Veganist_ Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World - Kathy Freston [78]
The animals protest that after the creation of human beings, they were treated mercilessly. “Whoever fell into their hands was… slaughtered and flayed…. [Humans] ripped open his belly, cut off his limbs and broke his bones, tore out his eyes; plucked his feathers or sheared off his hair or fleece, and put him onto the fire to be cooked, or on the spit to be roasted, or subjected him to even more dire tortures, whose full extent is beyond description.” It sounds like I’m quoting from an animal protection pamphlet, but this is a thousand-year-old Arabic text! Other tales tell of the Prophet Muhammad’s compassion for animals and his special affection for dogs.
Much more significant for Muslims, though, is a famous line in the Koran that beautifully expresses the idea that animals too are “good Muslims” and obey God in their own fashion. “There is not an animal that lives on the earth, nor a being that flies on its wings, but forms part of communities like you…. [T]hey all shall be gathered to their Lord in the end” (6:38). The word for “communities” used in this verse is the sacred Arabic word ummah, which is still today the common term used by Muslims to refer to human religious communities. Wherever the teachings of Muhammad, Moses, and Jesus may differ, they clearly agree that God enjoined humans to avoid cruelty to animals. They may not have advocated vegetarianism in their own day, but the real question is what these spiritual giants would say while standing in the shadow of today’s meat, dairy, and egg industries?
Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism
While the Abrahamic traditions of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism have championed values that lead one toward vegetarianism, the religious traditions that stem from India, such as Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism, have gone much further. In these traditions vegetarianism has not only been the theoretical ideal of the perfect world, but has been advocated as a basic part of the spiritual life. In America we are fortunate today that more restaurants are adding vegetarian sections to their menus, but meat-centered food is still the norm. In India today, the situation is often reversed. Instead of talking about “regular” and vegetarian food like we do here, restaurants are described as “veg or non-veg.” Eating animals is the aberrant diet!
The spiritual traditions originating in India, which today have almost 2 billion followers worldwide, have dealt thoughtfully with violence and have taught that killing and consuming animals goes hand in hand with violence to other humans. A guiding principle of all three traditions is ahimsa, literally “nonviolence,” the doctrine that all living beings are sacred and that we should avoid injuring them. Many Americans know of ahimsa through the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, the “father” of modern India and a key inspiration to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, was vegan until her death, and his son, Dexter King, still is).
The principle of ahimsa exposes the disconnected relationship that many of us have with our food. It is difficult and shocking to look at a piece of meat on your plate and visualize the violence that brought it there. Most of us, if we really thought about it, would find it repellent to personally commit such a violent act when so many nonviolent (and healthier) alternatives exist to nourish us. This kind of reasoning has led countless practitioners