Chapter 3
I’m a Tibetan monk, not a vegetarian.
—H.H. the Fourteenth Dalai Lama
In 1998 French president François Mitterrand invited various celebrities, including the Dalai Lama, to Paris to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Although most guests were served meat, the French chefs prepared an elaborate vegetarian dinner for the famous Tibetan Buddhist leader. They had presumed that since he was a Buddhist he must be vegetarian. After being served his dinner, the Dalai Lama was disappointed and remarked: “I’m a Tibetan monk, not a vegetarian.”1
This anecdote highlights a key theme of this book: the disconnect between how Buddhism is popularly understood and how it is actually practiced. The presumption that all Buddhists practice vegetarianism relates to the popular view of the Dharma as a “good” religion—anticonsumption, anti-materialism, and, by default, eco-friendly. The Buddha, however, did not advocate vegetarianism.2 In fact, when one of the Buddha’s disciples proposed a vegetarian diet, the Buddha explicitly rejected the idea.
The persistent misconception that all Buddhists are vegetarian provides an opportunity to explore not only why the eco-Buddhist paradigm persists but also who represents Buddhism and why. Like most modern imaginings about the Dharma, the “vegetarian discourse” derives from the tendency to focus analysis almost exclusively on monks, as if they embody the essence and totality of Buddhism. Yet, despite their importance as moral exemplars, monastics are a tiny fraction of the Buddhist community. If we are to properly understand Buddhist history—and its impact on Asia’s environment—we need to expand our understanding of the composition of the Buddhist community so as to include the two other major categories of Buddhist actors: the laity and the state.
Figure 4. Vegetarian restaurant at Ganden Monastery (Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, 2009).
Photo by author.
Exploring the question of vegetarianism helps us do this. The Buddha allows monks to eat meat as long as they have not killed the fish or animals themselves.3 If others kill and prepare an animal for consumption, a monk is allowed to receive it in his begging bowl and to eat it. This teaching was taken to its logical extreme in the following passage from the Telovada Jataka, a story recounting a previous life of the Buddha: “A wicked man may slaughter his wife and son and offer them as food. But if a pure man [i.e., a Buddhist monk] eats it, it is no sin…. The one who takes life is at fault but not the one who eats the flesh; my followers have permission to eat whatever food it is customary to eat in any place or country as long as it is done without gluttony and without evil desire.”4 To some this justification may seem karmically dubious; however, it rests on the Buddha’s foundational theory of intentionality, whereby karma is produced only if the action is done deliberately.5 I will explore this theory more fully in later chapters, but, in this context, its meaning is essentially that if you have not killed the animal, no karma is generated by eating its flesh.6
The Buddha also permitted the consumption of animal products. In the Pali monastic code, he approved the use of animal flesh and blood,7 as well as tallow, for medicinal purposes.8 Based on this precedent, a thirteenth-century Sinhalese medical treatise proclaimed that the eating of meat is “good”: “There is no other substance than meat for the growth of the body. The flesh of meat-eating animals is especially good because of its constitution with flesh.”9 Such thinking was taken up in various ways across the Buddhist world. In Tibet, monks sold the meat of mice that had eaten food offerings off altars because it was believed to cure difficult births.10 In his study of Buddhist medicine, Paul Demiéville found accounts in which the Buddha “in his previous existences, gave his blood and his marrow to the sick.”11 One might question, based on this evidence, whether this was a widespread practice, but there is at least some evidence for it.
So why did the sophisticated French assume that the Dalai Lama was a vegetarian? The short answer is that it conforms to the popular view of Buddhism being a good and environmental religion, which invariably includes vegetarianism. The more complicated answer, however, is that a thousand years after the Buddha allowed the eating of meat there developed the idea in China that monks should actually be vegetarian. In particular, Emperor Wu of the Liang dynasty (464–549 CE) advocated vegetarianism.12 Inspired by late Mahayana Buddhist texts and their cosmic vision of emptiness and its attendant reality of unity and interpenetration of everything, Emperor Wu believed that eating meat was karmically problematic. No matter how well his theory may have accorded with Mahayana doctrines, it did not fully sway monastic opinion or their dietary habits. In fact, as Christine Mollier has shown, Chinese monks adopted vegetarianism not for moral reasons but as a dietary strategy during times of famine. Indeed, monastic vegetarianism did not become established dogma for centuries.13 Moreover, as the Dharma spread from China to the rest of East Asia, this new idea of vegetarianism went with it. Its adoption, however, varied. In Korea it generally became mandatory for monastics but not the laity,14 while in Japan both monks and the laity rejected vegetarianism entirely.15 Within these debates, however, one thing remained constant: meat eating was a concern only for monastics, not for the laity.
In popular notions of the Dharma in the West, this fundamental distinction between the monastics and the laity is often confused. Because monks practice vegetarianism, the assumption is that all Buddhists do. Another example of this confusion is the case of meditation, which is seen in the West as the sine qua non of Buddhist practice. In Asia, however, only monks historically practiced meditation—and, even then, only a few elite ones. Therefore, when considering Buddhism and its practices, it is important to keep in mind the important difference between the moral strictures placed on monks and those placed on the laity. Monks renounce the material world, but the laity do not. For this reason, the laity and their actions need to be put front and center in an environmental history of the Dharma.
Yet all too often the Dharma has been idealized as the meditative tradition of the pious monk, who has renounced all possessions and lives a simple life away from the hurly-burly of everyday life.16 This idealized image undergirds much of the discourse surrounding Buddhism as a critique of the West, especially its materialism, consumerism, and economic activity.17 But, again, the ideals held up as defining the Dharma are in reality only pertinent to the small number of Buddhists who are monastics. Thus it is a major category error to draw on their lives as models for our own, or to extrapolate from them to what it means to be “Buddhist.” Imagine trying to grasp Christianity and Christian history in its entirety through the mandates of Benedictine monks. No one makes this mistake with Christianity, and yet this categorical confusion shapes how many people understand Buddhism.
