The Meat of the Matter
In the West, I ate beef and bacon with abandon. I was raised on Southern Black cooking. which is all about the pig. Everything–with maybe the exception of dessert–is cooked with bacon fat. The kitchen was never really fully stocked without a coffee can of drippings standing by for the next round of greens, or eggs, or whatever. And beef? As close as the nearest grocery store: steak, hamburger,…
Now I live in an area where eating beef is a stoning offense. Cows are sacred here: they provide the all important milk, which in turn produces butter, yogurt, paneer, and treats like milk fudge. The cows wander freely along the roads, stopping at the produce wallahs’ stalls to graze on the unsellable leavings. They have a serenity about them that Western cows do not. I think the attitude comes from the certainty that they will not be randomly killed for their meat or their hides, and that for the most part they have the right of way over taxis, buses, and even police cars.
A couple weeks back Joy observed that owning a cow here in Himachal is not easy. Feeding a cow and keeping it healthy is hard work. Every day we see farm wives walking along the road, porting the next load of long grass or succulent tree branches for a cow’s next meal. The arable portions of Himachal’s hilly landscape are dedicated to crops of people food. The idea of committing a large parcel of land, and water to keep it green, just for a cow to stay in, is an alien concept. So the whole cow-eating thing, in addition to being a religious misdeed, is also an economic one. Raising a cow just for its meat alone is not economically viable here.
To be fair, Rewalsar is not a vegetarian town, certainly not with its large Tibetan population. Instead, sheep, goats, and chickens take up the slack. Meat buying here is nothing like its Western counterpart: no sterile styrofoam trays or plastic wrap; no additives or preservatives; no neatly shaped identical bits of anything. Instead, there’s a carcass or two in the window, plus various hunks on a counter. You point at the hunk or carcass you want, specify a weight in kilos, and get handed a flimsy plastic bag filled with raw sheepy (or (goaty) bits.
What am I to make of the American way, then, of meat eating? Lately I’ve been reading about a strange phenomenon where people will happily eat meat as long as nothing about it reminds them that the meat actually came from an animal. They eat things that have had all bones, skin and funky innards carefully trimmed away, or have been transformed into sausage or hamburger. They don’t want any reminders that the steak or hamburger or whatever was once a living being that was up and walking around. They don’t want to think about blood, butchery, and guts. There are children who are convinced that milk comes from…a box. Or the store. Certainly not any kind of animal. This is not an attitude I think much of. I could rant about it here, but Barbara Fisher over at Tigers and Strawberries did it a lot better.
Here such knowledge is unavoidable. There’s no way to purchase meat or a meat-based meal here without knowing these things. In our favorite momo restaurant, the meat is chopped and prepped on a tree stump, and fed through the grinder, right next to the tables. Herds of sheep and goats occasionally clog the road as they travel from one grazing spot to the next. Every day, as I walk down the path the town, I pass the neighbor’s cows, one of whom provides the morning milk. Sometimes I’ll say a few manis for them as I go by. The idea of ignoring what these creatures give for my table (and my cat dishes) is absurd.
In the midst of all this gastronomic pondering, the Dharma friend of a Dharma friend happened by the house. (Hi, Lise!) She dropped off as a gift a small book titled The Udamwara Lotus Flower Protecting the Life of Helpless Beings: Statements from sutra relating to the eating of meat, by Geshe Thubten Soepa. Wow, talk about timely. But sometimes, the Dharma just be like dat, you know? I haven’t finished the book yet, but it relays beautiful quotes from the various sutras about meat eating, and the conditions under which you can do it. It’s an interesting work, because so many Tibetans and Tibetan Buddhists are meat eaters, following the traditions of their high-altitude diet. Western Buddhists who believe that all Buddhists are vegetarian tend to be a little startled when they encounter their first lama or ani sedately dining on a plate of momos, or slicing tidbits off the bone of a nice piece of pressure-cooked mutton.
The Tibetans worked out a few compromises. It’s not evil to eat meat that has not been killed specifically for that purpose–say, if a sheep or yak simply missteps and falls down a steep hillside, slice it up and put it in your cook pot. Too, there’s a belief that it’s better karmically to kill a large animal for food, and thus feed a lot of people at once, than it is to kill a much smaller one for only one or two folks. So no birds, fish, or bugs (like shrimp or lobster) in a traditional Tibetan Buddhist diet. (Anyone who’s gone for the all-you-can-eat Shrimp platters at Sizzler can feel really guilty now.) At a meal featuring meat, there’s also a meat blessing to be said over the plates before eating, to improve the animal’s karma for having fed others. Ignorance, by the way, is not a virtue: according to Udamwara Lotus, if you can’t tell whether the meat got to your table appropriately, you shouldn’t eat it.
So far the most startling thing is this quote from the Angulimala Sutra, discussing the cat situation by name. Cats, unlike people, are dedicated carnivores, despite the millennia of domestication.
“…beings that have previously been cats, constantly attached to eating meat, and beings that reject Buddha nature will all become rakshas [blood-thirsty cannibals] resembling cats. In the future, too, beings that have taken the form of cat-like rakshas and find killing others and meat-eating irresistible, will be the same as beings that have turned away from Buddha nature.”
That’s pretty plain. But what about short-lived kitties like Smoke, and Tiger, who moved on to their next incarnations never having tasted meat, or developed a craving for it? And having received a blessing from an enlightened master beforehand? Hm….
One other Buddhist practice I want to touch on is the one of liberating animals. In this practice animals are bought back from butchers and pet shops, and released back into the wild to live more natural lives. In the West this practice may be as prosaic as buying a bunch of worms and sardines from the bait shop, and releasing them back into the countryside, or the seashore. Here in India and nearby countries, it’s not uncommon for practictioners to buy sheeps, goats and chickens for release. I don’t know how many creatures our teacher Lama Wangdor Rimpoche has liberated, but I understand it’s quite a few. One very good Dharma of ours in the West added something extra to her practice of animal liberation: each animal her teacher ceremonially liberated, she stopped eating. The year he released fish, she stopped eating fish; the year he released some sheep, she stopped eating mutton, and so on.
Outside of Buddhism, there’s an interesting animal-liberating concept that’s gaining in popularity: sustainability. Critics of America’s methods of industrial food production point out that the big-business farm methods produce food that is less healthy, increase animal suffering, damage the environment, and make it economically desirable to buy processed food preserved with chemicals, rather than fresh produce and dairy products. These methods are doable, certainly, especially with government subsidies to big agri-business, but they’re not sustainable in the long run. People, animals, and the environment all suffer long-term effects that may take generations to recover from.
In sustainable methods, farmers and ranchers work on a smaller scale, allowing animals to range freely, and making sure their methods make environmental sense. One of the side-effects of sustainability is that as it gains in popularity, more and more people are thinking about what they eat. There’s a mindfulness to learning the backstory of one’s groceries that somewhat resembles the mindfulness of determining whether the meat on the menu is karmically sound.
Americans. Thinking about what they eat. Crazy, ain’t it? Or am I crazy, for not thinking about what I eat, until I shifted countries?
