Is the Logic of Vegetarianism a Problem in Buddhist Thinking?

As a recent vegetarian, one of the difficulties I deal with is limiting my choices of food. I’ve learned that true ritualized vegetarianism, the kind found in Buddhism that was meant to spare violence against animal life does not stop with the partaking of the flesh of an animal. It challenges us to go beyond this prohibition and consider the manufacturing facilities where diary is also produced. I started thinking about this when my wife recently brought to my attention the fact that dairy cows, even on so-called organic farms, are often treated harshly and their non-milk producing male offspring born on such farms are destroyed.

This kind of violence is not a direct concern in Buddhism. One obvious reason may lie in the fact that the early texts dealt with cycles of life (samsara) in which mass-production facilities did not exist. For overall efficiency, even on organic farms, which face growing demands for their products as healthier alternatives, disposing of the young and violently beating non-compliant animals is much easier than it would have been for a subsistent farmer living in South East Asia, even several hundred years ago, whose family relied on the lives of its livestock. Buddhism is often charged by its Western cousins with not “towing the line” when it comes to modern ethical issues. And there may be truth to this. But my reflection is also non-scholarly, and it is certainly something I will be exploring in the days to come.

Violence in such situations depends much more on where you get your products rather than right-to-life issues that come with slaughtering animals. Production awareness goes into very difficult areas, one such being our patronage of any company who participated or participates in some kind of evil. It is what we call in Christianity, sins of omission and sins of commission, and it assumes in the first that there is a standard of evil one must recognized universally. On a real level, Buddhism has this too. After all, one’s skillfulness (kosala), instead of morality, is often spoken of, and is part of the very fabric of life. Since there is no supreme lawgiver, the law is all that is front of us.

We might not be able to talk about right or wrong and only intentionality, but then we could appeal to any such argument to make our case for eating meat as well!

For example, I did not intend to kill any animal, but now that the meat is in front of me, I will eat.

While one might take pause here, it should be made clear that Tibetan monks would traditionally eat whatever was given to them in their begging bowls (patta). While many villagers are conscientious to provide vegetarian meals for the monks today, we know historically that this did not always happen, but on occasions portions were meat. Furthermore, legend tells us that the death of our historical Buddha occurred when he accepted what was put in front of him (a plate of spoiled food). Siddhartha knew what it was, but since gratitude was thought a more skillful action than self-preservation, he chose the former path and died.

So is the logic of vegetarianism a problem in Buddhist thinking? Only insofar as we must expand it to cover the whole range of nonviolent activities. And this inevitable mucks the waters.  

 

Was Jesus’ Vision of Lazarus in Hell of Egyptian Origin?

Did you hear the one about the rich man who dies and goes to hell and sees his servant enjoying himself in Abraham’s bosom? Well, apparently so did Jesus, and just as Proverbs shares a common heritage with the Egyptian wisdom of Amenemope, it seems that Jesus was also familiar with a more ancient story, the Tale of Khaemweset than the one he sets out in the gospels about a certain rich man named Lazarus.

It is important to remember that is no hell in ancient Judaism like the one we imagine in Christianity. At best we get a spectral realm, much like in ancient Greek thought, where people go, but do not perish under insurmountable conditions – they kind of just linger. In Hebrew they might be called צֵל, because the word for soul נָ֫פֶשׁ usually refers to a living body, not a spirit as in Christianity. And while we do have later tales that bring out forms of punishment (Sisyphus and the rolling boulder, for example), it seems clear to me that Jesus is not thinking in his inveterate Jewish tradition at this point in his story. One might argue that he was thinking like a Maccabean Jew, where the concept of afterlife revenge becomes important just a few hundred years prior to Jesus’ life, but by this time there was so much intermingling in Hellenistic thought that not even the Tannaim Jews considered the story of the Maccabees a part of their heritage (one reason it is not considered an authority book).

When we look to Egypt, however, we get an altogether different image. Here gods like Shezmu, squeezes his victims in a wine press. Judgment is very much a feature of the underworld as well. Mummies are unwrapped of their wrappings and thrown into fire pits. The sun god Ra ignores the screams and tortures of the dead, who are separated from their souls and go hungry and thirsty for all eternity. Christianity’s vision of hell is much closer to this than anything in Judaism.

The Tale of Khaemweset, which was discovered on the back of a papyrus for a land registry, it is thought, also comes under the influence of Hellenistic thought (and so probably closer to Jesus than the more ancient tales of Egyptian hells), but what is unique in the story is the very thing Jesus preaches in the gospels. That the last shall be first, the first shall be last, and those who you think had everything in this life are subject to harsh punishments in the next.

