Hello everyone, my name is Ryan, and for this episode we will explore the link between Buddhism
and veganism.
A few months ago I had an incredible conversation with Bhikkhu Sonu, a vegan Buddhist monk,
and during the episode we talked about Dharma voices for animals.
What is Dharma voices for animals?
It's a non-profit organization committed to speaking out when the actions of those
in the Buddhist community and the policies of Buddhist centers lead to animal suffering.
Since that conversation I knew I had to get this organization on the podcast, and today
at last we will be speaking with Bob Isaacson, founder and president of Dharma voices for
animals, and Ajani Puik, project director of Dharma voices for animals.
So both of you, I'm so happy to have you on, welcome to the show.
Thank you, thank you for having us, it's a pleasure to be here and to have this conversation
on this important, passionate subject for all of us on the call.
Yeah, I'm happy to be here and share whatever I can, whatever you're interested in and your
listeners are interested in about Dharma voices for animals.
Amazing.
So my first question for you has to do with being strategic in making an impact for the
vegan cause.
And this is how I introduced my conversation, my former conversation with Biko Sonu.
I asked him, how come there aren't more initiatives out there that target leaders in our communities,
like business leaders or religious leaders, who will then implement greater change in
their own community?
They have that power, they already have that much influence on a greater number of people.
Yeah, so Bob Isaacson here, so I started this organization Dharma voices for animals with
three friends in California in 2011.
And the reason we did it was all four of us had experienced frustration in attending retreats
at places that were sometimes not even vegetarian, let alone vegan.
There seemed to be such a disconnect between the Buddhist message of compassion for all
sentient beings and the actual practice of serving animal flesh and or animal products,
milk, eggs, etc.
So we started it because we realized I tried individual advocacy along with two friends,
we actually did this work independently, then we met each other, and we decided we needed
an organization.
So we started.
So you make a really good point.
If we're just talking one on one, it's important to talk one on one with people for sure.
But we don't change that many hearts and minds if we do that.
But instead, if we talk to institutions, leaders, as you put it, that's the vision of DVA, as
you mentioned.
So in each country, so I just should mention to your listeners, we have important projects
in four countries.
First of all, our US project, we call it our US Centers Project, and our Johnny Plyg is
here to talk about there to share other information and understandings insights that she has.
We also have a project in three countries, three Asian countries, and that's Thailand,
Sri Lanka, and Vietnam.
Those three countries have a combined Buddhist population of about 141 million Buddhists.
So the reason for DVA is the reason we're in those three countries, that Buddhism is
the religion or spiritual path.
Other people would call it a religion of choice of the majority of the people.
In Thailand, 65 million people identify as Buddhists have a population of 70 million.
And there we talk to the monks, we talk to the monks, there's about 300,000, not a lot
of nuns in Thailand.
Most of the monastics are monks or men, and they eat everything.
The way they interpret their precepts, they have to accept whatever is offered.
People understand that the monks like to eat, they like the taste of animal flesh, eggs.
Some monks are eating seven or eight eggs a day in Thailand, but they suffer, scientific
studies have been done there, they suffer from the worst kinds of disease, cancer, heart
disease, high blood pressure, obesity, and, did I say cancer?
Yeah, all the big ones that you can think of.
So we talk to the monks there, and we're not even talking about compassion.
They don't want to hear from a guy from California about compassion.
They want to hear, and I'm from California.
They want to hear from, they want to, they are concerned about their health, which is
why we talk to them about their health.
And slowly this compassion emerges so that they can see another reason.
And what we're starting to also talk to them about the environment to give them three really
good reasons to be vegan.
So similar stories in the other countries.
Vietnam is Mahayana, Buddhist country, and there they believe that the Buddha was vegetarian,
and he wanted his followers to be.
So we're starting at a much higher place in Vietnam, but so few of the Vietnamese folks
are vegetarian, let alone vegan.
So we teach cooking at the pagodas or the temples in Vietnam.
People say, we don't know how to cook vegan.
What is this?
Well, of course you can leave out the animal flesh and you got something often that's vegan.
We give them some more recipes, give them more interesting things to do than that.
And so we're teaching.
Sometimes we get 5,000 people at one of our presentations.
They come, they get free food, and they also learn about vegan cooking.
And Sri Lanka, it's just, it's a conglomeration of many different things we're doing.
But the monks there, although there aren't many that are vegetarian or vegan, maybe 15%,
just roughly your estimate by myself.
In Sri Lanka, the monks are surprisingly open to our vegan message, surprisingly open.
And they allow us to talk to their congregation, to their Sunday schools that are run out of
the temples.
So this is what we're doing.
And our Jani, of course, can address and should address what we're doing in the US.
So the message, I want to conclude by saying the message of the Buddha could not be stronger.
The message, I'm certainly not an expert on world religion and other religions, but the
message of the Buddha could not be any stronger.
All sentient beings are entitled to our compassion and not to be harmed.
It's the first precept by the Buddha.
It's chanted all the time.
Right now, people, millions of people around the world are chanting that.
And yet people are supporting the suffering of animals by eating them and eating their
products.
So since it's such a strong message by the Buddha, since there are so many Buddhists
in the world, somewhere between 500 million, which I think is a very low estimate, and
1 billion Buddhists in the world, and because there are so few Buddhists that are following
these teachings, we decided to start DDA in 2011.
Amazing, Bob.
We'll get back to the teachings part.
Arjani, do you believe that the religious argument for animal protection is of greater
impact than the secular argument for animal protection?
Or do you believe that activism targeted towards religious groups, leaders, has the potential
of making a greater impact?
I guess another way of phrasing that question.
Yeah, I think especially if we look at Buddhism, the difference really is that there is already
a supposed commitment towards compassion and towards non-harm.
And it is very central in the Buddhist path.
And if we're presupposing that commitment, then we have a lot of space and, so to say,
to speak of this commitment and to encourage and exhort people to follow that commitment
into action and not just stay in the realm of prayer, let's say.
And this is so common in the Buddhist path on so many levels.
I mean, the entire path is a path.
It's a training path.
We are honored to train our minds to perfect certain qualities of mind, to really practice
mindfulness, to be vigilant of the content of our thoughts, of our speech, of the actions
of our body.
So always this body, mind, and speech view on the effects of our action and how we are
in the world and how we influence others and whether we are bringing benefit to beings
or not.
