So] 62 November 2003 Compassionate Mindfulness Andrew Skilton gives a personal perspective of a Buddhist approach to other species.
I am proud of my ‘bug plug’! For an outlay of around £35 this electronic pest repeller will banish all kinds of pests from my house with inaudible and painless ultrasonic sound, it claims. Money wasted? We'll see — but I was pleased to have the opportunity to discontinue my cohabitation with various insects and arachnids (nothing larger was at issue) without resorting to the simple and some would say proper resource of killing them with poison or my foot. This concern in its turn has a twofold origin — on the one hand my interest in and practice of Buddhism and on the other a more direct empathy with life in other creatures. The two have informed each other over the years, as I think is right — after all, what value have ideas or doctrines that are not rooted in experience and consideration of others? Can not our raw or untutored responses and sensations be helpfully guided by the wisdom of others?
The problem arises from my own concern for life and the ease with which we as a species deprive others of it — either through death or the infliction of degrees of suffering. My concern is expressed in other ways too, interpretation of this rule allows modern monks to accept meat freely, since modern industrialised food processing produces a surplus of dead flesh killed for no-one in particular. We need only reflect on the reality of ancient agrarian village economies, in which livestock was a precious rarity and the connection between slaughter and hospitality for an honoured guest was direct and immediate, to understand this rule in its intention, i.e. the Buddhist community should not be the cause of a creature being deprived of life. The host then has no reason to kill, since he knows that the object of his hospitality would not accept the gift.
This focus on intention is intentional, of course! By the Buddha himself, ethical conduct is fundamentally defined in terms of intention, cetand, thus emphasising that it is our active intention that determines the ethical character of a given deed rather than the mere act itself. While this too It is profoundly affecting to allow ourselves to live with members of other species in a non-instrumental fashion including vegetarianism (since 1976), though non-Buddhists might be surprised to read that my debate over this particular practice unexpectedly incorporates two parties. I cannot count the number of times a fellow Buddhist has, with a smirk, unnecessarily informed me that 'the Buddha was not a vegetarian’. This supposedly earth-shattering piece of information is usually delivered at a restaurant table when it has become clear that I am avoiding the meat dishes. If even so fundamental a matter as the unnecessary killing of other creatures for sustenance is not clearly determined within Buddhism, can one then even begin to speak coherently of a Buddhist position regarding animal rights?
Some of the groundwork for this debate can be found in the monastic regulations of various Asian traditions of Buddhism, regulations that are authorised by posthumous attribution to the Buddha. For example, South East Asian monastics, who are supposed to receive all food in the form of donations, are exhorted not to accept meat if they even suspect that it was killed for their consumption. A legalistic So] 62 November 2003 can be diverted through casuistry to an argument for ‘harmless' or ‘necessary’ killing, its purpose is to endow the individual with ethical responsibility, to disallow claims to convention, precedent or duty to justify unethical, i.e. harmful, behaviours. Am I right to characterise the unethical as ‘harmful’? We can turn for guidance to the most fundamental ethical principle in the Buddhist tradition, expressed universally as the 'training principle’ (sikkhapada) not to deprive living beings of life. This precept, invariably the first of various sets of other precepts, is undertaken by all Buddhists, often being chanted regularly, perhaps daily or on festivals and at ceremonies.
Its meaning, quite unambiguous in the extreme seminar scenarios of murder or assault, cannot in my judgement be divorced from ordinary banal daily activities, such as eating.
Yet historically, although often interpreted as requiring vegetarianism in East Asia, this precept has not been enough to keep many Buddhists from the casual and regular consumption of dead flesh. Cultural factors undoubtedly have had a hand in determining this — it is a sad fact that many Asian Buddhists have been vegetarian simply because meat has been too expensive — or rather, they have been too poor — and the converse of this is that meat has often been a prestige food, a sign of wealth and success the power of which has overwhelmed what it means to acquire it. We could doubtless call to account other cultural and psychological factors, but I find it more relevant here to reflect on what it is that is missing that allows us so casually to condone the consumption and implicitly the slaughter of other creatures. Anyway, mere rule-based behaviour is fraught with moral difficulties and by the Buddhist criterion of intention fails to be ethical — wishing not to be caught is not an ethical motivation.