Though I’m sure I don’t speak for all, but conservative Christians tend to like this story because it supposedly reveals Jesus’ preternatural power, his deity flashing through his humanity, as he tells his followers about his own encounter with hell, in a story out of time. And of course, there are modifications to this story. The afterlife is now associated with Abraham’s bosom, though it should be noted that like the realm of the blessed in Egypt, both the righteous and evil dead are spirited to their final resting places through the same corridor (so to speak). In the Egyptian tales, the righteous ones use talismans and spells to fight through demonic hordes as they make their way to paradise. The idea that one uses the same corridor is much more detailed in the eponymous account of hell attributed to Josephus where a psychopomp or a guide carries the soul of the dead down one of two paths.

It is however difficult to ignore the similarities between Jesus’ and Kaemwese’s account. Of all the possible visions of hell available to the Son of God, one wonders why he chooses the one that already had great traction in his world. Could he have been testifying to the universal nature of the religious vision? Was he simply sharing something, to call to mind, a reality that his listeners may have been familiar with through folktales to inspire in them right conduct? At any rate, there is good evidence that the Egyptians exerted a significant influence on other stories in Jewish scripture, so why not here as well?

Living Your Infinitesimally Short Life Meaningfully

The impermanence of life…oh how it reigns true in our religious traditions! Coming into Thanksgiving, it reminds us to be thankful where we are and spread ourselves thin for the benefit of others.

Here are four examples of reflections on impermanence: Two from the New Testament, one from the Jewish Bible, and the other is a story from the Jodo Shinshu tradition of Buddhism. Two are exhortations; the other two are narrative examples.

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.” Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.” – The Epistle of James 4:13-16

The Master said, “One day, on my way to Kyoto, I went to Moji and stayed at a hotel where I waited for the departure of my boat. My room was upstairs. In the next room was a merchant who was intently reckoning on an abacus. Before long, a servant of the lodging house told us that the departure time would come soon. The merchant packed his account books and abacus in his wicker trunk and got on board with other passengers. When the boat set sail, he produced those things and resumed his work. Being his roommate, I thought to myself: What wonderful timing! If he had not stopped his work when the departure time was announced, he would have missed the boat. How amazing it is that he stopped his work in time and got on the boat while he admirably resumed his work once on board! “When I urge people to listen to the Dharma, they would say ‘I am busy with my work,’ or ‘I am too young to listen to the Dharma’. They do not know that the wind of impermanence can suddenly blow at any time. Why do they not learn from this merchant? Why do they not first get on board the Boat of the Vow of Great Compassion and then keep themselves busy with secular work?” – a story from Master Gôjun Shichiri (1835-1900)

 

And he told them this parable: “The ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’ “Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain. 19 And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”’ “But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’ “This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.”  - The Gospel of Luke 12:16-21

Rejoice, young man, while you are young, and let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth. Follow the inclination of your heart and the desire of your eyes, but know that for all these things God will bring you into judgment. – Ecclesiastes 11:9

Five World Religions' Eschatologies and Their Common Thread

Eschatology may be described as the end-time dreams of religious peoples and cultures with a vision towards the future that is often connected to the present. Existentially rendered, eschatology is the hopeful longing for a golden age and a time beyond the Sitz im Leben of the author, whose future reality nevertheless is codified in the images and symbols of the present.

Yet all eschatologies rely on hypothetical realities that attempt to create severe breaks with the reality they present even while they remain intimately close to the language and imagery of their time. Most extraordinary, and what I want to explore here, is that so many eschatologies that are culturally and geographically distant from one another bear striking similarities.

Are these similarities merely accidental? Are they guided by some universal revelation? Or do they speak to a supernal longing in each one of us for an age of salvation, justice, or peace? An age in which we matter because what we believe is finally validated.

Let’s take a very brief look at five possible eschatologies as they appear in the major religions of the world, that either help shape or form a part of the overall experience of their religions.