And especially in Mahayana Buddhism, there's the entire path of the Bodhisattva vow and
the Bodhisattva concept.
So there we are aiming to attain enlightenment, that liberation, not just for our own sake,
but in order to bring all countless, endless sentient beings to that same liberation, to
that same enlightenment.
So that is part of the Bodhisattva vow.
It is also called Bodhicitta, the aspiration to benefit beings and bring them towards enlightenment.
And so it is just a very easy entry point for the vegan message when it is understood,
when it is understood what the amount of suffering is that we are causing with our consumption
of animal products.
And yeah, Mahayana Buddhism is a special kind of Buddhism and it has kind of a strong link
with veganism.
And I'm thinking of Bodhisattva Guanyin and the stories related to one particular story
where she appears in a fishing village and she discourages the villagers from eating
and fishing, fishes, and she just implements a new model of how to sustain yourself through
agriculture instead of fishing.
And you think, oh my gosh, this has been written like centuries ago.
And then you think of Emperor Ashoka and the spread of Buddhism from India and how he was
the first one to implement animal welfare laws in history, in all of history.
It came from a Buddhist leader.
And I think of that long legacy and that strong relationship between Buddhism and animal welfare
and veganism, vegetarianism, I guess.
And I think, how come, like Bob described, how come there are so few vegans in some of
those countries among monastics?
Why is there such a contrast and disconnect between the Buddhist teachings, the Buddhist
history and legacy and the reality of Buddhism on the ground?
Bob, I see that you're looking for answering this question.
Go ahead.
Yes.
So this is it.
And so many people, we just got a very nice donation from a woman in Oakland.
And she said, gee, I was surprised.
I found your website and I saw it and I thought to myself, what?
I thought, we're vegan.
She's a vegan herself.
But then I find out, so actually I started, I wrote an article published in the Lion's
Words, a Buddhist publication, both online and there's a journal, a physical journal
that's published.
And that's how I start out the article.
One could stop someone on the streets in London or New York and ask them, are Buddhists vegan
or at least vegetarian?
And most people would say, of course.
That's the common understanding.
But as you point out, there are very few vegans and more, but not so many vegetarians.
So I would say one thing in favor of vegan monastics, we work in Vietnam, as I mentioned,
there are approximately 50,000 monastics.
And I should say a lot of women monastics who run temples, it's really neat to call
the abbesses, the abbots are the men.
And the monastics, 50,000 of them, they're all vegan.
And that's because they understand the Chinese monastics and the Vietnamese monastics are
vegan because they understand the word in their cultures, Vietnamese or Chinese, that
we can interpret as vegetarian, that it actually means vegan, it means completely vegetarian.
We could say pure vegetarian, it's a way of saying it.
And so we have like an automatic volunteer army in Vietnam, which we try to use to our
advantage to manage animals that are vegan, they completely understand.
But then when they ask their sanghas to be vegan, they'll say either it's not healthy,
because we know that's not true, but they think it is, that's what's important.
Or they say, I don't know how to cook vegan.
So what we've been doing for the last three years or so in Vietnam, we started our project
there in 2018 at a big animal rights conference in Hanoi.
We teach them how to cook vegan.
And it's interesting, and it's fun, and it's easy, and it's inexpensive compared to the
other food they're eating.
And so I think we're converting lots of people.
We have, we'll work with three chefs in, they're all based in Hanoi, but eventually we'll get
out to the rest of the country, Hanoi is the capital, of course, of Vietnam.
So that's our challenge.
But that's also the reason we have DVA.
You know, if all Buddhists were vegan in the perfect world, we wouldn't have any work to
do.
So this is why we started the organization, the message is so strong.
There's so many Buddhists in the world, hundreds of millions, wherever we draw the line and
think it's a billion or 800 million, whatever it is.
There are lots of them and very little compliance with compassionate eating, which is clearly
required by the Buddha, whether it's Mayan Buddhism or Theravada Buddhism.
Yeah, I think I would add that the reasons that not more Buddhists are vegetarian or
vegan are the same that why other people aren't, you know, it is not so different.
There is like Bob already mentioned, there's misinformation, like a lack of education around
how to be healthy on a plant based vegan diet, or even a vegetarian one.
So, and, and really like the animal industries have worked really hard to sow a lot of that,
you know, misinformation into into society, right, by promoting really with like huge
budgets for for decades and decades, the message that you need the animal protein to be strong,
you need milk for your bones, you know, all these things to raise your children well.
So I mean, these these kind of things, I mean, for one, they're their cultural legacies.
I mean, it's, it's, we've been eating, we've been omnivorous society, you know.
But on another, there's also the element of, there's powerful industries behind it that
that keep sowing that kind of information for for their, you know, profit benefits.
And so, yeah, that's sort of the information piece.
And then the other piece is like just attachment, attachment to taste, you know, not knowing
the realities of the industries, not knowing how the animals actually live.
That goes hand in hand again with misinformation because of the sort of humane washing, green
washing that happens a lot, or, you know, a lot of people really just think that the
dairy cars have a fine life.
And many people don't even stop to contemplate that by humans drinking milk, we're taking
it away from, you know, a calf for whom that that milk was intended.
And and just just really that that lack of education of the realities of the industries
and the amount of harm they cause to not only the animals themselves, but then the planet,
right.
And this is where the environmental impact and climate impact comes in, also biodiversity
loss.
So we're inflicting, like influencing so many more animals beyond, you know, just just the
animals, the farmed animals.
And yeah, a lot of bias, like it's just a lot of cognitive dissonance, a lot of excuses
that are found, you know, another thing to mention is the hierarchical structure of,
you know, but as some Buddhist communities, at least, there's still a lot of simply like
following the teacher.
And if the teacher's example is someone who consumes animal products, then a lot of students
will simply not question it.
Like they will simply be like, oh, but he he's eating it.
So she, you know, they're eating it.
And so I can, so I guess that's the way to interpret the text, right.
So they, they kind of stop at that interpretation by the model of someone else, right.
Who is their teacher who's teaching them the Dharma, right.
So it's, it's super tricky that that hierarchical thing.
And the example of teachers is a whole like big, tricky subject in itself, I think that
is worth contemplating.
Going a bit deeper here, I understand, and you explained very well, you know, the vegan
dimension, but what about the speciesism?
