Spiritual Teachers Recommending Vegetarianism

Spiritual Teachers Recommending Vegetarianism?

Add Thich Nhat Hanh to the list

by Kate Lawrence

Those vegetarians who try to find a spiritual community which will support their vegetarianism usually have a difficult and discouraging time of it. How many times have we heard a sermon or talk about caring and compassion at our place of worship only to have it followed by a congregational dinner featuring meat? There are, of course, groups which have long advocated vegetarianism for their members, such as Seventh Day Adventists, Jains, many Hindus including Hindu-based groups like ISKCON and Self-Realization Fellowship, and the Jewish Vegetarians, to name a few.

In Buddhism, the two best-known teachers are probably the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh. The Dalai Lama is on record as saying that "vegetarianism is very admirable" but not required, and that he personally must eat meat for health reasons. What those reasons are is not clear, but he has openly eaten meat during his American visits. So although we may respect him for the depth of his teachings, his continuing open dialogue with other faiths, and his persistence in maintaining compassion vis-a-vis the Chinese in the negotiations over Tibet, vegetarians may have difficulty accepting him wholeheartedly as their teacher.

Thich Nhat Hanh, on the other hand, is a committed vegetarian, all monks and nuns in the monasteries he supervises vow to be vegetarians for the rest of their lives, and he strongly urges all followers to become vegetarians. For readers who aren’t familiar with him, he is a Vietnamese monk, poet and peacemaker who was nominated by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for the Nobel Peace Prize in the 1960’s. Because of his peace activities in Vietnam during the war, he was exiled from Vietnam and has since lived in France, where he continues to work on behalf of the poor, of refugees and other marginalized groups, as well as to write and teach around the world.

At a retreat led by him which I attended this past August, he gave a talk about "mindful consumption" in which he included environmental and animal cruelty statistics about the devastation wrought by livestock agriculture and meat consumption. He strongly reiterated what he has written in his books, that the animals are our children, and "if, while we eat, we destroy living beings or the environment, we are eating the flesh of our own sons and daughters." He urged listeners at the very least to cut their meat consumption by half. The 400-plus attendees at this retreat ate only vegetarian food for the whole duration of the retreat.

Groups that discuss his writings and practice mindfulness in the way he teaches, meet regularly in Denver, Boulder, Idaho Springs, and Colorado Springs. For details on these groups, please call me at 303-300-2368.

--Kate Lawrence