The World Peace Diet: Eating For Spiritual Health And Social Harmony

Journey of Transformation / 263
attain complete spiritual enlightenment in order to be of maximum benefit
to living beings. A difficult inconsistency for me and for many others
was that while we were vegetarians, many of the Tibetan lamas we
sought instruction from ate meat regularly. Even the Dalai Lama himself,
while strongly condemning hunting and all forms of animal abuse
and encouraging vegetarianism among both the Tibetan people and
Western Buddhist practitioners, was eating animal flesh every other day,
purportedly on the advice of physicians. Perhaps the reasons may have
been political as well, because as the highest and most visible religious
authority in the Tibetan tradition, it would take considerable courage to
depart from the practice of most of the lamas and follow the ethical vegetarianism
enjoined by the original Buddhist teachings. Fortunately, in
April 2005, he displayed this remarkable political courage, and news
services reported, “Saying he has recently turned to a vegetarian diet,
the Dalai Lama called on people to stop killing and destroying animals.”
1 Because of the Dalai Lama’s eminence as an exemplar of peace,
this is good news for all of us and there are encouraging signs that
young Tibetans in India are moving in the same direction also. 2
SonggwangSa Temple
In 1984 I had my second opportunity to live in a vegan community. This
time it was an ancient Zen monastery in South Korea. I traveled there
and participated as a monk in the summer’s three-month intensive
retreat. We rose at 2:40 A.M. to begin the day of meditation, practicing
silence and simplicity, and eating vegan meals of rice, soup, vegetables,
and occasional tofu, and retiring after the evening meditation at 9:00
P.M. The meals were eaten in silence with each of us using a set of four
bowls: three for the rice, soup, and vegetables and the fourth for tea,
which we used to clean our bowls and then drink, so that not even a single
grain of rice would go to waste.
The community consisted of about seventy monks, with some lay
people who helped with certain tasks, and the vegan roots there were
old and deep. For many centuries in that temple, people had lived the
same way, meditating and living a life of nonviolence. There was no silk
or leather in any clothing, and though I was there in the summer mos-