When I look at people in the West who display more of a speciesist outlook on life, I always
think, you know, oh, it's because of their Judeo-Christian background, you know, they
have learned that humans are, you know, perfect creations, you know, this perfect creation
at the top of the world and everything was made for them.
And you know, they were also taught that animals do not have a soul.
So I understand that.
Now have you noticed if there was speciesism in among Buddhists?
Like it's not just the fact that they're not vegan, it's the fact that they don't see
animals as being sentient or they see themselves as being superior to other form of life out
there.
Have you noticed that in people, in Buddhists?
And are you also addressing that part of the problem?
Yeah, so, I mean, make a good point.
The just, Arjani just mentioned desire, one of the classes.
And also it's a version.
So people, my way into veganism, first I was vegetarian for many years and then vegan for
the last 20 years was through the suffering.
Look at the films, Meet Your Meat, PETA film, Earthlings, another film, just, it's really
hard for me to watch these films.
But when I kind of look away, I realize that this is going on all the time, that millions
and millions of animals are getting killed every day to feed us.
I like to ask the question, how many animals die each year to feed Buddhists around the
world?
And the number is extraordinary, astronomical.
So it's a version to seeing the suffering.
The suffering, it's terrible what happens.
I mean, you know this, the three of us know this, but people don't want to see it.
They avert their eyes, they don't, they'd say, I'd rather not see that.
So it's a version to the suffering that the animals experience on the one hand, and it's
the attachment or the desire for the taste of the food, which is reinforced.
We're on holidays and people in all cultures have holiday meals with family and friends
and they're used to a certain type of food.
It's mostly animal flesh and animal products and all.
It's hard to break that habit.
And here in a country like Vietnam, my goodness, the monastics couldn't be better examples.
There's 50,000, at least in the Vietnamese Buddhist Sangha.
By the way, our director of the Vietnam Project is one of the three top monks in the country
of Vietnam.
He stayed here in my house for almost a couple of weeks in 2017, which is where we forged
the relationship and he's since been our director.
And so he talks about this all the time in his Dharma talks.
He's got a group, a vegetarian group, I think it's 100 people in his Sangha.
But he said one of the most famous, about the most famous Sangha temples, they call
pagodas in Vietnam, called Ba Phan.
And so they have thousands of people frequent that temple and only 100 people are even vegetarian.
People just don't want to hear the message either because of a desire or aversion.
So what are you?
Or ignorance, the one, right?
And we have all three, attachment, aversion and ignorance.
Yeah, and ignorance is the third.
And ignorance, as we know, is the basis for both the for desire and for aversion.
It's central to all that.
Moha is, yeah.
So it's the same thing.
It's the same point why people are not vegan out there in the rest of the world that are
not Buddhist and people that are not vegan, that self identify as Buddhist.
So it's a big job.
But we know we've got the basis, the foundation of this house for DVA is the Dharma and the
direct teachings of the Buddha.
In the Dhammapada, which is a Pali canon text, it said not only that the one should not harm,
but one should not cause harm.
So people, everyone, all beings experience the fear and they shy away from danger.
And one realizes this, she does not cause, does not harm or cause to be harmed.
That phrase is repeated something like 24 times in the Dhammapada.
It's a central text for Theravada Buddhism, but also for Mayan Buddhism.
They accept, I think all the traditions except the Pali canon.
I mean, what could be stronger?
Not people are looking away or wanting, wanting, wanting, wanting this taste that they're so
addicted to.
Ajani?
Yeah, I want to add to the speciesism question because I do believe Buddhism has a potential
and in it, it is actually quite anti-speciesist and not anthropocentric in its worldview because
we have the different realms of beings, right?
And we are all on one way in the same category, which is sentient being, you know, wandering
being in samsara.
And we like from the Buddhist teachings, we are, we can be reborn in any of those six
realms.
Right?
So that means any of us have, have probably been animals before and might be animals again,
as well as the other realms of beings, you know, so there is a complete equality of,
of the, of the, of the consciousness, like of what is described as a sentient being.
Like we, we can, we just take on these different forms.
Right?
But so from that perspective, it should be even more relevant to us what happens to all
the kinds of other beings, because it might, might be, you know, it might be us one day.
And, and a lot of Tibetan teachers also teach from that perspective.
I mean, they call it a mother sentient being.
So they always in their Dharma talks, they talk about, you know, imagining that all other
sentient beings, because we've been transmigrating so long in samsara, you know, countless and
countless of lives.
The belief is that therefore every single one has at some point had some degree of relationship
to you, whether it's been your mother, your father, your sibling, your friend, whoever.
And so they, they use that to say like, yeah, do not really do not harm any one of them.
It is the same as harming your own mother.
So those, those teachings are right, right.
Like there, there's plenty of them out there.
And that's a very anti-speciesist view in my opinion.
Since the conversation is pulling more and more towards the, you know, the teaching part.
So let's dive into that topic.
And I guess a question I have around that is, you know, one of the most surprising teaching
of the Buddha is the fact that, you know, he selected the list of how do you say, you
know, like jobs, like forbidden jobs, like bad jobs that you should not have.
How does he call that life, not lifestyle, livelihoods exactly.
It's the word that slipped my mind, but yeah, livelihoods.
And he called them, you know, wrong livelihoods.
And among them is what he calls business in meat.
And he forbids his not he forbids, but he recommends his followers not to make a livelihood
in the business of meat.
And he was telling his followers that about 3000 years ago when farming was not the kind
of factory farming we have right now, you know, it was, I guess, much more humane in
the way that many of the public like to imagine where their food, their meat and animal products
are coming from.
And yet he looked at that and still condemn that practice.
And I want to start with that.
What is so wrong with, you know, humane farming in the sense of what the Buddha witnessed
and how do you explain that even 3000 years ago, there was this understanding of how harmful
it was, you know, bring us a bit in the historical context of that time.
And who wants to take the Bob?
Yeah, I mean, so this is a great point.
I must say, I really like your question.
And I must say that very few people who I've talked to have engaged with in the last, I
was doing this advocacy 10 years before we started DVA 2011 ever talk about wise livelihood.
It's really important.
And as you said, the Buddhist said that it's not wise livelihood, it's unwise livelihood,
your unskillful livelihood to engage in the raising of animals for slaughter.
And you think about that.
So why do Buddhists or how do Buddhists justify eating animals?
