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Meat or no meat?
I've been reading various different things about some Buddhists eating meat and others not. Do you eat meat? And if you do or don't eat meat is your study of Buddhism the reason or was it a personal choice?
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Comments
What I have said before:
More important than what you eat is how you eat.
I have recently become a vegetarian, but eating meat is also ok.
One should not be attached to either view [meat eating vs. vegetarianism].
To eat mindfully, and in moderation is better than simply obstaining from certain foods.
If one wishes to obstain from eating meat out of compassion, that is fine.
That is my understanding of what the Buddha taught.
This is what I take as my own practice.
However, to each his own.
Jason
I hadn't thought of that. That's important. We can become very rigid in our vegetarianism. I'm grateful for the reminder. Thanks, Jason.
Brigid
But in one of our path's teachings we say "Never take more than you need, banish greed from your life" - and I have tried to stick to that. I am ALWAYS horribly conscious of the fact that an animal died to give me this meat and I give thanks for its life before eating.
Anyhow, I was listening to one of the "Urban Dharma" podcasts by Kusala Bhiksu yesterday. It was a recording of one of his Q+A sessions and he was asked a question regarded meat eating. This led me to reading some of his articles on his website. Here's a snippet :
"There are three kinds of action that always increase suffering: Killing, stealing, and sexual misconduct. The Buddha said killing causes much suffering, all creatures have a desire to live.
I was surprised that a cockroach might enjoy and cherish his life, but you try to kill one, and they'll run away. And those ants in your kitchen, they want to go on living as well.
It's a cruel joke, if you truly want to hold this precept, you are doomed to failure. Because everything we eat, was at one time alive. Killing is a part of living.
A vegetarian might say, "You know, I don't kill anything." I would say to him, "That's because you can't hear the screams of the broccoli."
We are all faced with the same dilemma, which is not should I kill, but what do I need to kill to stay alive. Vegetarians choose to kill the lowest life form they can, while meat eaters just aren't as picky. But let me say here, I am not aware of anyone achieving enlightenment because of what they ate. The Buddha ate meat, he ate what was offered.
"
The full article can be found here
Cheers,
Adrian
Yes, but it's screaming: "EAT ME! EAT ME!
It's silly stuff. We eat the least sensitive life form available. That's intelligence. That's compassion. Of course "available" doesn't mean what's in the fridge.
I know this always gets peoples backs up but in my humble opinion meat is murder and can only bring bad Karma.
Four legs good, two legs bad.
HH
The other problem is that we have created "designer" fruit and veg.. I would be willing to bet that if you went back two hundred years, many of the vegetables and fruit we consume today would be vastly different in size, flavour and texture to the way they were then....
genetics and cross-pollination, together with advancements made in just growing methods, mean that what we consume has been adapted to a modern palate... probably more starches and sugars, and in some cases, less fibre....
we also have the ability to consume products 'out of season'.... once upon a time, we adapted the meal at the table to fit in with the season... Now we get strawberries in February and pumpkins in June....!!
Check it out...
http://www.accidentalhedonist.com/index.php/2005/11/09/who_is_norman_borlaug_and_why_you_should
Actually, although I think that Mr. Bourlag DID tamper with some GMO's in his career this article refers to hybridizing.
Anyway, if you want to know more about this man there is always google. I have to have the utmost respect for him.
Not in Kiwik Save it ain't.
It's a shame we don't know what the result would have been if he'd used a standard grain with these techniques.
Just a thought...
I'm inclined to agree on the whole; I wasn't intending to bash 'em, as I hadn't checked available information (though I can now!) I'm merely observing that we're getting very clever with food modification, and I'm wondering if it's all to the good? I accept the plus sides, and the improvements, but I'm also concerned that people's diets in general are for some, really quite appalling... and it's not always their fault...
Sweetcorn sugars start turning to starch the moment they're picked... oranges and other citrus fruits, due to methods of picking, storage and shipping, will have lost anything up to 85% of their Vitamin C content by the time you buy them - !
Tomatoes, due to the intensity of their cultivation, are often impregnated with artificial Vitamin 'C' whilst growing... I have compared commercial vs home-grown tomatoes, and I think this vegetable (fruit - ?) more than any other, reveals the enormous differences in flavours between the two!
