Lama Zopa Rinpoche

Whether or not we eat animals is in our hands
While I was in hospital in Australia, 98 I saw on TV that Australia was selling huge numbers
of sheep and cows to Indonesia. They showed sheep all lined up, so tiny, going to the
slaughterhouse. There was the shot of a cow with a rope tied around its horns being pulled
down from the platform to its place of execution. The cow didn’t want to go; it was pulling
back and a man was pulling it down.
I think this may have been the first time they exposed this and the Australian people,
everybody, got so upset. The livestock company stopped selling animals to Indonesia. But
then I don’t know what happened. Of course, everything in life is a dependent arising; one
thing depends on another. So perhaps, because the big companies have all the power, the
situation may have reverted again after two or three months.
At that time I thought I cannot stop this, but now, whatever teaching I do, even tantric
teachings, I announce to the world to be vegetarian, so that fewer people will eat meat and
fewer animals will get killed and they will suffer less. If more people refused to eat meat
there would naturally be less suffering for animals.
Not eating meat at all in the world—that is a dream. That will not happen. But fewer people
eating meat can happen. So I thought to announce this to the world. It’s very simple. We
ourselves don’t want somebody else to use our body, to be killed for food. We don’t want to
suffer. In exactly the same way, why not all others? Animals, insects, they don’t want to
suffer. We can see that when we touch their bodies, they have such fear.
Animals can’t speak. They can’t demonstrate in the road or proclaim their position on TV or
in newspapers. They can’t parade with placards and loudspeakers. They have no power at all.
Animals are powerless, totally in human hands, to be used like toilet paper. It’s so pitiful.
People have little concern about their feelings. Their mind is not open at all. That is really so
bad.
Learning the Buddha’s teachings makes people understand. It emphasizes the need to
generate compassion for all sentient beings. People have to understand the suffering of other
sentient beings as the teachings explain.
I’m thinking of writing a book about Western food especially for Tibetans, for their
monasteries, including Sera. Generally Tibetans from Tibet are very used to eating meat
because nomads ate it and that’s what we did before, with the Bön religion and with
shamanism, or black Bönpo. Meat eating was common before Buddhism came. This book
will explain how to make tasty, nutritious vegetarian food and will contain many
photographs to make it easy for the monks and nuns to be vegetarian. If the food is not tasty
they will go back to being non-vegetarians because they are so used to eating meat. And I
will also explain the meditation to do while cooking, cleaning and so forth so that everything
becomes Dharma.
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