Well, they often, not always, but often say, I didn't kill the animal, someone else killed
the animal.
So several things to say about that.
The first is wise livelihood.
To clear the Buddha did not draw the line between killing the animal yourself and eating
an animal that was killed for others, because he forbade, not forbid, you use that word,
and actually, it's just he strongly recommended against working in raising animals for slaughter.
It's specifically mentioned in the Noble Eightfold Path, specifically mentioned there.
So that to me is kind of the end of the story.
If you say, well, someone else killed the animal, all I'm doing is eating it, then you
are not understanding where the Buddha drew the line.
And when we are eating animals, we are forcing others to kill the animal.
And what about the slaughterhouse workers?
I don't know about Canada, but in the US, most of the slaughterhouse workers are poor,
don't have a lot of other opportunities.
It's the most dangerous occupation, factory occupation in the United States.
It's totally harmful.
You have to kill so many animals during the day, and they have to go home and perhaps
hug and hold their children after having done this.
If we're eating animals, we're forcing slaughterhouse workers to kill the animals.
It's a huge human rights issue in the United States that we're starting to bring attention
to.
So there really is no good excuse for Buddhists to be eating animals as there is not for anyone,
but especially for Buddhists.
The mindfulness is the key to the Buddhist teachings, just to know what your experience
is in the present moment.
If we're paying attention to that, there's a contemplation that goes with it.
How did the animal come to be on my plate?
People should take a look at these films.
If you're going to eat animals, just take a look at the film.
See how it is that the animal went from its life to your plate.
It's not easy to look at, but it's important to look at because whenever you change your
diet, it's good to do it.
I was in my 20s, mid-20s when I became vegetarian, but I was in my 40s when I became vegan.
So I thought, gee, how come I didn't know this before?
Why didn't I notice it?
Well, okay, but all we can really control is the present moment.
It's never too late to stop adding to the suffering.
Yeah, I could add, back to the question specifically of right livelihood versus wrong livelihood.
The other, I just looked it up again, so the other five, one, two, three, four, five, livelihoods
that are not recommended are also related to causing harm.
So it is really in its essence about not subsisting on causing harm to whatever kind of other
being.
So another one that's not recommended is dealing in weapons, any kind of business related to
weapons, war, et cetera, trading human beings for slavery, business in intoxicants, businesses
in poison, and then meat production and butchery.
So it's really all of them are about that we should not forward, like forward is one
of the right words, we should just not subsist on the suffering of others.
We should not gain benefit for ourselves through causing harm to others.
So that it's just so, such a central tenet all the time in Buddhism is not to cause harm,
not to cause harm.
Whether that's an insect, a human being, an animal, and they go further.
I mean, even like unseen beings, like, you know, in many Buddhist traditions, even those
there is instructions how not to harm them.
So it's very vast.
It's a very vast amount of teachings that are all exalting us not to cause harm and
suffering to others and instead to protect them, to benefit them, to teach them Dharma,
to bring them relative and ultimate benefit.
There's also that like the ultimate would be teaching them the Dharma and helping them
to gain ultimate liberation, but benefit like the relative benefit is any kind of benefit
in the present moment.
So material benefit, psychological benefit, anything.
I'm, I'm truly interested in knowing what kind of reaction Buddhists have when you confront
them with those teachings, when you present the proof, when you say, look, this is like
you said, Arjani, it's in the, you know, the hard, the core of Buddhism, like not harming.
How do they react?
You know, are they in denial or do they feel offended?
And not just, you know, and is there, you know, like a different reaction from the monastic
community to the lay community?
Are they less receptive?
Because I guess they feel like they're the teachers and they don't want to hear lay followers,
you know, correct them maybe in their practices or point out to something they could be doing
better.
So I wonder, you know, how do Buddhists react to your act?
It's so interesting because sometimes it can be quite aggressive, even like it can be really
like don't come to me with pointing the moral finger, like don't be moralistic.
And I mean, but you don't tell me what to do.
Like I have my own way of interpreting Buddhism or I guess the difficult thing is that they
feel attacked in their practice.
And if they do take their practice seriously to a degree, you know, then it is a difficult
thing to come in and say, hey, you're not doing it right.
Or you're like, you're misinterpreting something here.
Or so I understand that defensiveness from within, you know, from within to some degree.
And what I hear, one of the most common responses that also many teachers I've seen give is
that that we cause harm all the time, no matter what.
Right.
So this kind of that's a very common answer is I don't like we cannot avoid harm, even
if you eat vegetables, and even if you're vegan, you know, all the insects and we know
these arguments as vegans, right, all the insects and all the rodents killed in agriculture
also, you know, killed for your sake because you were asking for the crop.
Right.
So the only thing about that, the only problem with that issue is with that argument is that
we know, of course, when we're informed that the numbers are far greater when we're consuming
animal products.
The numbers of insects and rodents, etc. killed on agricultural land is greater because we're
using like 70% of that 80% of that to feed livestock to then feed humans.
And so the animal protein equation versus a plant direct plant protein, you know, ingestion
and the lives harmed.
I mean, the stack is just, I don't know, I don't know the number right now, but it's
like a lot more like so.
So from whichever angle you can say, okay, then, but, you know, it's causing less harm.
So let's choose the less harm approach whenever we can.
And I think it's important when we're debating or speaking with people to also admit that
part, right, to say like, yeah, I know my life, the way I'm living it through so many
other ways is causing harm and is causing the killing of beings and be it, you know,
this laptop that we're speaking on right now or phones, you know, like driving a car, all
those, you know, so many just walking outside in the yard, you know, we crush insects without
our knowledge.
And, and so I think it's important to always say to be humble in that moment and say, yes,
it is true.
We are all causing the death of other sentient beings simply by existing.
And there's really no way to avoid that completely.
But there are very accessible nowadays ways where we can reduce that amount greatly, right?
Very greatly, especially if we take into account, like I mentioned before, you know, the effects
of animal agriculture nowadays on the entire planet on biodiversity loss, on water pollution,
land use, you know, all these things that influence again, so many more animals and
insects, et cetera.
Yeah, so it's a reduction approach.
It's not, it's not, yeah, it's not perfection.
It's not like, oh, we're now saints that don't cause any harm anymore, right?
Once we're vegan Buddhists, no, we acknowledge the harm that is still being caused, but we're
trying to reduce it.
Yeah.
