Buddhism and Vegan Living

International best-selling author, Dr Will Tuttle, discusses Buddhism and vegan living in celebration of Parinirvana Day

With this month’s celebration of Parinirvana Day, commemorating the historical Buddha’s complete enlightenment upon leaving his physical body 2500 years ago, we may wonder about the Buddhist teachings and their relationship to vegan living. A non-theistic religion with well-known foundational teachings, such as the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, Buddhism’s central teachings aim to liberate the mind from ignorance so that it awakens to the truth of being. Buddha means ‘awakened one’ and the Buddhist Dharma, or teaching, emphasises cultivating mindful awareness through meditation practice that is supported by ethical living.  

In Buddhist ethics, both human and non-human animals are equally considered worthy of ethical treatment. The underlying principle of ahimsa, which is non-harmfulness to others by any action of body, speech or mind, applies to all sentient beings. The Buddhist teachings are unequivocal on this point; Buddhist practitioners are called to practise mindful compassion in all their relations with other living beings who are capable of suffering. 

For this reason, the practice of vegetarianism and veganism is widespread among Buddhists in many Asian countries. Buddhist monasteries have been centres of vegan living for many centuries in China, Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan and Japan, for example, due to the Buddhist ethical prohibition of eating animal flesh and eggs, and the absence of any pre-existing dairy tradition. The Buddhist teachings also emphasise minimalism as well and discourage waste and overuse of resources out of respect for animals, nature and others. 

Buddhism teaches that our true nature is eternal consciousness, which makes our physical body possible. We erroneously identify with this body and its conditioned thoughts and feelings, and it is this delusion that keeps us filled with craving and aversion, causing us to be reborn in endless lifetimes. This endless round of suffering is known as Samsara. Depending on the depth of our ignorance, we may be reborn in a variety of realms, such as the human realm or the animal realm, or in lower hell realms of acute suffering, or higher heaven realms of relative comfort. All are temporary, and the only ultimate liberation is through Prajna, the wisdom that arises through Sila – ethical living – and Samadhi – meditative equanimity and insight. 

Thus, Buddhism is a religion that emphasises, above all else, the importance of ethical living – practising respect for all expressions of life – coupled with meditative discipline that tames and trains the mind to free itself from conditioned thinking. These two practices, Sila and Samadhi, reinforce each other. The more our actions of body, speech and mind are ethical and filled with loving kindness for others, the more we remove inner hindrances and clear a path to be able to abide in the open, sky-like awareness of pure, joy-filled consciousness that is no longer bound by clinging to the false sense of a fundamentally separate self. As this meditative insight increasingly establishes itself in our awareness, we naturally act in ways that are ethical because we directly understand and experience the deeper truth that we are not essentially separate from others. It becomes obvious that in harming others we harm ourselves, and in helping them we help ourselves and all living beings. 

The basic Buddhist teachings call us to question cultural narratives that promote violence to living beings and to ecosystems, and to dedicate ourselves to lives of kindness and respect for others. All expressions of life are seen as infinitely interconnected, and the more we awaken from culturally imposed delusion, such as purchasing animal-sourced foods and products, the more we are awakening our innate Buddha-nature, and authentically contributing to the health, happiness and freedom of the world community that includes all living beings. 

For myself, because I was born and raised in Concord, Massachusetts, the locus of the American Transcendentalist movement, it seemed natural to begin studying the writings of Emerson, Thoreau and Alcott in my college years in the early 1970s. Transcendentalism, one of the first philosophical currents to emerge in the US, emphasised intuition over empiricism, and was strongly influenced by the just-emerging translations of non-Western spiritual teachings such as the Bhagavad-Gita and other yogic, Buddhist and Taoist texts. This led me to the Eastern spiritual teachings of India and China that had inspired the Transcendentalists and activated an intense interest in me, regarding the possibility and path of spiritual awakening. I discussed these new ideas with my younger brother, Ed, and a few months after my college graduation in 1975, we decided to go for it and dedicate our lives to attaining enlightenment. We thought the best approach would be to head west across the country to California, emulating the sages of ancient India, walking without money and with minimal possessions, as a meditative pilgrimage. 

Walking west to Buffalo, and then south over many weeks through Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, and into Tennessee, we discovered a variety of spiritual communities and some meditation groups. In Summertown, south of Nashville, we stopped for several weeks at The Farm, the largest hippie commune in the world at the time, with about 900 young people living there, and most of them were from, poetically, California. They informed us that they were vegetarian, although today we would call them vegan, because they ate no meat, dairy, eggs or honey, and many eschewed leather and other animal-sourced products, but the word vegan back in 1975 was almost completely unknown. I haven’t eaten meat since the day the people at The Farm explained to me the connections to world hunger, and to animal abuse, and provided their example as a thriving community, without about 200 children, most of them vegan from birth. The primary motivating influence on their vegan living was the Zen Buddhist teaching that they were following, and the ancient Japanese Zen practice of shojin, which is ethical eating that consumes no animal products. 

We eventually walked on south to Huntsville, Alabama, and further deepened our understanding of Buddhism and vegan living in meditation centres there and in Georgia, and in San Francisco.  I became vegan in 1980, and a few years later shaved my head and went to South Korea to live as a monk in a Zen monastery there called Songgwangsa. This Buddhist spiritual community had been practising vegan living for 750 years, since the 13th century, refraining from animal-sourced foods, leather, wool and silk. My experience at the Zen monastery dramatically deepened my understanding of the intimate interconnections between vegan living and the essential Buddhist teachings, and now I find it fascinating to see the many ways that the awakening experience of the historical Buddha many centuries ago in India is still rippling out into our culture today, usually in hidden ways, inspiring and nurturing what we refer to as vegan living, as well as meditation, spirituality, peace and self-reliance.  

There are many more questions and nuances to be explored in understanding the relationship between Buddhist teachings and vegan living, and these fields beckon future exploration. In the meantime, we can give thanks for the inspiration and wisdom of the world’s spiritual teachings that help us to awaken out of the narratives that legitimise exploiting other living beings, and instead to treat them with respect and kindness. 

Dr Will Tuttle, visionary author of the international best-seller, The World Peace Diet, published in 18 languages, is a recipient of the Courage of Conscience Award and the Empty Cages Prize. He is also the author of several other books on spirituality, intuition and social justice, including Buddhism and Veganism, Food for Freedom and The World Peace Way. A vegan since 1980 and a former Zen monk, he is featured in a number of documentaries and is a frequent radio, television and online presenter.  

Find out more about Dr Will Tuttle’s work, or follow him on Facebook, LinkedIn, or X.