An open letter to the Dalai Lama

[Guest guest]

The Dalai Lama has been much in the news lately, and I posted the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article on the NTARN message board a couple of weeks ago. His recent pronouncements on animal experimentation and food animals have reopened the discussion of how his life does not reflect his words. This open letter states the case pretty well, I think. So each of us can begin to reach our own conclusions about the Dalai Lama.

 

By the way, I can't figure out why hepatitis and liver damage require the ingestion of animal carcasses. I suspect this is just an excuse for his actions. JJP

 

 

 

An Open Letter to the Dalai Lama Norm Phelps <n.phe...

 

An Open Letter to the Dalai Lama

June 15, 2007

The Dalai Lama

Thekchen Choeling P.O. McLeod Ganj Dharamsala H.P. 176219 India

By mail and email to: o... (AT) gov (DOT) tibet.net

Dear Sir:

I am writing to you with great sadness.

By way of introduction, or actually re-introduction, I am the author of The Great Compassion: Buddhism and Animal Rights, a copy of which I sent you soon after it came out in 2004, and an additional copy of which I am enclosing with the hard copy of this letter. I have been a practicing Tibetan Buddhist for more than twenty years. You may also recall that in November 1998 you generously granted me a private audience in Washington, D.C. for the purpose of discussing a vegetarian diet as Buddhist practice. You were very gracious in providing me an opportunity to urge you to adopt a vegetarian diet on full-time basis. You told me that because of liver damage resulting from hepatitis B, your doctors had instructed you to eat meat, and that for some years you had compromised by eating vegetarian every other day. You spoke movingly of your deep compassion for animals and your desire that as many people as possible, including Tibetans and Buddhists, adopt a vegetarian diet as an expression of Buddhist compassion for all sentient beings. Less than three weeks after this interview, Agence France Presse (AFP) reported that at a dinner at the Elysee Palace for Nobel Peace Prize laureates, you refused the vegetarian meal that you had been served with the comment, “I’m a Tibetan monk, not a vegetarian,” and insisted on being served the same entrée that the other guests were having, which was reported to be braised calf’s cheek and vol-au-vent stuffed with shrimp.

I understood that the dinner might have been held on a meat-eating day of your one-day-meat, one-day-veggies regime, but I could not understand why you would publicly go out of your way to dissociate yourself from a compassionate vegetarian diet when just days earlier you had spoken to me with such apparent conviction about the need for “everyone who can” to become vegetarian. There were no reporters present at the dinner; the AFP reporter heard the story from you the next day, which suggests that you wanted the world to know that you were not vegetarian. In other words, quite inexplicably, you apparently wanted to promote meat eating as consistent with Buddhist practice. I wrote you asking about this, but received no response.

In light of this background, I was overjoyed to read in April 2005 that you had announced to a wildlife conference in New Delhi that you had lately adopted a vegetarian diet on a full-time basis. On February 16, 2007, Rinchen Dhondrup wrote a thank-you letter on your official letterhead to Ms. Dulce Clements of La Verne, California, who had sent you a copy of a wonderful book on vegetarianism as spiritual practice, The World Peace Diet by Will Tuttle, Ph.D. In this letter, Dhondrup-la said that “His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s kitchen here in Dharamsala is now vegetarian.”

Thus, as you may imagine, I was greatly dismayed to read an article from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel dated May 15, 2007, reporting that you had attended a fund-raising luncheon on May 3, in Madison, Wisconsin for the Deer Park Buddhist Center and Monastery. According to the article, the food served included veal roast, stuffed pheasant breast, and soup made with chicken stock. The chef told the reporter that you “chowed down” on everything you were served, including the veal. Veal calves are separated from their mothers just hours after birth, confined in tiny crates too small for them to turn around in, fed an iron deficient diet that gives them severe, painful, chronic anemia, and killed while they are still small children. When you ate the veal, you lent your public support to some of the most egregious cruelty that our society is capable of. Someone who attended a public talk that you gave in Madison around this time reports that you mentioned the vegetarian issue, saying that you had been vegetarian for two years “because the big monasteries are becoming vegetarian,” but that you had gone back to meat eating because of your health. I presume that the two years were spring, 2005 to spring, 2007. I would have expected you, as a great bodhisattva, to follow a vegetarian diet because it is the compassionate thing to do and was taught by the Lord Buddha Shakyamuni, not because it is the popular thing to do in the context of monastic politics.

