An Open Letter to the Dalai Lama

An Open Letter to the Dalai Lama
by Norm Phelps, written June 15, 2007

The Dalai Lama
Thekchen Choeling
P.O. McLeod Ganj

Dharamsala H.P. 176219India–
By mail and email to: ohhdl@gov.tibet.net

Dear Sir: I am writing to you with great sadness.

By way of introduction, or actually re-introduction, I am the author of The Great Compassion: Buddhism and Animal Rights, a copy of which I sent you soon after it came out in 2004, and an additional copy of which I am enclosing with the hard copy of this letter. I have been a practicing Tibetan Buddhist for more than twenty years.

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You may also recall that in November 1998 you generously granted me a private audience in Washington, D.C. for the purpose of discussing a vegetarian diet as Buddhist practice. You were very gracious in providing me an opportunity to urge you to adopt a vegetarian diet on full-time basis. You told me that because of liver damage resulting from hepatitis B, your doctors had instructed you to eat meat, and that for some years you had compromised by eating vegetarian every other day. You spoke movingly of your deep compassion for animals and your desire that as many people as possible, including Tibetans and Buddhists, adopt a vegetarian diet as an expression of Buddhist compassion for all sentient beings.  

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Less than three weeks after this interview, Agence France Presse (AFP) reported that at a dinner at the Elysee Palace for Nobel Peace Prize laureates, you refused the vegetarian meal that you had been served with the comment, “I’m a Tibetan monk, not a vegetarian,” and insisted on being served the same entrée that the other guests were having, which was reported to be braised calf’s cheek and vol-au-vent stuffed with shrimp. I understood that the dinner might have been held on a meat-eating day of your one-day-meat, one-day-veggies regime, but I could not understand why you would publicly go out of your way to dissociate yourself from a compassionate vegetarian diet when just days earlier you had spoken to me with such apparent conviction about the need for “everyone who can” to become vegetarian. There were no reporters present at the dinner; the AFP reporter heard the story from you the next day, which suggests that you wanted the world to know that you were not vegetarian. In other words, quite inexplicably, you apparently wanted to promote meat eating as consistent with Buddhist practice. I wrote you asking about this, but received no response.

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In light of this background, I was overjoyed to read in April 2005 that you had announced to a wildlife conference in New Delhi that you had lately adopted a vegetarian diet on a full-time basis. On February 16, 2007, Rinchen Dhondrup wrote a thank-you letter on your official letterhead to Ms. Dulce Clements of La Verne, California, who had sent you a copy of a wonderful book on vegetarianism as spiritual practice, The World Peace Diet by Will Tuttle, Ph.D. In this letter, Dhondrup-la said that “His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s kitchen here in Dharamsala is now vegetarian.”

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Thus, as you may imagine, I was greatly dismayed to read an article from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel dated May 15, 2007, reporting that you had attended a fund-raising luncheon on May 3, in Madison, Wisconsin for the Deer Park Buddhist Center and Monastery. According to the article, the food served included veal roast, stuffed pheasant breast, and soup made with chicken stock. The chef told the reporter that you “chowed down” on everything you were served, including the veal. Veal calves are separated from their mothers just hours after birth, confined in tiny crates too small for them to turn around in, fed an iron deficient diet that gives them severe, painful, chronic anemia, and killed while they are still small children. When you ate the veal, you lent your public support to some of the most egregious cruelty that our society is capable of.

Someone who attended a public talk that you gave in Madison around this time reports that you mentioned the vegetarian issue, saying that you had been vegetarian for two years “because the big monasteries are becoming vegetarian,” but that you had gone back to meat eating because of your health. I presume that the two years were spring, 2005 to spring, 2007. I would have expected you, as a great bodhisattva, to follow a vegetarian diet because it is the compassionate thing to do and was taught by the Lord Buddha Shakyamuni, not because it is the popular thing to do in the context of monastic politics. Even more recently, it has been reported in the world press that on June 13, 2007 you visited a zoo created by the late television performer Steve Irwin in Beerwah, Australia. During this visit you reportedly spoke in support of a compassionate vegetarian diet while admitting that you eat meat “occasionally” for the sake of your health.

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It is hard to understand how eating meat “occasionally” could benefit your health. It would seem reasonable that if your body did, in fact, require meat—which seems most unlikely—you would have to consume meat more often than “occasionally” for it to have any health effect.. And since it is easy in India and the West to eat a nutritious, high-protein diet without meat, perhaps supplemented by vitamin B12 tablets, I cannot help suspecting that this is more a question of appetite and custom than health.