Buddhism

Known as the manifestation of the Buddhas in ten directions, Buddha Maitreya is the savior of humanity in the Buddhist tradition. He comes at a time when Buddhism has been forgotten from the earth and thus he returns to deliver its message once again. Whether or not the passage in the Pali canon where this occurs is apocryphal, it is accepted as part of the repertoire among the three major traditions. In the passage from the Maitreyavyakarana, the world is thought to look very much like the ideal Buddhist paradise, in which men will fall into trancelike meditations, their cravings swept underfoot, and their morality will be amplified. They will live without homes, families, and possessions. All of these of course are recognizable Buddhist ephemera. No doubt in every religion, heaven, hell, and every unexamined meta-reality in between looks much like the religious reality’s doctrine or image of their idealistic conditions which they fight to keep stabilized in this world.

Christianity

In Christianity, Jesus returns at a time when anti-Christ destroys the world so that he instigates a battle between God and the devil. Jesus returns as a warrior king to set the world right once again. He reestablishes God’s place on earth. While many Christians attempt to sophisticate and sanitize this eschatology by placing it squarely in the gospels as something Jesus brought into the here-and-now (or a form of realized eschatology to deconstruct completely the language of the epoch in which it was written), it is clear that the Book of Revelation uses the kind of imagistic creatures and drama that other cultures also imagine in their own scriptures and sacred writings. All peoples will eventually come to worship Jesus in Jerusalem.
Judaism

Judaism requires that the world completely repair itself (tikkun olam) so that the ground is ripe and sanctified for the return of Messiah. This end-times figure, whether Elijah redivivus or not, is very much a co-signer to the tradition of Messiah that held three primary goals as far back as David: A House for the Lord, a House for David, and the Establishment of Land. Thus, a third temple will be constructed, the Messiah will be someone from the House of David, descendant from his line, and all Jews will eventually come back to the land they are to possess. And what of the rest of us? Well, God dwelling among his people and the world knowing who God is will come to him and worship him, although the manner is unclear. It does not necessarily seem like mass conversion will be necessary. Maybe like Cyrus the Great, God’s first messiah, he will only require tribute. This tripartite formula is also found in Christianity's Book of Revelation.

Hinduism

Kalki, the final incarnation of Vishnu offers one such eschatological vision in Hinduism. Kalki, like Jesus comes on a white horse with a sword (in his hand not like Christianity in his mouth). This metahistorical narrative takes place after the Kali Yuga, or this present age, in which death and destruction are the rule and not the exception. The golden age, or more accurately Satya Yuga, comes as a time in which peace will rule and all violence will cease. Like our Jewish friends who believe in the reestablishment of the temple, so our Indian friends taking from their own practices envision the end as one in which meditation is supremely important and as an inevitable establishment as something universal.

Consider the following sutta:

"Lord Kalki, the Lord of the universe, riding His swift horse Devadatta and, sword in hand, will travel over the earth exhibiting His eight mystic powers and eight special qualities of Godhead. Displaying His unequalled effulgence and riding with great speed, He will kill by the millions those thieves and rogues who have dared dress as kings."

Islam

Mahdi, in Islam, comes only from the extra-canonical hadiths, where he is said to assist Jesus in his parousia (second coming). In numerous views that accept the Madhi, he brings in an Islamic age of law and various practices intrinsic to Islamic ritual. Like Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and even Buddhism, it comes as the ultimate vengeance against a religious world that is divided. Umma Salam, a wife of Muhammad, was said to have stated that the Madhi will wipe out all superstitions save Islam. Unbelievers will come to believe and follow Sharia Law.

Some Final Thoughts

In ages where such religions have been marginalized in their earthly forms, their eternal forms no doubt offer a kind of reprisal in which not only they but all people take over the characteristics of their religions. In effect, it is a type of victory narrative.

In all of these eschatologies, they immediately follow our age, which makes it all the more imperative that we as the generation that is going to bring all this upon us act soberly and responsibly. Of course in religions where there are no channels or cycles of rebirth, it makes sense to think that from the Axial Age onward (900 – 500 BCE) when the knowledge of religion increases and ever sophisticates, humankind represents the zenith of its own longings.

Those like Rudyard Kipling who say that East and West are too far apart, forget that there were incursions, even in the Axial Age, where religions touched. For example, the kingdom of the Buddhist Gandhara was interdicted by Greek Hellenistic influences, typified in much of the architecture. It was during this time that glimpses of Maitreya could be seen most prominently often in some combination with Greek gods. Could this be because the Greeks, who followed Christ hundreds of years later, were interested connoisseurs of religion, as we see in the melding of the Logos of Stoicism with the Messiah of Judaism? All food for thought…

In the end (excuse the pun), there is much in common with the way religious peoples think about themselves and the end of the world. Many see a victory for their way of life, their ideology, etc.