So DBA has been around, I want to add to that, 13 years now.
And I was doing this, you know, eight or 10 years before that, talking to all, pretty
much all of the major, best known, well-known Western teachers, one-on-one, most of the
time, sometimes it'd be through emails or texts and all.
People don't want to talk about it.
So what I like to say, they don't want to talk about it.
They don't want to debate it.
They don't want to talk publicly about it.
They just want to be left alone to eat whatever they want to eat.
The problem, of course, is that the average American eating somewhere between 10 and 20,000
animals in a lifetime, that's a lot of suffering.
And so, but it's tricky to engage in the debate.
You can't force people to talk about it.
Just once we're talking about it, we're like 80% of the way there, just to talk about it.
So if you're reading our mission, part of our mission, and it's getting people to talk
about it.
There's two parts.
One is the education, talking about it.
So let's have a quick, I like to say, can we have a conversation about this?
Let's see what happens.
Remaining humble, not self-righteous, it's hard.
It's really hard to do.
I talked to my sangha about it.
I have a weekly sangha for years and years, and I only bring it up maybe once a year.
So some people even miss it, because it's hard for people.
But I've come around to what I think is as non-judgmental as I've ever been about it.
Because you know, one time I was doing the stuff that everyone is doing, that other people
are doing now, eating animals and then eating animal products until 20 years ago.
So you have to come at it from that point.
I'd like to recommend our film.
Our film was produced by Keegan Kuhn, who most of your many, let's say, listeners would
know, Cowspiracy, What the Health, They're Trying to Kill Us are three of his films.
He produced some, at least two of those films, that we and I wrote a cabrio.
So he produced our film.
I helped write the script and also did some of the editing.
He has another member of our original DVA team.
And it talks about all this except for Wise Livelihood.
It wasn't, the understanding of that wasn't so clear back about 10 or 12 years ago.
But now, so everything else that we're talking about today is in the film.
And we talked to and interviewed some of the top teachers, both Western and Eastern teachers.
Men and women, different religions, different races, Mahayana, Theravada, everything is
in there.
It's, I think, a really good film.
And Keegan's an award-winning documentary filmmaker.
So this is a good place to go.
By the way, the film has been translated into 12 languages, including Chinese and Spanish.
And we have a translation of all the major Asian languages, where 98.5% of the Buddhists
live, except for Japanese.
If anybody wants to do a translation in Japanese, it's actually not that much, only four pages
when you put it in a transcript.
We love it.
Cannot find for this time.
We will have a Japanese translation.
All the other major languages are in there.
So please watch our film.
Amazing.
And of course, you will find the link in the description below for the movie.
And yes, I absolutely recommend it.
And Animals in the Buddha, it's the name of it.
Go to our website.
It's there.
You can click on it or just go to YouTube.
Animals in the Buddha.
It's there.
In fact, I should add it in the audio file of this podcast, just to give a sample to
people.
Are these animals being killed for you?
Normally, people have no idea what animals go through.
It will only be realized when you get to see what actually happens in the slaughterhouses.
Until then, you wouldn't realize.
And then when you see that, actually, you will feel if that is really appropriate to
eat them.
It's really horrifying.
Even slaughterhouses have the entire animal that they are supposed to slaughter for the
day are standing in a corner out there and then the one by another being slaughtered
in front of the rest of the animal.
And then you can imagine how terrifying that experience would be.
Just imagine yourself being out there and all your friends and colleagues are being
slaughtered and you are in the line.
Just a step away from that terrifying thing.
According to most religions, talk about hell, like most horrifying suffering realm, but
I can't imagine there is something more horrifying and painful so-called hell than those horrifying
experience when you are lined up in the slaughterhouse.
Just heartbreaking.
So, we need to actually see those things so that how we humans are actually causing so
much trouble to other sentient beings.
Let me continue on this lane of teachings and how people practice Buddhism while not
being vegan and all of that.
I want to turn this time to the vegans and to the vegan community at large.
I think that if you look at any report or poll done studying the vegan world and its
population, you would find that most vegans are not religious.
And I interpret that in two ways.
First of all, as a failure to reach out to religious communities and advocate for veganism
in those communities, but also I find that among vegans, there is this nihilism, this
difficulty to confront the large scale of animal suffering out there.
I would even talk about an existential crisis of just realizing the scale and horror of
just factory farming.
I wanted to ask you as a Buddhist and as a vegan Buddhist, how do you square your veganism
with your Buddhism?
How do we make place for, because Buddhism is all about happiness and self actualization.
But how can you seek and find that while living in a world where you have billions of creatures
just being tortured and killed mercilessly?
It's a tough question.
I know, but it has to do with how the sense you give your veganism and if you find any
spiritual meaning to your veganism.
Yeah, so I'll let you answer.
Buddhist teachers are not, at least in present time, are not Buddhist.
The last Buddha, the historical Buddha, about 2600 years ago is best we could tell, and
he did a pretty good job of avoiding harm when he was alive, as you point out, before
huge amounts of factory farming.
And it's too easy, it's too lazy, in my opinion, to cop out, to see the suffering and
to see the, let's say, non-compliance by Buddhists with Buddhist institutions and Buddhists around
the world, to not get involved in that.
I mean, it's easy to say, this is terrible.
They don't understand suffering.
They're not mindful, so I'm not going to practice this.
The Buddha wasn't a Buddhist, it was the Buddha gave us great teachings.
The teachings fully support non-harming of animals and a compassionate diet, which today
means vegan diet, to limit the harm and eliminate all the harm because of all the factors that
we discussed before.
So I choose not to hang out and get involved and aversive to the teachers, both here in
the US, Western teachers, and teachers that I come across in the three countries, Sri
Lanka, Thailand, and Vietnam.
Vietnam's pretty good.
The teachers are vegan, as I pointed out before.
So the animals need us.
It's not about me, my ego.
I can't believe this dissent to reserving animal products or animal flesh.
Let's have a conversation about this.
I mean, that's the challenge of being a Buddha.
The Buddha also expressed a strong suggestion and a hope that his followers would not only
refrain from harm, but actually be adding something positive to rectify the wrongs that
are being committed to help those that need our help.
There's like an affirmative duty on responsible Buddhists, so we can either choose to accept
that or not.
People don't have to start an organization.
Just talk to some people.
Ask the question.