Even more recently, it has been reported in the world press that on June 13, 2007 you visited a zoo created by the late television performer Steve Irwin in Beerwah, Australia. During this visit you reportedly spoke in support of a compassionate vegetarian diet while admitting that you eat meat “occasionally” for the sake of your health.

It is hard to understand how eating meat “occasionally” could benefit your health. It would seem reasonable that if your body did, in fact, require meat—which seems most unlikely—you would have to consume meat more often than “occasionally” for it to have any health effect. And since it is easy in India and the West to eat a nutritious, high-protein diet without meat, perhaps supplemented by vitamin B12 tablets, I cannot help suspecting that this is more a question of appetite and custom than health.

It is also hard to understand why you would lend your support to a zoo, which is, after all, a prison in which animals innocent of causing any harm are incarcerated far from their natural surroundings to live out their lives in bleak, barren deprivation and hopelessness. It is especially difficult to understand why you would visit a zoo dedicated to the memory of Steve Irwin, who was world-famous for teasing and tormenting animals for the sake of television ratings, worldly fame, and money.

The lack of consistency between your public statements in support of vegetarianism and animal protection on the one hand and your personal behavior on the other is troubling, to say the least. I am afraid that it is now taken for granted in much of the Western animal protection community that you are a hypocrite who tells his audience what he believes they want to hear and then does whatever he wants to. Your moral inconsistency toward nonhuman animals has even given rise to a website called Bad Karma Lama, www.badkarmalama.com . I have no idea who created the site, but it reflects a view that is very widely held—and, I fear, with good reason. You cannot have it both ways. You cannot be seen as a protector of nonhuman animals and continue to eat meat and visit zoos. You cannot respect the Buddha nature of animals in your speech and continue to disrespect it in your conduct. That is, in fact, hypocrisy. In The Great Compassion, I said that “Buddhism ought to be an animal rights religion par excellence” because of the Buddhadharma’s recognition that there is no intrinsic difference between humans and other animals and its insistence that the First Precept (“Do not kill.”) applies to our treatment of animals as well as our treatment of human beings. If Buddhism does not in actual practice always extend the full measure of its compassionate protection to animals, that is a failure of individual Buddhists, including I am afraid, far too many teachers; it is a violation of the teachings, not a consequence of them. The world sees you as the living embodiment of the Buddhadharma, and even those who are not Buddhist see you as a great moral leader. “Actions speak louder than words,” and when you eat meat, the public, Buddhist and non-Buddhist alike, takes that as proof that inflicting unspeakable suffering and premature death on sentient beings for the sake of appetite is morally acceptable. In that way, you contribute to the killing of the forty-eight billion land animals and uncounted billions of aquatic animals who are slaughtered every year for food. After more than two decades of waiting for you to bring your personal regime into line with your public pronouncements—and the clear teachings of the Lord Buddha Shakyamuni in the Mahayana Scriptures—I have reluctantly concluded that you do, in fact, speak in soothing platitudes to people like me while continuing to eat the flesh of murdered mother beings, and that you have no intention of changing. I remain a firm practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism—you have broken my heart, but not my faith—but I no longer consider myself a follower of the Dalai Lama; and I will not consider myself one until your actions toward sentient beings in the animal realm reflect your teaching.

I have reached this decision only after much soul-searching and with great reluctance. I am not going to ask you to change your behavior. I’ve been there, done that. We have a saying in America that “Anybody can talk the talk. What matters is do you walk the walk.” You can talk the talk with the best of them. But after twenty years, I can no longer pretend that everything is fine while I wait for you to walk the walk.

Sincerely yours,

Norm Phelps

n.phe... (AT) myactv (DOT) net

P. O. Box 776

Funkstown, MD 21734, USA

cc: Office of Tibet, New York

 

 

 

 

 

 

Version: 7.5.472 / Virus Database: 269.8.15/848 - Release 6/13/2007 12:50 PM

[Guest guest]

