists and reality is something preposterous like thoughts without a thinker.
But if we look behind us, we see that those wagon parts is all we are and all we ever were. We always were something, just not that fixed immortal soul. So cows now exist again, as maybe not so clever, but real creatures that fear death and predators.
When we kill and deprive a sentient being of it's flowing blood, bones, brains and a beating heart, we take away everything from them. Now they are nothing in the mundane, dictionary sense. (In the orthodox sense, they continue as a cause and effect where some future being will be punished or rewarded for actions they have no memory of, but that is another tangent, another thread.)
Anyhow, if sunyata means no one exists, or that conceptually everything is non-dual** so there is no difference between the living and the dead, then 1st precept is bunk, 2nd precept is bunk (you don't own those calories represented in your flesh right?) And a Buddhism without an moral compass is intuitively unsatisfying.
** some of the versions of sunyata posit that not only does everything change across time, creating a temporal goo of one thing squishing into the next, but that everything is conceptual goo in space-- that the difference between you and me is less distinct than we naively imagine and then people apply that to abstractions and suddenly there is no difference between the living and the dead, the animate or the inanimate, no difference between good or evil, right or wrong, skillful or unskillful, it's all undifferentiated conceptual goo. The idea, for me works for social relations (very profound that people are rather similar), is unnecessary for physics and chemistry (science works fine, thanks) and is antinomian or absurd when applied to the abstract.
Thanks for that.
Why must we separate ourselves from the rest of the life on earth in order to arrive where we have always been?
All of nature has evolved to use the food available in the local habitat.
http://www.davidsuzuki.org/blogs/healthy-oceans-blog/2012/10/-pacific-underwater-salmon-dont-grow-on-trees-but-trees-grow-on-salmon/
As wayfarers can't we continue to do that in an enlightened manner?
I'm working on a new angle for justifying my livelyhood.
* sorry, I should have said "cavepersons" but it doesn't sound right.
That's a very un-buddhisty thought. Maybe a perfectly fine wiccan one, but not Buddhist. There isn't an essential nature to anything. The ecosystem is just one of many ways the bits and pieces of the world could have been arranged.
re: evolution
Evolution as an abstract process has no goal-- genes exist solely to reproduce. Plants don't exist for me to eat them-- the have no goal (aside from a biochemical imperative to reproduce or become irrelevant), animals don't exist for anyone else, they exist for what ever existential project they create for themselves and and that biochemical imperative to survive and reproduce.
re: livelihood
I work in the military-industrial complex-- it's a very un-Buddhisty job. I think there are two reasonably good rationalizations for being a rancher or working in the military-- #1 the world can't possibly be any other way-- unilateral pacifism hasn't worked in the past, it would lead to untold misery of another sort. #2 Everyone has to start somewhere-- no one is enlightened and maximally ethical on day one. I read a thread about a recent convert who worked as a pest exterminator-- it's unfair to ask him to reduce himself to poverty, better to work on other issues. Personally, I'm confident that Buddhism works and to have an enlighten manner is to be on a path that leads to a sense of compassion that has real consequences for personal decisions. Better for people to take their time and start with what is possible than to never start the path at all.
re: Salmon
If the salmon have taken the Bodhisattva vows and are altruistically giving up their bodies for the welfare and enlightenment of humans and the denizens of the forest, then maybe. But those salmon are thinking about executing their instinctive goal of eating, spawning-- they don't have the means to practice Buddhism or cross species altruism, to imagine so is rather self serving.
That said, salmon, which are harvested just before they were planning to keel over and die anyhow, are one of the edge cases of vegetarianism, where you are consuming a creature that is either already dead or on deaths door step anyhow. (Road kill and cows dying of old age would fall in the same edge case) i.e. the main questions would be about health, not so much about the ethics of killing.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/12/23/131223fa_fact_pollan?currentPage=all
A quote (though not my takeaway from the article):
"Unprepared to consider the ethical implications of plant intelligence, I could feel my resistance to the whole idea stiffen. Descartes, who believed that only humans possessed self-consciousness, was unable to credit the idea that other animals could suffer from pain. So he dismissed their screams and howls as mere reflexes, as meaningless physiological noise. Could it be remotely possible that we are now making the same mistake with plants? That the perfume of jasmine or basil, or the scent of freshly mowed grass, so sweet to us, is (as the ecologist Jack Schultz likes to say) the chemical equivalent of a scream? "
But even it's remotely possible that plants can feel pain. It's the intention that counts. We intent to cause the least possible sufferings. I wonder what is the purpose of this debate? There is no need to justify why people eat meat. It's legal under the law.
I think there is more to plants that meets the eye. The fact that they are simply reacting in some sensory way to a stimulation doesn't lesson it much for me. Babies do the same thing. We don't undermine they just because they don't understand why their automatic reactions to things. Because plants can't communicate with us we don't know for sure if they feel pain. We only know how to judge pain on the level we experience it. It's just like how we limit ourselves to looking for life on other planets because living beings here require certain things. Why do we limit ourselves to our type of life when it's quite possible that there are beings who live in far reaches of the universe that don't rely on water or oxygen? Just because we experience something here in a certain way doesn't mean other beings can't experience things differently that we can't measure with our understanding that we limit by comparing it to ourselves. Who knows what science will bring us in the future.
It's interesting to read about and discuss, but people must still eat. It's not like we can start eating rocks (and if you follow TNH he will tell you even minerals are precious...which they are but I won't starve my children to save a rock. Neither would most people, I think. Then what will we eat? Soylent Green?