When a teacher is talking, I can't tell you how many times I've heard teachers at Spirit
Rock or IMS or Forest Refuge where I practiced for years and years, and they'll say, I just
had a wonderful sushi dinner.
And at the dinner that I had, and there's no suggestion it's vegan or vegetarian sushi,
and then I noticed this or that, or I had fish and chips in England.
An English teacher talks, a teacher in England talks about that.
And it's so amazing without any thought that maybe that would be taken in a heartfelt way
by somebody like myself that doesn't think it's okay to eat animals as a Buddhist.
So we have to do something.
It's right there in our face.
So say something.
You don't have to start an organization if you want to.
Great.
We're the only international Buddhist animal advocacy organization in the whole world.
We're the only one.
We've been out there for 13 years and haven't seen any other.
There aren't any.
There are organizations that are doing good work, but they're not devoted to animal advocacy
like we are.
So that's the calling.
It's our calling, and I'm sure all of our people's calling of our people.
We want to do something about this.
Arjani, if you want to add something.
Yeah, I mean, the only thing that comes to mind, I'm still a little bit on the philosophical
how to deal with the suffering in the world.
So the Buddha, his very first teaching was on the Four Noble Truths.
That's the first thing he spoke about was suffering.
So contrary to perhaps what you mentioned like as the nihilistic or maybe like the very
intellectual Western materialistic or scientific point of view, it went straight to suffering.
It went straight to what is it that causes suffering, be it physical, mental, anguish,
discomfort, the whole spectrum of suffering.
The word dukkha is a very, it's actually worth looking into because it can be translated
with like 20 different words.
So many degrees of suffering that he's talking about, and he taught sort of how we get into
that entrapment and how to get out of it.
And so that is really what we're turning towards on the Buddhist path.
There isn't a shying away from it or denying it or even being crushed by it.
So the message isn't, oh my God, there's so much suffering.
Yeah, let's just call it a day because this is terrible, we should go in bed and cry.
It's too much to handle.
It's like, okay, there's so much suffering, what can we do to alleviate it in ourselves
and then for others as well?
So yeah, the entire path deals with it really, like constantly.
All mind training, everything we do really revolves around that question of the truth
of suffering, the mechanisms of it and how to unwind those and find liberation.
And yeah, that's what comes to mind with that question.
Those are great answers.
I mean, I tried to ask the daring questions and the questions that nobody is asking, but
actually that everyone is asking inside, but are not hard to ask out loud.
Let me ask another question with a more philosophical dimension.
And it has to do with evil.
And that's the same question I asked a Catholic priest.
If we look at those workers or even executives of the farm industry or all the people that
are actually abusing animals out there, and we've seen the footage, are those people evil?
Is there such a thing as evil from a Buddhist perspective?
The way I understand this is it's not evil people.
We do unskillful acts.
And so there's always a possibility of redemption in the next moment.
So it's that bad person, terrible for doing this, that's not so helpful for that person
or for the person saying it.
Instead, it's just recognizing there are a lot of acts that cause suffering.
I mean, in subtle ways, we cause suffering almost all the time to ourselves and to others.
But this is kind of off the charts suffering when you see what happens to animals.
So it's quantitatively different, qualitatively different, quantitatively and qualitatively.
It is.
So this is something we can do something about.
And it's something we should do something about if we can.
And to practice Buddhism, to see that universal suffering is the first noble truth, there's
suffering everywhere, then to see how it is that we add to suffering.
So if someone, the practice might go, I'm just putting this out there, it might go something
like this.
So someone is eating animals, maybe that person takes a look at a video, because it's that
common knowledge what happens to animals.
And what I like to say is that if you haven't seen a video and you haven't been one of the
few people that can get into slaughterhouses or factory farms, it's a thousand times worse
than you can imagine.
So wherever you imagine, multiply that by a thousand.
And that's where it is.
So you might take a look at that just to fill in the blanks of a place we don't have any
experience.
You take a look at that and then just pay attention to what arises when you go into
a store or sit down in a restaurant and order your favorite hamburger or chicken or dairy
dessert or something and pay attention to it.
What is it?
I mean, I notice craving, I notice wanting for foods.
Now my universe of foods that I eat are all plant-based, but I really like frozen soy.
I really like it.
I just had some for lunch.
It was an ice cream, quote unquote, it's a soy cream sandwich with chocolate outside
and vanilla inside.
And I really like this.
I thought I don't have time to have one of these sandwiches about yay big, just like
regular ice cream sandwiches, but they're vegan.
They're delicious.
Clear craving.
And I was aware of that.
I mean, I could have this later on.
I don't have it now.
We're going to start in five minutes.
But I noticed their craving as I put the delicious soy ice cream sandwich in my mouth and chopped
that.
I even walked upstairs because I didn't have enough time to finish it downstairs.
So to notice that and also to notice aversion.
When I'm sitting at a table and people I know or maybe not know so well are ordering steaks
and chicken and everything they're eating there.
I have to see that.
I'm of course thinking, I notice my aversion.
Why are they eating that?
This is on and on and on.
That's aversion.
That's what it is.
I can practice mindfulness around my vegan practice.
And I suggest to our listeners that everyone can practice mindfulness around their eating.
And as the Buddha said in the Foundations of Mindfulness, Majjhima, Nakaya, number 10,
very important teaching in the Pali Canon, that we can be mindful internally, what we're
experienced as I just described, but also externally.
All right, Jenny.
Yeah, I would add, just contemplating on the question of evil, I think from a Buddhist
perspective, it is confused mind.
So confused mind is able to be bewildered mind, bewildered by intense emotions usually.
The mind experiences so much intensity of these patterns, of habitual patterns of emotions
of, again, all born from ignorance, attachment and aversion, right?
As those three first, as that ground where everything springs from.
And so much of it is about reifying the self and protecting the self and defending the
self.
And that self can look like that small moment when we're like offended by something, someone
says, and it can look like I'm trying to survive and feed my family and I need this job or
I want to eat this hamburger because I think it's healthy for me or whatever kind of self
protection is happening.
But it is always like the reifying of self versus the Buddhist path moving us a bit more
towards selflessness, right?
Or a more altruistic point of view where those lines of dualistic mind get blurred a bit
more and self and other isn't seen as separate.
And I know like Tichanand Han and others teach it with words like interbeing, right?
There's so many teachings on the interconnection of all of us, right?