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It is also hard to understand why you would lend your support to a zoo, which is, after all, a prison in which animals innocent of causing any harm are incarcerated far from their natural surroundings to live out their lives in bleak, barren deprivation and hopelessness. It is especially difficult to understand why you would visit a zoo dedicated to the memory of Steve Irwin, who was world-famous for teasing and tormenting animals for the sake of television ratings, worldly fame, and money.

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The lack of consistency between your public statements in support of vegetarianism and animal protection on the one hand and your personal behavior on the other is troubling, to say the least. I am afraid that it is now taken for granted in much of the Western animal protection community that you are a hypocrite who tells his audience what he believes they want to hear and then does whatever he wants to.

Your moral inconsistency toward nonhuman animals has even given rise to a website called Bad Karma Lama, www.badkarmalama.com. I have no idea who created the site, but it reflects a view that is very widely held—and, I fear, with good reason. You cannot have it both ways. You cannot be seen as a protector of nonhuman animals and continue to eat meat and visit zoos. You cannot respect the Buddha nature of animals in your speech and continue to disrespect it in your conduct. That is, in fact, hypocrisy.

In The Great Compassion, I said that “Buddhism ought to be an animal rights religion par excellence” because of the Buddhadharma’s recognition that there is no intrinsic difference between humans and other animals and its insistence that the First Precept (“Do not kill.”) applies to our treatment of animals as well as our treatment of human beings. If Buddhism does not in actual practice always extend the full measure of its compassionate protection to animals, that is a failure of individual Buddhists, including I am afraid, far too many teachers; it is a violation of the teachings, not a consequence of them.

The world sees you as the living embodiment of the Buddhadharma, and even those who are not Buddhist see you as a great moral leader. “Actions speak louder than words,” and when you eat meat, the public, Buddhist and non-Buddhist alike, takes that as proof that inflicting unspeakable suffering and premature death on sentient beings for the sake of appetite is morally acceptable. In that way, you contribute to the killing of the forty-eight billion land animals and uncounted billions of aquatic animals who are slaughtered every year for food.

After more than two decades of waiting for you to bring your personal regime into line with your public pronouncements—and the clear teachings of the Lord Buddha Shakyamuni in the Mahayana Scriptures—I have reluctantly concluded that you do, in fact, speak in soothing platitudes to people like me while continuing to eat the flesh of murdered mother beings, and that you have no intention of changing. I remain a firm practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism—you have broken my heart, but not my faith—but I no longer consider myself a follower of the Dalai Lama; and I will not consider myself one until your actions toward sentient beings in the animal realm reflect your teaching. I have reached this decision only after much soul-searching and with great reluctance.

I am not going to ask you to change your behavior. I’ve been there, done that. We have a saying in America that “Anybody can talk the talk. What matters is do you walk the walk.” You can talk the talk with the best of them. But after twenty years, I can no longer pretend that everything is fine while I wait for you to walk the walk.
Sincerely yours,

/s/ Norm Phelps
n.phelps@myactv.net
P. O. Box 776
Funkstown, MD 21734, USA

cc: Office of Tibet, New York

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AHIMSA – NON-VIOLENCE

“For the sake of love of purity, let the Bodhisattva refrain from eating flesh , which is born of semen, blood etc. To avoid causing terror to living beings, let the disciple, who is disciplining himself to attain compassion, refrain from eating meat… It is not true that meat is proper food and permissible when the animal was not killed by himself, when he did not order to kill it, when it was not especially meant for him.

There may be some people in the future who, being under the influence of taste for meat will string together in various ways sophistic arguments to defend meat eating.

But meat-eating in any form, in any manner and in any place is unconditionally and once and for all prohibited.