IMOGMOIMOGMOIMOGMOIMOGMOIMOGMOIMOGMOIMOGMOIMOGM :type:
I think the shame is that traditional farming techniques aren't combined with these uber-hybrids. Now THAT would be something!
You can always buy organic seeds and sprout them, as well. If anyone hasn't tried them; sunflower seed sprouts are delicious.
I'll be giving sunflower seeds a try next then. Thanks for the tip! :thumbsup:
edit: Oh and you're welcome.
It does the job but I think I'll be getting a multi level one so that I can diversify my crops!
That's the ticket! You can also do sunflower seeds in dirt. There's vast info on the web, of course.
Fede, this is SO true. It's gotten to the point that I have a hard time eating supermarket tomatoes. The simple backyard variety seems to me to be a different fruit altogether. It actually has a flavour!
"There's no denying it's more expensive than getting them from the supermarket but the difference in taste more than makes up for that."
Frizz, and nutritive value as well. The differences are sometimes shocking.
As for eating meat or not, I struggle so much with this issue that not a day goes by that I don't think about it. I used to be a vegetarian for years. Until I got very poor financially and was offered meals from friends. They would offer me the food they had prepared and sometimes it was meat. I couldn't turn my nose up at it. I also couldn't digest the meat very well. Painful. So, I straddle the fence. I still don't know what to do. But, for that matter, I don't know what to do about mosquitoes. They carry Malaria (and West Nile Virus), killing millions of people, many of them children, every year. I live in a West Nile Virus zone. What am I supposed to do? But the Buddha said that we should never sacrifice our own well being for that of another. Maybe it's just an issue of remaining mindful about killing and making the wisest choice in situations in which our well being is threatened.
A talk by the Buddhist teacher Thich Naht Hanh on Mindful Consumption
All things need food to be alive and to grow, including our love or our hate. Love is a living thing, hate is a living thing. If you do not nourish your love, it will die. If you cut the source of nutriment for your violence, your violence will also die. That is why the path shown by the Buddha is the path of mindful consumption.
The Buddha told the following story. There was a couple who wanted to cross the desert to go to another country in order to seek freedom. They brought with them their little boy and a quantity of food and water. But they did not calculate well, and that is why halfway through the desert they ran out of food, and they knew that they were going to die. So after a lot of anguish, they decided to eat the little boy so that they could survive and go to the other country, and that's what they did. And every time they ate a piece of flesh from their son, they cried.
The Buddha asked his monks, "My dear friends: Do you think that the couple enjoyed eating the flesh of their son?" The Buddha said, "It is impossible to enjoy eating the flesh of our son. If you do not eat mindfully, you are eating the flesh of your son and daughter, you are eating the flesh of your parent."
If we look deeply, we will see that eating can be extremely violent. UNESCO tells us that every day, forty thousand children in the world die because of a lack of nutrition, of food. Every day, forty thousand children. And the amount of grain that we grow in the West is mostly used to feed our cattle. Eighty percent of the corn grown in this country is to feed the cattle to make meat. Ninety-five percent of the oats produced in this country is not for us to eat, but for the animals raised for food. According to this recent report that we received of all the agricultural land in the US, eighty-seven percent is used to raise animals for food. That is forty-five percent of the total land mass in the US.
More than half of all the water consumed in the US whole purpose is to raise animals for food. It takes 2500 gallons of water to produce a pound of meat, but only 25 gallons to produce a pound of wheat. A totally vegetarian diet requires 300 gallons of water per day, while a meat-eating diet requires more than 4000 gallons of water per day.
Raising animals for food causes more water pollution than any other industry in the US because animals raised for food produce one hundred thirty times the excrement of the entire human population. It means 87,000 pounds per second. Much of the waste from factory farms and slaughter houses flows into streams and rivers, contaminating water sources.
Each vegetarian can save one acre of trees per year. More than 260 million acres of US forests have been cleared to grow crops to feed animals raised for meat. And another acre of trees disappears every eight seconds. The tropical rain forests are also being destroyed to create grazing land for cattle.