The distorting focus on monastics not only plays a critical role in perpetuating the eco-friendly paradigm of the Dharma; it also marginalizes much of Buddhism and Buddhist experience. Most obviously, making the Buddhist monk a synecdoche for Buddhism downplays the importance of the two other major actors in Buddhist history: the laity and the Buddhist state. Even more problematically, focusing on Buddhist monks and their renouncing elides the economic activities of all Buddhist actors and, of course, their environmental consequences.
In terms of the Buddhist community, the lives of monks represent neither the norm in the Buddhist community nor how Buddhists interacted with the environment. Monks are greatly respected and venerated precisely because they live according to stringent rules of the Vinaya, while the average person does not (Figure 5). The monk is quite specifically understood to be the antithesis of the laity, who, as mandated by the Buddha, live in the material world and make money, preferably “by agriculture, trade, and other [professions].”18 Indeed, as the Buddha well recognized, a nonproductive monastic elite could not survive without the surplus food and money the working laity produced.
Figure 5. Reserved area at Bangkok International Airport (Thailand, 2010).
Photo by author.
As noted above, monastics have made up a small percentage of the Buddhist population. In Southeast Asia, for example, it has recently been estimated that only 1 percent of the population was monastic in the sixth to eleventh centuries.19 If we really want to understand the history of Buddhism, especially the impact that Buddhists had on the environment, we need to bring that other 99 percent into the story. They are not just the overwhelming majority of Buddhists; they are those who were actually living, working, and exploiting the natural world so that a few could renounce the human world. In order to fully appreciate the “footprint” of the Buddhist tradition—and the history of Buddhist Asia—the activities of the lay community need to be brought to the front and center of our analyses.
We also need to attend to Buddhist states, which, like all other states, controlled and extracted natural resources in order to maintain their power. This control and manipulation of resources by all three categories of Buddhist actors—the monks, the laity, and the state—propelled the Dharma’s expansion and its institutionalization across Asia. In short, to understand Buddhist history across Asia, we need to broaden our definition of a “Buddhist” well beyond the archetypal monk.
As a result, the problem of “Buddhist vegetarianism” has serious historiographical implications. When late, or wholly modern, developments are uncritically accepted as defining the tradition, much of Buddhist history is erased. My point is not that Buddhism has not, or cannot be used to promote vegetarianism—or environmentalism, for that matter. It has and it can. But such a contemporary interpretation does not mean that all Buddhists have historically been vegetarian or eco-conscious. Christian theologians today use scripture to promote eco-consciousness, but that does not mean that Christianity or Christians have always been environmentally friendly. Yet, oddly and all too often, these new Buddhist interpretations—stemming from the Dharma’s moral cachet in the modern world and the misguided fixation on monks as defining Buddhism—are all too readily projected back in time as an inherent part of the tradition.
As a result, Buddhism avoids critical analysis. If, for example, one were to apply the common platitudes claimed about Buddhism to other religions—that is, if one were to claim that Muslims have never started a war, that Judaism is compatible with modern theoretical physics, that Christianity is all about renouncing and antimaterialism, or that Sikhism is inherently environmental—many eyebrows would be raised. Yet, making those statements about Buddhists or Buddhism will often go unquestioned. If we are to better understand Buddhists’ attitude toward and engagement with the natural world, such lazy thinking needs to be confronted.
Any lived religion is continually being created—and renegotiated—which means that normative claims do not necessarily reflect historical realities. Indeed, if all Christians “turned the other cheek,” it is clear that European history would have been very different. Thus the fact that the Buddha may have advocated the idea of no killing as a theoretical ideal does not mean that Buddhists have not come up with creative ways to justify killing people in war or animals for their diet. In Tibet, in accord with the theory of karmic intentionality, they secure their meat by either having Muslims butcher the animals or having animals “accidentally” fall off a cliff.20 Similarly, Japanese hunters were not kept from legitimizing their hunting of the sacred moon bear.21 These moral reimaginings and work-arounds need to be the focus of environmental history and not solely scriptural admonitions.22
Consider the case of the Japanese market in deerskins. The Buddha’s admonition “no killing” is often held up as emblematic of the Dharma, especially in terms of Buddhist vegetarianism and eco-Buddhism as a whole. But in the early seventeenth century the Buddhist kingdoms of mainland Southeast Asia sold one hundred thousand deerskins to the Japanese, who used them largely to make Buddhist-related commodities.23 Obviously, deer were killed for their skins, so Buddhists in Southeast Asia and Japan did not prohibit killing. This one simple example provides an opportunity to reconsider Buddhist history. Here, we have one Buddhist society exploiting the natural world in order to satisfy the market demands of another Buddhist society.24 This extractive economy, premised on the Dharma, is what propelled the Buddhist ecumene across Asia. The Japanese demand for deerskin archery gloves involves not just the desire for wealth and status but also the prosperity theology of the Dharma that fostered such desire—and the exploitation of Southeast Asia’s natural resources that was needed to feed these demands.25
Such interconnections are too often overlooked in Buddhist history because of the popular misconceptions about the Dharma that I have examined. Linking Buddhism so closely to monks perpetuates ahistorical normative claims about Buddhism and obscures lived history. Thus, if we want to better understand the role Buddhism and Buddhists have played in shaping Asia’s environmental history, we need to leave such misconceptions behind and turn our attention to how the very architecture of the Dharma sustained a system of exploitation on the commodity frontier.