The missing component is surely some degree of empathy. We regularly resort or resign ourselves to some degree of dissociation from other creatures so as to allow the working upon them to their detriment of harmful actions. It is an easily observable phenomenon that many meat eaters recoil in horror if confronted by the very processes of farming, slaughter and preparation that brings 'meat products’ into their unthinking gastronomy. Similar responses emerge to the reality of medical experimentation on animals as well as to the casual exploitation of natural resources, whether animal populations in the wild or the consumption of their habitat. How does this occur and can we counter it?
At this point I tend to reflect on the spontaneous revulsion that one may feel towards these things and its almost systematic suppression. I cannot usefully analyse here the cultural and psychological threads of such disempathy, though as a society we are gradually becoming familiar with its function either in communities that condone or perform genocide or in families where the survival of individual victims depend upon it. I do however note at least two factors that influence us and facilitate such dis-empathy. One is practical and one ideological.
It is profoundly affecting to allow ourselves to live with members of other species in a non-instrumental fashion. To live 'in association’ with another creature, to allow oneself to acknowledge its identity, its difference from us and from each other, its 'desire to be’ on its own terms, strikes a profound resonance with these same things in ourselves — things which many of us, in a pragmatic sense take to define our humanity. Our increasing lack of contact with the natural world and members of other species greatly facilitates dis-empathy. The absence of some instrumental interest is crucial here —I cannot forget the absurdity of an assurance that I once received that meat farmers ‘loved' (and emphasis was on that last word) their livestock. The main thread of the history of humankind's interaction with animal communities is one of ruthless exploitation and surely the workshop in which the ground rules of species dissociation, of dis-empathy, were worked out.
At the same time, behaviours are intimately intertwined with ideologies. Many cultures sustain practices that require the full acknowledgement of an animal's identity and right to life even as it is slaughtered, but more pernicious are those that endorse or even sanctify the dissociation of which I am writing. The fault line of this dissociation is of course usually around the human species as a whole, but we can sadly recall too many occasions where this line runs between even human communities, and religion, as a vehicle for these views, which clearly has had an alarming and fearful role in this activity. The belief that the natural world is 'provided' for humanity's enjoyment or the evocation of the absence of intangible, non-verifiable attributes ('souls') have, for example, clearly endorsed a profound dis-empathy with our fellow animals.
The Buddhist tradition is perhaps therefore distinguished by a number of pragmatic activities that can help alleviate us of the burden of dis-empathy with our fellow animals. I am thinking here primarily of various kinds of meditation, by which I mean forms of mental technology that allow us personally to transform our own mental states. At the most fundamental level this transformation is from relatively ‘unwholesome' towards relatively ‘wholesome’ states, typically characterised by calm, clarity and genuinely loving or benevolent feelings towards other creatures. I might include alongside meditation the encouragement to experience oneself, if only occasionally, in isolation in a natural environment — the eremitical experience has engendered some of the most tender yet unsentimental evocations of our solidarity with the natural world —I am thinking for example of some of the so-called songs of the Tibetan hermit Milarepa.
At the same time the ideology of Buddhism allows that in most respects human beings cannot be differentiated from animals other than by their capacity to choose — a capacity greatly enhanced in human beings through their capacity to understand. Buddhism thus emphasises the continuity of experience between species and the shared fragility of life. The Jataka stories, the most popular section of Buddhist scripture, frequently depict animals as the primary agents in touching and occasionally comic stories illustrating Buddhist virtues such as compassion, intelligence, or fortitude. Notably, in Buddhist stories animals are often depicted with the capacity to reach beyond their animal natures to perform noble acts and it is not insignificant that each story concludes with the identification of the virtuous animal with a former existence of the Buddha. Indeed the entire framework of rebirth, not in itself a distinctively Buddhist belief, is interpreted to imply that all creatures have at one time or another been an intimate and loved relation.
But the most fundamental solidarity with other creatures is our shared susceptibility to death — the inevitable outcome of all lives. As human beings our fundamental spiritual challenge is to reconcile ourselves to impermanence, which we experience most crucially in death. While we seek to make the death of members of our species seem to ourselves rare or exceptional, the poignant death of a fellow animal can recall us to our true animal nature and thereby to our humanity.
Andrew Skilton D. Phil. is a Senior Lecturer in Buddhist Studies and Director of Postgraduate Research in the School of Religious and Theological Studies, Cardiff University. sof 62 November 2003 Humane Killing and Humane Living Andrew Tyler reflects on religious practices of killing and a religious way of living.