In the US, animals raised for food are fed more than eighty percent of the corn we grow and more than ninety-five percent of the oats. We are eating our country, we are eating our earth, we are eating our children. And I have learned that more than half the people in this country overeat.
Mindful eating can help maintain compassion within our heart. A person without compassion cannot be happy, cannot relate to other human beings and to other living beings. And eating the flesh of our own son is what is going on in the world, because we do not practice mindful eating.
The Buddha spoke about the second kind of food that we consume every day -- sense impressions -- the kind of food that we take in by the way of the eyes, the ears, the tongue, the body, and the mind. When we read a magazine, we consume. When you watch television, you consume. When you listen to a conversation, you consume. And these items can be highly toxic. There may be a lot of poisons, like craving, like violence, like anger, and despair. We allow ourselves to be intoxicated by what we consume in terms of sense impressions. We allow our children to intoxicate themselves because of these products. That is why it is very important to look deeply into our ill-being, into the nature of our ill-being, in order to recognize the sources of nutriment we have used to bring it into us and into our society.
The Buddha had this to say: "What has come to be - if you know how to look deeply into its nature and identify its source of nutriment, you are already on the path of emancipation." What has come to be is our illness, our ill-being, our suffering, our violence, our despair. And if you practice looking deeply, meditation, you'll be able to identify the sources of nutriments, of food, that has brought it into us.
Therefore the whole nation has to practice looking deeply into the nature of what we consume every day. And consuming mindfully is the only way to protect our nation, ourselves, and our society. We have to learn how to consume mindfully as a family, as a city, as a nation. We have to learn what to produce and what not to produce in order to provide our people with only the items that are nourishing and healing. We have to refrain from producing the kinds of items that bring war and despair into our body, into our consciousness, and into the collective body and consciousness of our nation, our society. And Congress has to practice that. We have elected members of the Congress. We expect them to practice deeply, listening to the suffering of the people, to the real causes of that suffering, and to make the kind of laws that can protect us from self-destruction. And America is great. I have the conviction that you can do it and help the world. You can offer the world wisdom, mindfulness, and compassion.
Nowadays I enjoy places where people do not smoke. There are nonsmoking flights that you can enjoy. Ten years ago they did not exist, nonsmoking flights. And in America on every box of cigarettes there is the message: "Beware: Smoking can be hazardous to your health." That is a bell of mindfulness. That is the practice of mindful consumption. You do not say that you are practicing mindfulness, but you are really practicing mindfulness. Mindfulness of smoking is what allowed you to see that smoking is not healthy.
In America, people are very aware of the food they eat. They want every package of food to be labeled so that they can know what is in it. They don't want to eat the kind of food that will bring toxins and poisons into their bodies. This is the practice of mindful eating.
But we can go further. We can do better, as parents, as teachers, as artists and as politicians. If you are a teacher, you can contribute a lot in awakening people of the need for mindful consumption, because that is the way to real emancipation. If you are a journalist, you have the means to educate people, to wake people up to the nature of our situation. Every one of us can transform himself or herself into a bodhisattva doing the work of awakening. Because only awakening can help us to stop the course we are taking, the course of destruction. Then we will know in which direction we should go to make the earth a safe place for us, for our children, and for their children.
I am eating freshly sprouted mung beans as we speak! My husband sprouts them for us. Frizzer, you do not need a fancy sprouter! My husband does it all with a strainer and bowls from our kitchen!
I am vegetarian (vegan, most of the time). I buy all organic fruits and veggies for my family, and mostly from farmers markets. And during Spring and Summer, the veggies come from my own back yard. I can't wait until Spring!! We also do not eat processed foods. I spend a lot of time on the weekends cooking for us! I love it.
Although me, my husband and daughter are vegetarian, it does not bother me when other people are not. I simply do not like toxins in my body. That's all!
They're hardly fancy. There is not much to a sprouter unless of course you're talking about "The Little Green Acre" sprouter from the early 70's. It was beautiful to behold. And of course "need" is not the word. It's a hell of alot less work with a sprouter. Not all seeds/beans are as easy to sprout as mung beans.
Thanks for that post. I only hope people are listening to the message.
Good work my friend.
HH
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