What Would Buddha Eat?

I've been to Nara several times now. And each time, I try to stop at a little shop near Todaiji temple, home of Nara's great bronze Daibutsu statue. At this shop they serve kusamochi daifuku right off the griddle -- a pastry of rice flour seasoned with mugwort, filled with sweet azuki bean paste. I fell in love with these on my first visit. I love to grab a few of these kusamochi, along with a hot green tea (or, on a warm day, an cold beer), sit on a bench in the park, shoo away the tame deer (considered sacred messengers of the gods, the Nara deer are notorious mooches) and have a wonderful little meal.

There is perhaps nothing so miraculous and yet so commonplace as eating. Several times a day (for those of us fortunate enough to live where food is readily available), we engage in amazing transformational alchemy that turns the food on our plates into our living breathing bodies.

And because of the intimate nature of our relationship with food -- "you are what you eat" -- we have a tremendous emotional investment in the choice of what things we turn into us.

People will allow their health to deteriorate, they will die of heart disease or diabetes, rather than change what they eat. Many Americans have their bellies ripped open and their digestive tracts surgically modified to "cure" gross obesity, because they find themselves unable to alter their eating habits.

In Mahayana Buddhism, one of the fates that can befall the dead who were greedy in life is to be made to roam the world as a "hungry ghost", enormous in appetite but cursed with such small mouths and throats that they cannot swallow. (Offerings of food, a few grains of rice, are left out for these suffering beings at meals in Zen monasteries.) This is a wonderful personification of how powerful our appetite can be -- persisting even through death.

I recall my shiatsu sensei, Barbra Esher, once noting that it was easier to get people to change their religion than to change what they eat.[*] This is interesting to ponder -- if early Christians had made Gentile converts keep kosher, would anyone have heard of Jesus of Nazareth today? And it sometimes seems that many Westerners are willing to consider Buddhism only so long as they can keep their Big Macs too.

[* When I fact-checked this with Barbra, she didn't recall making that comparison, but had maybe repeated an idea from Alex Tiberi, who said that it was easier to get someone to change their spouse than their diet -- but she concurred that the same applied to religion.]

But it's exactly because we have such a charged relationship with our food choices that considering them more deeply is an opportunity for spiritual development. If spirituality concerns our relationship with the Universe, does that relationship manifest in a more intimate way than in how we eat?

Mindfulness requires us to take a good honest look at the effect of our choices on our bodies, on the environment, and on the lives and deaths of other sentient beings. Closing our eyes to unpleasant facts about how our food is produced, or about its effect on our health, is not mindful.

Nor should we construct supernatural or superstitious excuses of how it's all right to make animals suffer and die to feed us so long as we perform the proper rituals, or how it's beneficial to the karma of an animal to be eaten by a human.

All of these considerations recommend a diet based around sustainably-grown plant foods. Many books have been written about the health advantages of a vegetarian diet, as well as the environmental devastation caused by modern "factory farming".

And surely choosing vegetarian foods is a wonderful way to prevent a tremendous amount of suffering by animals. Rather than repeating those arguments here, I will refer you to the works of John Robbins, especially his books Diet for a New America and The Food Revolution.

Instead, what I'd like to consider here is the question of how to best move our own stubborn minds towards mindful and compassionate food choices, while avoiding falling into attachments to ideas of spiritually "pure" and "impure" foods.

It's a problem the Buddha faced. He didn't much have to worry about sustainable organic farming versus the use of petrochemical fertilizers, or about people gorging themselves to death on Big Macs. But the issue of killing animals for food was one to which he gave considerable thought.

It's clear that his teachings include extending compassion to non-human animals. The precept against taking life forbids killing both humans and other animals, and he spoke of freeing animals destined for the butcher as a great act of kindness. But he did not require his followers to be vegetarians, and explicitly rejected such a requirement when suggested by his cousin (and, later, rival) Devadatta.

In fact, some scholars believe that the Buddha's last meal may have been of wild boar meat, given him by Cunda the smith. Others hold it was mushrooms, the issue apparently being whether the Pali for something like "pig's delight" should be interpreted as "food pigs like to eat", i.e. mushrooms, or food made from pigs meant to "delight" omnivorous humans.

