This blog is serving as a tool in Christie's on-going attempts to have the best life she can despite the limmitations and challenges of a serious illness. It is a collection of observations, discoveries and questions she is collecting to help her design the life she wants, despite the limmitations and complications of this illness.




Friday, February 22, 2013

Killing, Vegetarianism and Buddhist Teachings


Since leaving the meditation center after the Jan. 30th 10-day meditation course, I have been learning all that I can about the ideas behind the Vipassana meditation techniques we learned. Included in this is a foundation of Buddhist teachings which I find fascinating and perhaps worth brining into my life. As I sort through these ideas, testing them against my own experience and beliefs, I find that much of what Mr. Goenka teaches (and the Buddha taught) fits with what I have experienced the world to be beautifully and opens up whole new, exciting possibilities as well. But there are a few pieces which do not fit, which I cannot yet reconcile with logic and reason. 


I am very drawn to these new (to me) ideas, for many reasons. One of those reasons is that so much of what Mr. Goenka taught in his discourses was truly non-sectarian - universal. That is so rare when one is teaching a value system by which to live. I have never come across another teaching so free of sectarian or cultural values and influence. That said, it seems to me that his teachings are not completely free of cultural influence or sectarian values. There are a few points which seem to me to be exactly that. I would like to explore these so that I may determine for myself if they truly are the influence of culture talking or if I am missing the way in which they apply universally.

My first question is about vegetarianism and killing. Mr. Goenka states, in his discourses, that one cannot kill without hate and anger. It is clear that Buddhist tradition feel very strongly that this is so. It is clear that the Buddhist teaching feels vegetarianism is the only choice for a truly enlightened person.

This strikes me as a cultural bias, not a universal truth.

To begin with, of course, is the fact that we all kill to eat, vegetarian or not. Why are the lives of plants less valued than the lives of animals? I have long had a sense (and the experience) that plants spirits are more organized by species than by individual plants. So I can see some reason, if this were known to be so, why killing a plant may not be the same as killing a human. If the spirit is not killed, perhaps the damage is not the same. But why assume this is so? Many cultures believe the same about Animals spirits. Many cultures believe animals share a common, universal species spirit and not individual spirits such as human beings have. Many cultures have long traditions of direct experience with this reality, just as the Buddha had direct experience with the reality of his past life experience. So why assume that killing animals to eat is any different than killing plants to eat? 

We all must kill to live. Dear as much as mountain lions. So why do Buddhists single out the mountain lions? Why give more importance to or value to the life of the animal than to the life of the plant? If the Buddha’s memories of past lives extended only to animal and human lives, perhaps he assumed the others were not eternal spirits in the same sense and did not value them as such? And if not, is that really justified? 

Or is the whole thing just anthropomorphic? We relate to animals as more like us, thus killing them is wrong and killing plants is not?

I have not found an answer here that satisfies me as of yet and would welcome input into these questions.

I also have further questions along this same issue. 

Let us leave aside the question of the value of a plant life vs. an animal life for a moment, and consider animals and humans.

Mr. Goenka states that one of the reasons killing is always wrong is that it harms the killer. He states that one cannot kill without anger or hate. This is not true. 

I raise horses. I often take in abused or injured horses and keep them, giving them a good home adn health care. I took in one such mare 10 years ago and she had a wonderful, largely pain free 10 years with me under my and my vet’s care. But she was quite old (late 30’s) and eventually nothing we did could stop the pain and damage to her joints. Finally she reached a point where pain meds did not help and she simply would not move, not even to walk 5 feet to get water or food. The vet did everything he could, but finally had to tell me there was nothing more to do. She was far beyond her expected lifespan anyway, a very old horse. And nothing we did was going to stop her from being in pain and unable to move. 

I hand fed her for three days, but that did not change the misery she was in. She simply stood and looked at me with those huge, deep eyes and finally I knew that she was waiting for me. Waiting for me to do what was my job to do. 

I had taken it upon myself to be responsible for her life for these past 10 years. And finally, I looked into her eyes and I heard her tell me that this responsibility included her death. That she needed to die. It was time. And it was my job to make that happen.

The vet agreed. My family agreed. But I did not want to have the vet give her a shot and end her life that way. Those shots fill the dead body with poison and any plant or animal that comes into contact with it will die. I wanted her body to return to the earth and give back to the land she loved. So I decided to kill her myself. With a gun.

I loaded her into a trailer and she went, walking for the first time in days, calmly and never looking back, keeping her eyes on me the whole time. And I took her to a back part of the mountains in which we live and led her into a quiet filed. And while she stared and me, calmly and quietly, I put a 45 to her head and pulled the trigger. 

She was dead before she hit the ground. 

And there was no hate or anger in my heart when I did it, only love, compassion and grief.

She was not harmed by this killing. She was only helped. I was harmed, I can tell you that. My soul was damaged by that killing. I still feel the blow, when I think about it. The violence of a gun… But how selfish would it have been of me to refuse to do what was right because it would hurt me? Because it would disturb my tranquility, my peace? 

