On the ethics of meat-eating

Question: The precept against killing is often translated into adopting a vegetarian diet. Is this necessary? Aren’t you also killing these poor vegetables, stripping their skin off while they’re still alive and boiling them?

Thanissaro Bhikkhu: For the monks, our rule is that we’re not allowed to eat meat if we either know or suspect that it was killed for the purpose of feeding us. The precept against killing is specifically against either killing something on your own or telling someone else to kill. Now, if you want to take the precept further and adopt a vegetarian diet, that’s perfectly fine. But the precept doesn’t require it. Just make sure that when you go to a seafood restaurant and they have a fish tank with live fish, don’t choose any of the live fish.

As for vegetables, they don’t come under the concept of sentient being — they don’t feel pain — so the precept doesn’t cover them.

We’ve received several questions on the issue of the relationship between the first precept and a vegetarian or non-vegetarian diet. You have to remember that the precept is a training rule. It’s not a principle for trying to create a perfect society or a perfect world. Its purpose is to focus you on the things that you are directly responsible for doing.

Also, it doesn’t guarantee that, if you abide by the precept, you’re not going to have any bad kamma. In other words, the precept is phrased in such a way that eating meat does not go against the precept, but you still have the kamma of eating the flesh of the animal that had to die for that.

This is one of the reasons why monks have a reflection every day on the food they eat, which is that they’re incurring a debt and only through the practice can they get beyond that debt. You take the time to reflect on the fact that simply having a body requires that you place a burden on many other beings, which gives you a good motivation for trying to find a happiness that doesn’t need to feed. One of Ajaan Lee’s reflections is that when you’re about to die, the spirits of all the animals whose bodies you ate are going to come thronging around, asking for some merit. If you don’t have any merit to give them, they’ll take you with them. But if you have lots of merit to dedicate to them, they’ll be happy to take your merit instead.

Question: You said that eating meat does not break the precept against killing. How can you say that the consumer of the meat does not play any role in supporting the killing of the cow? How can this not be breaking the precept?

Thanissaro Bhikkhu: It’s not the case that eating meat does not support the killing of the cow. It does play a role in supporting that, but the precepts cover only two things: One is what you do yourself, and the other is what you give the order to do. That’s all that’s covered by any of the precepts. Beyond that, if you feel inspired not to support the cow-killing industry, then don’t eat meat. But that goes beyond the precept. We’re not trying to create an ideal society with the precepts. We’re trying to focus directly on what we’re doing so that our own personal behavior is conducive to getting the mind into concentration and then gaining the insight so that we don’t have to come back to this process that needs to keep on eating. Only when you train the mind to the point where it doesn’t need to feed can it can be really pure.

Question: We had a long question from a mother with a 14-year-old child who wanted to be a vegetarian. The child did not like the fact that his mother was not a vegetarian and was giving her many, many, many reasons for becoming vegetarian. No matter how she would argue with him, he wouldn’t listen to her reasoning. She wanted to know how I would reason with the kid.

Thanissaro Bhikkhu: I would basically say, “If you’re providing the food for the family, then you have the right to have a say in what kind of food is being fixed. Until you reach that point, the mother is the one making the decisions.”

~ Good Heart, Good Mind: The Practice of the Ten Perfections