Dependent arising, like none of us are a separate entity per se, right?
And so even studying like more philosophical aspects of Buddhism, studying them can infuse
this question as well, that it is all interconnected and that also like sort of kind of brought
the evil thing.
But yeah, so much harm is caused just by bewildered, confused, bewildered beings that are fighting
for their survival.
And from that comes hatred, all kinds of actions, right?
Thank you.
I want to now turn to the activism part of the organization.
And I want to ask you, you know, what has been the impact of Dharma Voices for Animals?
And we touched on that.
And like you said, Bob, this organization has been doing great work for 13 years.
And so I want to inspire our listeners and talk about the impact the organization has
done in the last decade.
Okay, so let's start right here in the US.
As I mentioned, my own retreat center has been Spirit Rock since about 1996.
They built the retreat center and completed it in 1998.
I started going on retreats there maybe, probably three years, we put all the retreats together.
When I first started going on retreat, and I was actually at the first retreat July of
1998, the food was all vegetarian, but every single main meal, every single meal had dairy.
So there were no vegan meals and no vegan alternatives, no options.
So we started working.
We started posting messages, donating breakfasts and lunches, and then you get to post a message
on the bulletin board.
And we did that, some of our supporters gave us money to do that.
And slowly but surely, it took a long time with Spirit Rock, it took 10, 12 years.
Eventually their meals are now, I would say, 97, 98% vegan.
Now there's alternative milks offered, all of the dressings are vegan dressing, all of
the soups are vegan soups and on and on and on.
And similarly things that happened with IMS and Berry and Forest Refuge and BCBS center
out there.
And there's some other centers that are there.
So we've affected enormous change at these centers, but we have so much work to do.
So now our Johnnie's caseload is the centers in the United States.
And she's going to need help from maybe from your listeners, anybody can help people that
actually go to Dharma centers.
And if it's in Canada, if it's a big center, we could probably include that in our list
of centers we're going to engage with.
And each center requires a different thing.
We try to connect with decision makers at the centers and start conversations with them
and support them.
Maybe we can financially support vegan alternatives, things like that.
We're exploring all kinds of possibilities.
In a country like Sri Lanka, I tell you, there's 16 million Buddhists in Sri Lanka.
It's right off the southeast coast of India.
In Sri Lanka, we've had a television show on prime time that teaches vegan cooking.
We've had a radio show for five years that goes on every Friday morning in Sri Lanka.
We have a staff of 17 regional coordinators in Sri Lanka.
They go to women's groups.
They go to factories.
They go to temples, talk to the kids in the Dharma schools or the Sunday schools, talk
to the parents in the sagas in the temple.
And we are now, every single month for the last 18 months, we have made over 100 presentations,
sometimes as many as 140 presentations, separate presentations.
We're reaching, on the average now, 10,000 people one on one every single month.
I don't know how many people change.
We have the anecdotal evidence.
Some of the temples have changed in Sri Lanka.
We have the anecdotal evidence that there's one temple in particular there, one to vegan,
it was a vegetarian temple.
But we know we're affecting lots of people because of the anecdotal evidence.
Maybe someday we'll do a study there.
We now have MOUs, memorandums of understanding, where specific WATs, W-A-T-WATs are the term
for temples in Thailand.
A WAT commits to one day a week, they will only accept vegan or plant-based food from
the followers.
Now, what effect does that have?
Not only are the monks eating vegan for one day a week, it's a good start, it's not enough,
but it's a really good start.
But now we're educating the followers.
And again, there's 65 million of them.
Before we started in Thailand, which is next to China, the largest Buddhist population
in the entire world, before we started there, the Thai monks didn't even have the word vegan
or plant-based in their vocabulary.
They weren't thinking about it.
And so if you're a model, if you're a devoted Buddhist, and a monk says, it doesn't matter
if you're eating animal flesh, it doesn't matter if you're eating animal products, it's
all the same.
Just take whatever's offered.
But now we're changing that narrative.
So it does matter.
I know it's only one day a week at these temples, but a lot of the monks are responding to this
and we're working with the major temples.
We've been to 150 of them in the last four years.
We also teach vegan cooking.
And then in Vietnam, we're sponsoring these large-scale cooking classes and cooking shows.
And some of our events get as many as five or 6,000 people.
So we're not counting them with the counter, but we're estimating that during the course
of a weekend, actually showing people, 5,000 to 6,000 people how to cook vegan.
And at the same time, talking to them about the nutritional benefits to lower your risk
of getting cancer and heart disease and obesity and high blood pressure, et cetera, et cetera.
So we know we're having an enormous effect.
We've gotten major grants from Open Philanthropy, from ACE, Animal Charity Evaluators.
We just got one a couple of days ago from ACE, from the World Foundation of Animals.
So we're definitely a major factor out there and we are the only voice for animals in the
Buddhist community, the only organization that's a voice for animals internationally.
Thank you, Bob.
Arjani, would you like to add something to this long, beautiful list?
Yeah, I'd love to just present a little bit what the US strategy will be going forward
because I'm new in my position at DVA.
So I'm coming in and having to come up with a whole approach of how I'm going to try to
raise awareness of animal suffering and influence Buddhists in the States.
So that's my role.
So it's a three-tiered strategy that we're planning at DVA.
So the first being direct Dharma center engagement.
So really reaching out to Dharma centers, consulting them thoroughly on how to change
their menus, what to buy, how to go towards more and more meals being fully plant-based.
And in that, we're building right now this program called the Climate and Compassion
Awards.
So we plan to award and honor Buddhist centers that have animal and climate-friendly food
policies.
So it's really wanting to push institutional food policies to be better for climate and
animal impact.
And with those awards, we hope to raise the profile of those centers and encourage other
centers to join and to go through our consulting and hopefully adapt their food policies more
and more.
And then the second tier would be community engagement, community outreach.
I'm very excited about that one because we will have two cohorts per year.
So compassion leadership cohorts running twice a year, around four to five months each, where
individuals from sanghas or just individual practitioners, individual Buddhists, even
individual Buddhist curious people, even if they're not fully practicing yet, or just
you know, like, yeah, just practicing a little bit.
They can partake in this learning cohort with us and we will be training them in all aspects
of, first of all, like all the in-depth, like what the Buddha taught, like what does Buddhism
teach about animal rights, ethics, veganism, vegetarianism.