As a rancher, I can tell you, this kind of killing happens all the time. I raise horses, rather than food animals, on my ranch. But even so, killing and dyeing are as much a part of my every day life as life and birth. An animal is too injured to survive, and animal is too old and in pain to have a good life. I have had my vet put down two beloved dogs over the years - one when age and illness made her life nothing but misery and one when a brain injury was clearly untreatable and he was dying slowly and with pain and fear. There was no anger or hate in my heart when I caused those beloved friends to die. Only love and compassion and grief.

How many times in the history of the world have such killings been done? Done to animals, done to humans. Killings of compassion and love without a trace of hate or anger involved. I have no doubt that these killings hurt the one’s doing the killing. But I am not convinced they had to. If I were truly enlightened, could I have found peace in ending my mare’s life? In doing for her this one last service, even the expense of my own feelings? Could that not someday bring pride and joy and love to my heart, rather than the jarring violence of a gunshot?

And if killing is not always done with hate and anger, than let us take that truth, and look further. Could one kill a healthy, happy animal for food without hate and anger? I can tell you it can be done. Is done. Has been done every day for tens of thousands of years.

We tried, on our ranch, to raise animals for food for a time. I am not willing to support the modern meat industry in which animals are given lives of misery and terror in order to be raised for food. But my husband and I are meat eaters, and we have not found adequate reason in the arguments we have heard for vegetarianism to change that. So, we decided to raise animals ourselves, giving them good, happy lives. And further, we did not want to subject them to terror and misery on the day of their deaths by loading them into trailers and taking them from their home to a saluter house. So we resolved to kill them and butcher them ourselves.

I went one step further. I love my animals. I name them, I know them. I refused to treat these food animals any differently. I refused to withhold my love and friendship from them just to save my own heart. (This, incidentally, is a pretty good way to create a vegetarian - I lost a lot of my love of meat this way.) When butchering day came, we brought the animal its favorite meal, led it a little away from the others, and quietly shot it in the head. It would have been less jarring, less upsetting to us to kill it in some other way. But the fact is that a shot to the head is the least upsetting way for the animal to die. They don’t even know what happened. They are dead before they even realize that anything unusual is going on.

So. Killing for food. I had not a trace of anger or hate in my heart when I killed those animals. Most farmers and ranchers don’t. Further, there have been many cultures upon this earth in which hunting game for food was a regular part of their existence, which did not turn to hate and anger in that killing. Many native american cultures had extensive traditions of respect and love for the animals which gave their lives for them to eat. My husband sometimes hunts dear for us to put int he freezer. He cries every time he shoots a dear, sitting over its beautiful body and mourning the loss of that life. But much of our meat comes from these dear.

Today, in our culture, most of us have the choice not to eat animals if we don’t want to. Most of us can get plenty of good, vegetarian food at the grocery store. So, there may be more to the question of whether it is cruel for me to eat meat, today. But lets simplify it one step further. Lets take me out of the picture.

What about Eskimos in ancient times? They had no ability to survive on plant matter. They had to hunt animals to survive. Only meat was available in the extreme northern climates and only that kind of intense protein and fat would get a person through in those climates anyway. So, is the Buddha saying that it is impossible for an eskimo to attain enlightenment? That no Buddha could have been born among the northern people? Surely not.

In such a culture, in such a climate, many peoples had beautiful, respectful and loving relationships with the animals they hunted, honoring them and respecting them for their sacrifice. Is it impossible to imagine that some of those people could have not only killed without anger or hate in their hearts, but even without doing the damage to themselves which killing does to me? Could they not have had such an understanding of the circle of life and their place in it that they felt only love, gratitude and reverence for the sacrifice made for them? That it did not leave a scar, do damage, to their spirits when hey killed, as it does to me?

The thing is, it is easy for someone who comes from a tropical culture to decide that it is wrong to kill animals to live. That vegetarianism is the holly way to go. Similarly, it is easy for those of us living in modern culture today, removed from the need to grow anything ourselves, able to simply go to the grocery store and get anything we want from anywhere int he world, to say that vegetarianism is the holly way to live. But that strikes me as a cultural bias, born of privilege. Born of the privilege of living in a country such as India, in which warm weather is the norm, and all things grow. Born of the privilege of living in modern society with money and access to all the foods of the world and no need to connect to the actual process of growing the foods yourself. Not to mention the privilege of living in a society that allows specialization to such an extent that many people never have to do hard, physical labor to survive, and thus, have very different needs than human beings living (as I do) in Montana might have had 500 years ago.

I have struggled with the question of vegetarianism for decades. A part of me longs to find the arguments for this way of life convincing enough to demand this choice for myself. But so far, I have not. And so far, the views about this and about killing in general, expressed by Mr. Goenka, look to me to be one of the few places in which his teachings leave the realm of the universal and are influenced by cultural bias. One of the few areas in which I see a gap between what he is claiming is truth and what my reason can agree with.

I would welcome any thoughts on these issues from whoever you think may be interested in engaging in this discussion with me.

Sincerely,

Christie Goodman

[This is the first in a series of letters and thoughts related to my stay at the Northwest Vipassana Center for a (free) 10-day course on Vipassana mediation. This course has influenced me greatly and is changing my life. ]

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