February
1995
Letter
from the Editor: Re-membering Compassion
By Martin Rowe
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Under the rubric, Meat: To Eat It or Not, the latest edition of Tricycle:
The Buddhist Review has a number of articles on the place of meat
in Buddhism. Overwhelmingly — and this is true of the issue itself
— the articles are about Tibetan Buddhism which, albeit with
some justification because of the climate, is not vegetarian. Nevertheless,
the articles are not by Tibetans currently living in the vastnesses
of the mountain kingdom. They are written from places like the United
States and Japan, where there is no shortage of greenery and where
yak
is not generally on the diet in any of his or her constituent parts.
“We Tibetans like to eat meat,” enthuses Gelek Rinpoche,
spiritual director of the Jewel Heart Tibetan Cultural Institute and
Buddhist Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan. “We don’t care if
it’s healthy or not — we like it.” There then follows
a random mixture of sentences: such as, we need to eat, vegetarians
can’t be pure although they may wish to be, and that we must cut
down on the “negatives,” (as if they were fatty acids!).
The other articles are also filled with jumbled and vaguely thought-out
reflections on vegetarianism, as well as the recycled myth that Hitler
was a vegetarian (see Satya 1 for the evidence).
Now I would be the first to admit that I am not pure, nor would I suggest
for a moment that vegetarians are superior individuals, or even closer
to the Buddha’s Dharma than actual practitioners of Buddhism:
piousness has no place here. But there is a crucial facet of Buddhism
that is being ignored or not even seen to such a worrying extent that
it could be said to undermine every statement made about animals by
Buddhists. If we examine the phrase “Meat: To Eat It or Not”
as well as Gelek Rinpoche’s ringing endorsement, we can spot a
failure to recognize the source of meat. Meat, it must be remembered,
is a wholly created product; meat is literally nothing without the death
of the animal who became “it.” The animal, to employ the
term used by Carol J. Adams in The Sexual Politics of Meat, is the “absent
referent” — reduced as a being to invisibility, ungendered,
and forgotten for meat to come to be.
Why should this be a Buddhist concern? Well, Buddhism’s great
insights are that all life is suffering, that there is nothing essential
but that all is co-dependently co-arising, and that the key act of a
Buddhist must be the extension of compassion to all living beings. Buddhism’s
acknowledgment of the lack of origination, far from suggesting we forget
the being that became meat, forces a re-membering of meat with the animal,
simply because it acknowledges that the animal is always present simultaneously
in the meat. Meat can, therefore, never be ungendered into an “it,” nor
can the animal be forgotten.
Since all meat is produced through suffering and death, meat is the
paradigm of the Buddhist view of reality. If the Buddhist wishes to
escape that vicious circle of suffering and death, then, unless it
means
starvation, giving up meat must be a prerequisite. Admittedly, any
form of attachment to dogma — vegetarian or otherwise — provides
its own form of karma, but what Gelek Rinpoche acknowledges is that
his taste for meat is not based on universal principles of suffering,
or of compassion for the billions of animals slaughtered in his adopted
home. It is based on custom and the satisfaction of desire. In this
one sentence then, Gelek Rinpoche shows attachment, craving, desire,
and a lack of compassion so distinctly un-Buddhist as to notch up whole
lifetimes of karma. It is the self-definition of a Buddhist that where
he or she can offer it — and certainly in the comfort of the fertile
lands where food is readily available and, conversely, billions of animals
are slaughtered for meat — extension of compassion should be
made to all living beings and not to where it pleases.
Satya is now eight editions old, and we would like to offer
you the chance to reflect on the previous issues and give us some feedback.
What have you liked and disliked so far? What would you like more of
and what less? Do you want more sections, different types of articles?
Please let us know, so we can continue to be a voice for compassionate
livelihood in New York City and the surrounds. And do continue to send
in your writing. Thank you.
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