正文
Open Letter To The Dalai Lama
June 19, 2007 : 7:30 PM
Buddhist Challenges Dalai Lama To Walk His Talk
Reprinted with the permission of the Society of Ethical & Religious Vegetarians
June 15, 2007
The Dalai Lama
Thekchen Choeling
P.O. McLeod Ganj
Dharamsala H.P. 176219
India
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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 ures...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,
Norm Phelps
P. O. Box 776
Funkstown, MD 21734, USA
cc: Office of Tibet, New York
The Society of Ethical & Religious Vegetarians (SERV) is an interfaith effort to gain a more humane, just, peaceful, and environmentally sustainable world. We believe that applying spiritual values to scientific knowledge encourages plant-based diets, with major benefits for humans, animals, and the environment. For more information about the Society of Ethical and Religious Vegetarians (SERV) visit: http://www.serv-online.org
To share your thoughts with the Dalai Lama, email: ohhdl@gov.tibet
To visit the Best Friends Animals & Religion community, visit:
http://www.network.bestfriends.org/religion
June 19, 2007 : 7:30 PM
Buddhist Challenges Dalai Lama To Walk His Talk
Reprinted with the permission of the Society of Ethical & Religious Vegetarians
June 15, 2007
The Dalai Lama
Thekchen Choeling
P.O. McLeod Ganj
Dharamsala H.P. 176219
India
By mail and email to: ohhdl@gov.tibet.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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 ures...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,
Norm Phelps
P. O. Box 776
Funkstown, MD 21734, USA
cc: Office of Tibet, New York
The Society of Ethical & Religious Vegetarians (SERV) is an interfaith effort to gain a more humane, just, peaceful, and environmentally sustainable world. We believe that applying spiritual values to scientific knowledge encourages plant-based diets, with major benefits for humans, animals, and the environment. For more information about the Society of Ethical and Religious Vegetarians (SERV) visit: http://www.serv-online.org
To share your thoughts with the Dalai Lama, email: ohhdl@gov.tibet
To visit the Best Friends Animals & Religion community, visit:
http://www.network.bestfriends.org/religion
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