Since I have about a half an hour, I wanted to talk about being vegetarian. It's not easy to talk too much about being vegetarian, to give up meat eating. I think it's very important to know how to think about eating meat and how to put it into practice. Now I should start to talk because this half hour is about to finish. To begin with we will say some prayers.
Generally regarding those who are ordained, if you ask if meat is allowed for the monks or not, some people say that it is not allowed because if there are people who are eating meat, then there will be people who will kill those animals, and if there is no one eating meat then there would be no one will make the meat. So therefore eating meat is very much related to killing and therefore the negative deed of killing is very much caused by eating meat. Now whether that is true or not is something different….If there are people who are using the pearls, then these people who use the pearls cause the killing of the shellfish. And also those people who wear certain kind of dresses, people who wear brocades—silk is also made by certain animals or certain insects—so anybody who is wearing these clothes or anything that is coming from animals [is also killing animals].
And also if there is nobody who eats meat, then because of eating things like grains and so forth, also this causes lots of insects under the earth to come up on the earth and then all those beings living on top of the earth go below and therefore cause a lot of beings to die.
Because there are sheep, there will be people who are killing the sheep. So therefore, being a sheep is also a problem, a kind of source of the negative deed. [Therefore] just being one cause cannot be the same as being the actual deed of negative things.
There was once a person in China who used to butcher pigs. Each day he used to kill a pig and he used to make his sword red. Sometimes he thought, “Why should I do this? Each day I'm killing a pig.” And he thought, “It's not because I want to kill the pig but because other people want to eat [it] and need the pig and therefore that's why I'm doing it,” and so he was consoling himself that it's not too bad.
H.H.Karmapa for full dharma teaching on why to be a vegetarian.
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