The Buddhist sutras are contradictory on the issue of vegetarianism, and different schools of Buddhism have taken different attitudes toward it depending on which sutras they believe authoritative. Or, given the way we get attached to our food choices, perhaps they have chosen which sutras they believe authoritative depending on their attitudes toward vegetarianism!

There are some Buddhists who ignore the issue completely. Some (like the Dali Lama and the famous Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki) praise vegetarianism while continuing to eat meat themselves, and then there are the Japanese Zen temples that have elevated the vegetarian cuisine called shojin ryori to an art.

Hui Neng, the Sixth Patriarch of Zen, supposedly lived with hunters for several years during his exile, but would sabotage their traps and gather vegetables to eat. On the other hands some Vajrayana Buddhists seem to believe that it's more important to chant mantras or dedicate merit to the souls of slaughtered animals, than to refrain from killing them.

What are we to make of all this? Were the early Buddhists quite happy to eat animal flesh, so long as someone else accumulated the bad karma of doing the actual killing? This is how things were once done in Japan, with the burakumin, a low caste, getting stuck doing "unclean" work like butchering. Discrimination against the descendants of these people continues today.

Or was the Buddha up to something more subtle?

First we should note that the prohibition against taking the lives of animals is very specific and strong. It applied not just to monks, but to lay followers. If everyone followed the Buddha's teachings, there would be no slaughterhouses, no butchers, no meat to eat. The world he was working toward was clearly a vegetarian one.

Also, we must consider that the early Buddhist monks lived with a very different economic system than we have today. They were forbidden from using money and went begging for their food -- essentially, they were trading teaching to the lay community in return for offerings of food, clothing, and medicine. It's a pattern that goes back to the time the Buddha spent under the Bo tree, when local children would bring him food and he would teach them meditation and mindfulness techniques.

The monks were pretty much expected to accept whatever was offered to them without discrimination, but were expressly forbidden to accept offerings of flesh foods from animals that had been killed specifically to feed them. Even the suspicion that this was so, was enough to put the meat on the forbidden list. It was only when someone had meat that they were going to eat themselves, and decided to offer it instead to a monk or a nun, that he or she could accept. This acceptance wasn't any sort of endorsement, as one of the first things the monk or nun would teach them was the precept against the taking of life.

If the Buddha required his monastic followers to accept only vegetarian food, his message of compassion would be less likely to reach those who did not have vegetarian food to offer. By allowing (but not requiring!) his monks to accept offerings of meat, the Buddha allowed his teaching to spread to many more laypeople.

But there were those in the order who were less enthusiastic about letting laymen into the game. (In the years after the Buddha's death, this was one of the issues that lead to the split between the Theravada and Mahayana schools of Buddhism -- would it be a practice centered around monastic practice, or could lay people be full participants too?) When Devadatta proposed that the monks be allowed to accept only vegetarian food offerings, it was part of a package of proposals that would have made for greater separation between ordained followers and laypeople.

I believe the Buddha's rejection of these proposals was intended as affirming the importance of being inclusive, not as an endorsement of flesh foods.

So if we look to the principle of mindful compassion toward all sentient beings that the Buddha taught 2,500 years ago, how might we apply it today? If you dropped some money in his begging bowl, what would Buddha buy at the supermarket? Would he be hanging out by the butcher's case looking for a good pork chop, or over in the produce section, thumping melons?

In our economic system, to purchase a product is to reward its maker, to support and endorse the actions taken to produced it. When we buy a shirt or a salad or a steak, we are retroactively hiring everyone who worked to produce it, and we bear responsibility for the actions of our employees.

We cannot avoid responsibility for our choices on the basis that it was someone else's hands that implemented them. If wicked things are done to produce a product -- workers exploited, land or water polluted, animals treated cruelly, precious resources wasted -- then we must honestly, mindfully, and compassionately consider the consequences, and do our best to find alternatives. It's not enough to refrain from doing harm with our own hands; we must not encourage others to do harm.

With all that in mind, I'm pretty sure you'd find old Siddhartha buying broccoli rather than a beef brisket, seeking to give his support to those doing the least harm.

But, rather than telling the butcher to kiss off, the Buddha might well invite him to come sit down and join the Buddha in a meal.