“Meat eating I have not permitted to anyone, I do not permit and will not permit…” ( Lord Buddha, Lanka vatara Sutra * 1)

After my paranirvana in the last kalpa different ghosts will be encountered everywhere deceiving people and teaching them that they can eat meat and still attain enlightenment. How can a bhikshu, who hopes to become a deliverer of others, himself be living on the flesh of other sentient beings?” ( Lord Buddha, Surangama Sutra *2)

“All tremble at violence; all fear death. Putting oneself in the place of another, one should not kill nor cause another to kill.” ( Lord Buddha, Dhammapada, 129)

“One who, while seeking happiness, oppresses with violence other living beings who also desire happinesss, will not find happiness hereafter.” ( Lord Buddha, Dhammapada, 131)

“He who has renounced all violence towards all living beings, weak or strong, who neither kills nor causes others to kill – him I do call a holy man.” ( Lord Buddha, Dhammapada, 405 *3)

“Anyone familiar with the numerous accounts of the Buddha’s extraordinary compassion and reverence for living beings – for example his insistence that his monks strain the water they drink lest they inadvertently cause the death of any micro-organisms 4 – could never believe that he would be indifferent to the sufferings of domestic animals caused by their slaughter of food” ( Roshi Philip Kapleau, in To Cherish All Life *5)

“The inhabitants are numerous and happy… Throuhout the country the people do not kill any living creature, nor drink intoxicating liquor.. .they do not keep pigs and foul, and do not sell live cattle; in the markets there are no butcher shops and no dealers in intoxicating drink… Only the Chandalas (lowest cast) are fisherman and hunters and sell flesh meat.” ( famous 4th century Chines Buddhist traveller Fa-hsien *6)

“I have enforced the laws against killing certain animals and many others. But the greatest progress of Righteousness among men comes from the exhortation in favour of non-injury to life and abstention from killing living things. ” (Pillar Edict of King Ashoka [268-233 BC] *7)

“The eating of meat extinguishes the seed of great compassion”

“The reason for practicing dhyana and seeking to attain samadhi is to escape from the suffering of life, but in seeking to escape from suffering ourselves why should we inflict it upon others? Unless you can so control your minds that even the thought of brutal unkindness and killing is abhorred, you will never be able to escape from the bondage of the world’s life…

The 13th Century Zen Master Doyen , while visiting China, asked this question:

“What must the mental attitude and daily activities of a student be when he is engaged in Buddhist Meditation and practice? Ju-Ching answered that one of the things he should avoid is eating meat . (*8)

“The salvation of birds and beasts, oneself included -this is the object of Shakyamuni’s religious austerities.” – Zen Master Ikkyu

“In China and Japan the eating of meat was looked upon as an evil and was ostracised.. .The eating of meat gradually ceased (around 517) and the tended to become general. It became a matter of course not to use any kind of meat in the meals of temples and monasteries.” (Encyclopaedia of Buddhism *9)

“There is just no reason why animals should be slaughtered to serve as human diet when there are so many substitutes. Man can live without meat.” – The Dalai Lama

The 14 th century Saint Srila Jayadeva Gosvami in his Dasavatara-stotra sings:

nindasi yajna-vidher ahaha sruti jatam
sadaya-hrdaya- darsita-pasu-ghatam
kesava dhrta-buddha-sarira jaya jagad-isa hare

“It is said about Lord Buddha here: sadaya-hrdaya darsita-pasu- qhatam.

He saw the whole human race going to hell by this animal killing. So he appeared to teach ahimsa, non-violence, being compassionate on the animals and human beings.

Actually animal-killing, no religion sanctions. In Christian religion also, it is clearly stated, ‘Thou shall not kill‘. Everywhere animal killing is restricted. In no religion unnecessary killing of animals is actually allowed or supported. But for this nobody cares nowadays.

The killing of animals is increasing, and so are the reactions. Every ten years you will find a war. These are the reactions.” – His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, Founder-Acarya of ISKCON, the Hare Krishna Movement.

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1 The Lankavatara Sutra, / Daisez Susuki, London: Routiedge 1932
2 A Buddhist Bible, ed. Dwight Godard, New York:Dutton 1952
3 Dhammapada by Ven.Sri Acarya Duddharakkhita,Budha Vacana Trust,Bangalore
4 for detailed explanation of this Rule see: A Record of Buddhist Religion, I.Tsing, trans. J. Takakusu (Delhi:Munsriram Manoharlal, 1966 pp.30-33
5 Roshi Philip Kapleau, in To Cherish All Life
6 A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms, trans.l. James Legge, NY: Dover 195 p 43
7 The Seventh Pillar Edict, in Sources of Indian Tradition, NY: ColumbiaUniv. ‘Press 1958
8 Eihel Dogen, Hokyo-ki:Zen Master,Zen Disciple, Udumbara, A Journal ofZen Master Doyen (1980)
9 Encyclopaedia of Buddhism, Govt. of Cylon Press (1963)