Enlightened Eating

In the early days of January, I was fortunate enough to be sitting in an audience watching one of the best plays I’ve seen in quite some time, August; Osage County by Tracy Letts. Well into the second act of, get ready, a three-act play, there is a dinner scene. The scene lasts a good twenty minutes and has to be the best group scene since the dinner in Act I of The Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov, which is a pretty darn good play. Toward the beginning of the dinner a young female character is asked why she is a vegetarian and she turns to her Uncle and explains that it is because she does not want to ingest fear.

Now I won’t reprint the conversation here, but I was frozen in my seat. The playwright had pulled the argument straight from my head, or so it seemed. Anyway, it led me to attempt to articulate why, as I announced in my last post, vegetarianism is a matter of enlightenment.

Buddhists are vegetarian. Actually, that is not true. Buddhism, like Christianity changed in many ways as it was exported from its home in India to many of the countries that we now associate with Buddhism; China, Japan, Nepal etc. However, any Buddhist who attempts to adhere to the original teachings of the historical Buddha needs to be a vegetarian, but many have strayed from the original teachings in many different and sometimes significant ways.

Now it must be understood that Buddhists are not ‘commanded’ to be this or that, as Christians, Jews and Muslim’s are, nor do you have to believe anything or sign onto anything or recite any sort of a creed at the outset. There is no test or baptism or entry or hazing that is involved before you can begin showing up and practicing Buddhism. The practice is called the eightfold path to enlightenment, which has many components, the scope of which we are not concerned with now. What is important to note is that the results of the pursuit of the path to enlightenment are fairly predictable and form the basic doctrine of Buddhism but it is essential that you reach these realizations, in your own time, of your own accord and experientially.

The practice of Buddhism involves several things but the most important is Vipassana meditation, sometimes referred to as Insight meditation. All meditation techniques are beneficial, some more than others, but they differentiate themselves primarily by what they choose as the focus of your attention. Some select sounds or mantra’s, some visualizations, etc. The Buddha taught a technique that used the sensations of the body as its focal point.

Most people don’t spend much time investigating the continual stream of sensations that our physical bodies transmit unless they rise to a point where they can’t be ignored. Pain, itching, burning, tickling, pulsing, tingling, etc. All these are examples of sensations that we constantly feel, and many more. Pressure, cold, wetness, throbbing, etc.

Allow me to describe, in an overly swift and truncated way , one particular realization. One slowly becomes aware, through the practice of this type of meditation, of the inseparability of mind and body. One then appreciates the uniqueness and wonder of matter that is animated and has a consciousness attached to it. The Buddhists refer to these as sentient beings. We humans are the most intelligent of sentient beings but all animals also fall into this category. They too have an awareness and a consciousness that arises from, and is inextricably attached to the bodies they possess. They too experience all the sensations we do, although they do not have the capacity to observe them with detachment like a practicing Buddhist, none-the-less they experience them just like we do. If you kick a cow, does it not feel pressure and pain?

Once you have spent time observing your own existence in this way, noticing that what you are is both always changing and always bound by this communion of mind and body, you cannot help but look into the eyes of any animal and see a slightly more primitive reflection of that incomprehensible marriage of matter and consciousness.

The irony is that any Christian, who has his or her thinking cap on, would categorize this as a miracle, one of God’s most impressive. But for whatever reason their sense of wonder and awe extends only as far as humans are concerned and no farther. Buddhists extend their sense of wonder and respect to any sentient being. And out of respect for the consciousness that resides inside animals, and out of an experiential knowledge, through meditation, that we are essentially the same, Buddhists do not kill, not people, not animals, and, as the character in Tracy Lett’s play insists, it is not good to ingest the fear that is inevitably felt by the consciousness of the steer who’s head is pinned just prior to a spike being driven into it’s skull.

The eightfold path to enlightenment, by definition, leads a person from ignorance to enlightenment. Not ignorance in the pejorative sense, but as it’s Greek root suggests, in the “not knowing” sense. There is no way that one can follow the logical progression of the path to enlightenment and not conclude, early on, that the destruction of any example of the miraculous marriage of mind and matter is anathema to the pursuit. So I can safely say, and with confidence, that vegetarianism is a byproduct of enlightenment.