We must keep in mind that the goal is compassion and mindfulness, not attachment to some abstract idea of "purity". We have to be kind to others and to ourselves, to recognize the difficulty of changing fundamental behaviors. The Universe is a complicated place, and we have to maintain mental flexibility to deal with it.

As wonderful as the practices of vegetarianism and veganism are, getting self-righteous about them is not just harmful to our own minds but reduces the opportunity to influence others to choose compassionately.

Brad Warner, a contemporary American Zen teacher, has noted that "The problem of vegetarianism in Zen practice is that it so often becomes a huge mental block...a tremendous way of defining the ego." He even mentions Zen masters tricking students into eating meat -- I wouldn't call that a good idea, but I must admit that over the years, I've encountered a handful of vegetarians and vegans who were so hung up on how they defined themselves by their food choices that they forgot about the compassion and love that motivated the choice in the first place. And I must admit I've fallen into the trap a few times myself.

But worse than tangling us up inside in our thought constructions, getting self-righteous about vegetarianism can deprive us of the opportunity to reach out to our fellow humans to work for greater compassion.

In his book The Food Revolution, John Robbins -- one of the greatest contemporary advocates for veganism and animal rights -- tells an amazing story about an encounter he had many years ago with a the owner of a pig farm.

Robbins was doing undercover research on animal agriculture when he visited a small family farm which he describes as nothing less than "a pig Auschwitz", where pigs were confined for their whole lives in tiny cages stacked three high, so that urine and feces from the upper tiers rained on the pigs lower down.

For some reason, the family that ran the farm invited him to dinner and he accepted. Clearly they weren't going offer him a vegan meal, but he declined the pork they offered (maintaining his cover by saying his doctor was worried about his cholesterol) and filled his plate with side dishes, and by keeping the discussion on the level of small talk managed to have a reasonably pleasant meal. He wondered at the contrast between their hospitality to him, and the treatment he had witnessed of the pigs.

All was well until, somehow, Robbins's cover was blown. The farmer began a tirade against "you animal rights people", saying how he didn't like being accused of mistreating his animals, but that was the way the business worked and he was doing what he had to do in order to feed his family.

But as he talked, the farmer was struck, with an almost physical force, by a long-buried memory. He began to tell Robbins how when he was a young boy, he'd had a pet pig. This man who now ran a hog farm that visited tremendous cruelty on pigs, had once had a pet pig, a sow which he'd treated with the greatest loving kindness. He explained how sometimes in the summer he would sleep in the barn with the pig alongside him, how she would come to him to have her belly rubbed, how the pig would go swimming with him and keep the family dog from bothering him.

And then this man who Robbins had been ready to judge so harshly as the owner of a "a pig Auschwitz" went on to tell how his father had made him slaughter and butcher his pet. Robbins tells the story:

"So I did it," he says, and now his tears begin to flow, making their way down his cheeks. I am touched and humbled. This man, whom I had judged to be without human feeling, is weeping in front of me, a stranger. This man, whom I had seen as callous and even heartless, is actually someone who cares, and deeply. How wrong, how profoundly and terribly wrong I had been.

...

I had judged him, and done so, to be honest, mercilessly. But for the rest of the evening I sat with him, humbled, and grateful for whatever it was in him that had been strong enough to force this long-buried and deeply painful memory to the surface. And glad, too, that I had not stayed stuck in my judgments of him, for if I had, I would not have provided an environment in which his remembering could have occurred.

It took several years for all the consequences of that heart opening conversation to play out. But as a result, a wonderful change occured. The farmer now runs a small organic vegetable farm. He eats a mostly vegetarian diet, and still keeps a few pigs -- for a "Pet-a-pig" program, where he brings school children out and shows them how intelligent and friendly pigs are, and sees to it that each of them gets the chance to give a pig a belly rub.

Had Robbins done what most of us would do when confronted with someone who fundamentally disagrees with our values, had he walked away in disgust from a table where the flesh foods he found repulsive were being served, a tremendous opportunity for furthering the compassionate treatment of all beings would have been lost. But because he was able to maintain compassion even for someone doing things he found horrible, a great step towards a more compassionate world was taken.

Compassion and mindfulness should lead us as far down the road toward a vegetarian diet as we can go in our circumstances -- maybe in one big jump, maybe in a series of small steps. But they should also remind us of the importance of not being a jerk about it.