Tricycle | Awake in the World

Tricycle contributing editor Martine Batchelor, and Kerry Brown, via The Times of India, Dharma, for Buddhists, is the sacred law, morality and the teachings of the Buddha. It is also all things in nature. Cats, dogs, penguins, trees, humans, mosquitoes, sunlight, leaf dew are all dharmas. So at its very essence, Buddhism  can be described as an ecological religion or a religious ecology. The principles of love, compassion and respect for all life, are familiar to the Western mind but in recent centuries, we have restricted them to humans only. Even the law of karma (cause and effect) has some place in our thinking although without the universal and inescapable power it is given in Buddhist thought. The law of karma ultimately places mind as the first cause. More »

The way I see it, there are two ways to think about the ethics of meat eating. One is to look at the suffering of each individual animal that is killed for consumption. The other way is to take a global approach, where one is concerned with negative environmental/human consequences caused by the meat industry. Of course, you don't have to choose one over the other, it just seems worthwhile to make a distinction. With this distinction in mind I'd like to call attention to a recent piece by George Monbiot in The Guardian that argues that much of the human malnutrition connected to the meat industry could be alleviated most effectively by changing the system in which animals are farmed. The author, a longtime proponent of veganism, had some of his assumptions challenged by the book Meat: A Benign Extravagance by Simon Fairlie. From "I was wrong about veganism. More »