The Buddha’s message is simple and unwavering. Compassion and kindness for others, and ourselves, coupled with conscious ethical living, is the pathway to more happiness and less misery for all. Practitioners of the teachings of the Buddha strive to act in ways that reduce the amount of suffering in the world.
The Buddha taught that the path to happiness can be found in right living, as simply set forth in the Noble Eightfold Path. This path provides an intentional, wise passage through life’s daily tangles to happiness and freedom. The Eightfold Path shines light on how our intentions and actions affect the interconnected happiness of all beings. Our intentions and actions in this breath color the experience of the next. One of these Eight is Right Action. Right Action includes refraining from causing unnecessary harm and destroying life. Interbeing – our connectedness with all of life – makes it impossible to harm another without harming ourselves and contributing to the suffering of all beings.
As a precept, “abstaining from taking life” is a teaching of the Buddha that is bigger than simply refraining from killing other human beings. This precept enjoins abstaining from killing any sentient being. A “sentient being” is a living being endowed with mind or consciousness. For practical purposes, this means human beings and animals. Plants are not considered to be sentient beings; though they exhibit some degree of sensitivity, they lack full-fledged consciousness, the defining attribute of a sentient being.
Simply living on this planet makes it impossible not to harm some life – such as the unintentional quashing of an ant trail on the road or the crush of a bug underfoot. But there is an enormous difference we can make when it comes to animals and our plates. The single greatest impact we have on their suffering is the decision to eat – or not to eat – them. The “taking of life” that is to be avoided is intentional killing, the deliberate destruction of life of a being endowed with consciousness. This principle is grounded in the consideration that all beings love life and fear death. That all beings seek happiness and are averse to pain.
In the words of well-known Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nat Hanh:
We should eat and drink in such a way that can preserve compassion in our heart. We should consume in such a way that helps reduce the suffering of living beings. And that way we can preserve compassion in our heart. A person who does not have compassion in his heart cannot be a happy person any more. So to be vegan is not perfect, but it helps reduce the suffering of animals…raising cows and raising chickens [to be slaughtered] creates a lot of suffering.
Tibetan Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard, now well-known as “the world’s happiest man” adds:
My first Buddhist teacher, Kangyur Rinpoche, was a very strict vegetarian. I was inspired by him and also by a deep inner reasoning that suddenly became obvious to me. I never hunted in my life, but did go fishing sometimes when I was a little boy in Brittany. When I was 13 years old, a thought bloomed in my mind “How can I do something like that”? I realized that I was totally avoiding putting myself in the place of the other. And when I was 20, I gave up eating meat. That was 50 years ago.
The heart of the Buddhist path is compassion. That means to value others. If you value others, you value their wellbeing and are concerned by their suffering. It seems completely absurd and abhorrent that we try to survive at the cost of many other sentient beings’ life. Think of the 150 billions [of] animals which are used as objects of consumption just to satisfy our sort of craving for meat. This is unbelievable that we have no consideration for the immense suffering that those animals are suffering in slaughter houses and other conditions. Compassion ends at the edges of our plate – that is not the way a good civilization should proceed. Ghandi also famously once said, we can see the degree of civilization of a nation by the way it treats animals. We will not have an ethical society if we tolerate the way we treat billions and billions of animals…we treat them like objects and this is just not acceptable. There’s no justification for that. So we should extend our compassion to all sentient beings without exception.
(Thanks to Lani Muelrath, author of The Mindful Vegan, for this page)
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