sentient beings are numberless, ...
I was living in Manchester when The Smiths released the album 'Meat is Murder', and although, for some reason I still don't quite understand, I never went to see them (I know, I know, you don't have to say it) the music had a huge impact. My favourite song of all time is still 'How Soon is Now?' and, although I'd become a vegetarian a couple of years before, 'Meat is Murder' confirmed and supported me in that decision.
One Christmas I earned some money working on a turkey farm but didn't eat any of the meat I'd killed. I think I might have even quoted Morrisey at the table; "And the calf that you carve with a smile, is murder/and the turkey you festively slice, is murder/do you know how animals die?" A left-wing teenage Smiths fan down from Manchester for the holiday, I must have been a right pain in the neck.
But the vegetarianism stuck. Not always perfectly. Tess will happily remind me of the huge fry-ups we'd get through in the Bethnal Green cafe on Sunday mornings in the late eighties in which I'd eat enough sausage and bacon in one sitting to make a mockery of my weekday abstinence. But mostly I remember vegetarian pasta and, later, carrying my commitment abroad. I lived a year in Turkey without tasting a kebab.
Now I can't remember the last time I ate meat. I think it may have been the chicken noodles served to me in a Thai temple about two years ago which I was too polite to refuse. And I can't see myself ever choosing to eat meat again. Dao helped, she was happy to cook veggie food for me, and Ikumi is the same. And she prepares the greatest veggie packed lunches for when we go to the park.
We are responsible for what we do. Even if you believe that karmic burdens can be lightened by prostrations or absolved by a vow-fulfilling Buddha, our actions have consequences. Take bacon. Pigs are continually impregnated until slaughtered. Piglets are taken away and their tails are chopped off, pliers are taken to their teeth, and male piglets have their testicles ripped out of their scrotums. All without painkillers.
The sow, more intelligent than a three year old child, perfectly able to recognise her own name, to dream, to enjoy music and play ball games, is forced to live in a filthy crate, too small for her to turn around in. She never gets to do the things she loves, never sees the sun or grass, never experiences fresh air, never gets to rear her children; they are slaughtered, daily, in their thousands, for your BLT.
The Buddha's first precept was not to kill. Bacon demands not just killing, but some of the most extreme cruelty imaginable. Mother pigs never get to exercise, and develop open untreated sores from a lifetime pressed against cold concrete and steel. The pigs whose flesh you eat live in conditions so barbaric that they are able to stay alive only with massive doses of antibiotics, even then many die, their rotting corpses left where they fall.
"Aware of the suffering caused by the destruction of life, I undertake to cultivate compassion and learn ways to protect the lives of people, animals, plants, and minerals. I am determined not to kill, not to let others kill, and not to condone any act of killing in the world." Of course we all fall short, of course we all mess up, but eating meat is to intentionally disregard the first precept.
I read once that the young Buddha, still living in the palace with his family, wept at the annual earth-breaking ceremony, aware that everything we consume necessitates some level of killing. Later he went on to say "All beings tremble before danger, all fear death. When a man considers this, he does not kill or cause to kill,"
(Dhammapada 129) and in the Mahaparinirvana Sutra he said "The eating of meat extinguishes the seed of great compassion."
If Buddhism is more than just a fashion, requiring nothing of its followers save the buying of a trendy image for their living space, then those who consider themselves Buddhist must live the Buddha's message - and start with the basics. A Buddhist who eats meat is not only causing the death of animals, is not only taking what is not freely offered, but is also eroding Buddhist ethical teaching. That's one hell of a lot of karma.
This post is a composite from older journal entries and comments I posted yesterday with an undercover PETA investigation video. But I don't want to fill this blog with gruesome videos, I prefer a nice picture of a temple cat. Still, do please visit the PETA site and watch some of their videos. Take some action. Write to the companies involved, and don't eat meat. The moment you put an animal's flesh in your mouth you support unspeakable cruelty.
Yes, of course all eating involves suffering. Yes, of course the precepts are impossible to keep. The point is to work towards them, to make constant effort to reduce the amount of suffering you cause in the world as much as you realistically can. And, yes, realistically, that means not eating body parts torn from sentient beings. If you want more love in the world, just don't eat meat.
It really is that simple. Morrisey is right, "It's death for no reason". Over twenty-five years since hearing this message it still makes sense to me. As it does, I am sure, to the countless millions of animals systematically abused and slaughtered in this world to satisfy the selfish desires of human beings, many of whom eat flesh in total disregard to the basic teachings of their religion. Meat is murder.
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