Then also, like the environmental impact, truly like a full deep dive also on animal
suffering and the realities of the animal industries and what common practices are so
that they're really equipped with that knowledge in depth and then environmental impact and
health impact and then a bit of strategy about, you know, how to engage conversations, how
to lead good conversations.
And then encouraging them to go out into their individual communities and bringing animal
advocacy programming into those communities.
So that can be in the form of running a book club, a discussion group, you know, showing
movies on the subject, documentaries, having a potluck, some kind of like vegan bakeout
or something.
So it will be very creative.
It could be arts programs, whatever they want, but we will be sort of training them, incubating
them.
It's like it's the incubating changemakers approach.
So you bring people in, you incubate them to know how to do advocacy work and then you
send them out to advocate for animals we have in Buddhist communities.
So that will be that tier.
And then the last one, just public education, right?
So there's direct center outreach, community outreach, and then public education, where
we just hope to do more on our website, you know, just get like a better blog running
again, have more interviews, you know, just really raise awareness of animal suffering
and the Buddhist sphere in the United States in the public way, just kind of in conversation,
in the narrative, in the discourse area.
Yeah.
Thank you, Arjani.
And I have to confess to the listeners that I am a member of Dharma Voices for Animals
and I decided to be a donor and I encourage listeners to also donate.
After listening to the impact of the organization, this is what you're contributing to, an organization
that is smart and is strategic, that is making a difference.
And there's this concept in Buddhism of getting joy, getting happiness from the good and wholesome
actions and great things that happen to people.
And I get lots of joy from just reading or listening to you, but also reading about all
the great things that Dharma Voices for Animals do.
So I try to be objective in this interview, but really, I truly believe in this organization.
Arjani, Bob, did you have anything more to add before we stop the recording?
Well, thank you for that comment and your appreciation of the work.
I'm also very excited to begin this journey with DBA and to really expand and bring whatever
skills I have and ideas to the table.
And I'm excited and I really hope people reach out, they can volunteer, they can participate
in the cohort, they can tell us of Dharma centers that they think should participate
in the awards.
There's so many ways to help us out or to be engaged.
So I look forward to hearing from folks out there.
Also thank you for kind words and for being a member and for donations.
It's wonderful.
It can really help us.
So all these projects that I mentioned in Asia are three countries and in the US and
that we're doing lots of other stuff.
And we don't mention like in Brazil, Germany, we do work in all these places, but we concentrate
on our four projects that we picked those out because of the impact on the number of
Buddhists and impact that we can have.
So people can join, go to our website and become a member, drop down and just sign up
and make a donation if you like.
I mean, if you don't have the means to do that, it's okay, just join and then you'll
get our newsletter.
So there's something you can do.
We have a Sangha that meets the last Sunday of every month.
So it's either one hour, we call that Sangha or three hour retreat.
And I'm either teaching, so we teach meditation and also it's kind of a time where you can
just share your joys and your frustrations with practicing at Buddhist centers or practicing
in Sanghas.
And so it's kind of a support group for Buddhists.
Some people are activists, some are vegan, some are vegetarian, some are none of the
above, but do that.
I teach it and I also teach with our board member, Bhante Sati, who's a Sri Lankan American
Theravadan Buddhist monk.
He's one of the few Theravadan monks in the world that's vegan and he has been for many
years.
He's been living in the US since 1999 and just send an email or a web form to us if
you haven't already signed up for one of our Sunday meetings.
So that's another way you can get involved, support your Dharma practice or if you're
curious about meditation or whatever, very much appreciated.
The other thing is to help us out with these centers.
If you go to a center, so maybe you're going to go on a retreat or maybe it's just you
go to listen to a Dharma talk or maybe just go for a meal.
Let us know.
Just send an email to friends at dharmavoicesforanimals.org and one of us will be answering your email
if you want to tell us about a center.
You got this center and maybe on a certain day of the week they're serving hamburgers
there and you're curious about that or you're upset by that.
Let us know.
If you're going to the center, they'll listen to you.
They'll give you the time to talk to them about that.
You might just ask a question.
I'm confused.
Maybe it goes on like this.
I'm confused.
Why are we eating hamburgers?
Because I understand how hamburgers are produced.
Or maybe you just contact us and let us do the work for you and that's fine.
We just need information on these centers.
So I think that's a way to answer your question.
Thanks.
Yeah.
And I would love to leave one last message too just for listeners, especially if there's
any Buddhist listening.
If compassion, I think it's important to contemplate like if compassion, the teachings of compassion
is what drew us to Buddhism.
But that is the case and if we care deeply about compassion as a practice, then we have
that opportunity three times a day to put those teachings into practice and into action.
And really in the spirit of engaged Buddhism, of really letting our practice come alive,
of letting it infuse all aspects of our lives, like our relationships, our consumption, our
mind, our thoughts, our, like I said, like body, speech and mind.
It's a wonderful opportunity to consider the animals and the impact we have.
And yeah, I want to leave with that.
Yeah, if I may, just one more thing I'd like to share.
So animals cannot speak for themselves.
They don't speak in a way.
I mean, if we have a cat or a dog, we kind of know what they want and that's, but most
animals, farmed animals really can't go to a center and say, why are you eating my children?
I mean, they can't do that.
So they didn't vote for us.
They didn't select us, but we represent them.
And we, as I mentioned, are the only international Buddhist animal advocacy organization in the
entire world.
So when you help us, you're helping the animals.
We're speaking for them.
We're trying to do the best job we can.
And this is your opportunity to help us, to support us so that we can be a voice for animals,
a sound of voice for animals.
Thanks for having us, by the way.
Of course.
And those are great parting words.
Yes, this is your opportunity.
And yes, you have the chance to be compassionate three times a day.
Yes, to all of that.
And of course, again, more details in the description below.
So Ajani, Bob, thank you so much for all of your work, for your dedication to this organization.
And thank you so much for having accepted my invitation.
Thank you.
Thank you, everyone, for listening.
I kindly invite you to share this podcast with the vegans you know.
Let's encourage more people to take action.
Again, thank you so much for caring.
And I will see you next Tuesday for a new episode.
May all beings be happy, Whatever living beings there may be,
Whether they are weak or strong, Omitting none,
The great or the mighty, Medium, short or small,
The seen and the unseen, Those living near and far away,
Those born and to be born, May all beings be happy.