Not to get into a comparison of religious leaders here, but Abd'ul Baha, the son of Baha'u'llah, prophet leader of the Baha'i faith, said that there is only one time that it might be necessary for humans to eat meat, and that is when they are very ill and cannot eat normal amounts of food. Then small amounts of meat are advisable because they concentrated nutrient foods. He advocated a vegetarian diet and believed humanity would evolve into a vegetarian race. Since I've only recently become vegan, I was/am very surprised, and sadly so, to learn these things, below, about the Dalai Lama. His picture is on the front of Peta's Vegetarian Starter Kit. ( Nichole in Little Elmjjpippin <jjpippin wrote: The Dalai Lama has been much in the news lately, and I posted the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article on the NTARN message board a couple of weeks ago. His recent pronouncements on animal experimentation and food animals have reopened the discussion of how his life does not reflect his words. This open

letter states the case pretty well, I think. So each of us can begin to reach our own conclusions about the Dalai Lama. By the way, I can't figure out why hepatitis and liver damage require the ingestion of animal carcasses. I suspect this is just an excuse for his actions. JJP An Open Letter to the Dalai Lama Norm Phelps <n.phe... (AT) myactv (DOT) net> An Open Letter to the Dalai Lama June 15, 2007 The Dalai Lama Thekchen Choeling P.O. McLeod Ganj Dharamsala H.P. 176219 India By mail and email to: o... (AT) gov (DOT) tibet.net Dear Sir: I am writing to you with great sadness. By way of introduction, or actually re-introduction, I am the author of The Great Compassion: Buddhism and Animal Rights, a copy of which I sent you soon after it came out in 2004, and an additional copy of which I am enclosing with the hard copy of this letter. I have been a practicing Tibetan Buddhist for more than twenty years. You may also recall that in November 1998 you generously granted me a private audience in Washington, D.C. for the purpose of discussing a vegetarian diet as Buddhist practice. You were very gracious in providing me an

opportunity to urge you to adopt a vegetarian diet on full-time basis. You told me that because of liver damage resulting from hepatitis B, your doctors had instructed you to eat meat, and that for some years you had compromised by eating vegetarian every other day. You spoke movingly of your deep compassion for animals and your desire that as many people as possible, including Tibetans and Buddhists, adopt a vegetarian diet as an expression of Buddhist compassion for all sentient beings. Less than three weeks after this interview, Agence France Presse (AFP) reported that at a dinner at the Elysee Palace for Nobel Peace Prize laureates, you refused the vegetarian meal that you had been served with the comment, “I’m a Tibetan monk, not a vegetarian,” and insisted on being served the same entrée that the other guests were having, which was reported to be braised calf’s cheek and vol-au-vent stuffed with shrimp. I understood that the dinner might

have been held on a meat-eating day of your one-day-meat, one-day-veggies regime, but I could not understand why you would publicly go out of your way to dissociate yourself from a compassionate vegetarian diet when just days earlier you had spoken to me with such apparent conviction about the need for “everyone who can” to become vegetarian. There were no reporters present at the dinner; the AFP reporter heard the story from you the next day, which suggests that you wanted the world to know that you were not vegetarian. In other words, quite inexplicably, you apparently wanted to promote meat eating as consistent with Buddhist practice. I wrote you asking about this, but received no response. In light of this background, I was overjoyed to read in April 2005 that you had announced to a wildlife conference in New Delhi that you had lately adopted a vegetarian diet on a full-time basis. On February 16, 2007, Rinchen

Dhondrup wrote a thank-you letter on your official letterhead to Ms. Dulce Clements of La Verne, California, who had sent you a copy of a wonderful book on vegetarianism as spiritual practice, The World Peace Diet by Will Tuttle, Ph.D. In this letter, Dhondrup-la said that “His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s kitchen here in Dharamsala is now vegetarian.” Thus, as you may imagine, I was greatly dismayed to read an article from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel dated May 15, 2007, reporting that you had attended a fund-raising luncheon on May 3, in Madison, Wisconsin for the Deer Park Buddhist Center and Monastery. According to the article, the food served included veal roast, stuffed pheasant breast, and soup made with chicken stock. The chef told the reporter that you “chowed down” on everything you were served, including the veal. Veal calves are separated from their mothers just hours after birth, confined in tiny crates

too small for them to turn around in, fed an iron deficient diet that gives them severe, painful, chronic anemia, and killed while they are still small children. When you ate the veal, you lent your public support to some of the most egregious cruelty that our society is capable of. Someone who attended a public talk that you gave in Madison around this time reports that you mentioned the vegetarian issue, saying that you had been vegetarian for two years “because the big monasteries are becoming vegetarian,” but that you had gone back to meat eating because of your health. I presume that the two years were spring, 2005 to spring, 2007. I would have expected you, as a great bodhisattva, to follow a vegetarian diet because it is the compassionate thing to do and was taught by the Lord Buddha Shakyamuni, not because it is the popular thing to do in the context of monastic politics. Even more recently, it has been reported in the world press that on June 13,

2007 you visited a zoo created by the late television performer Steve Irwin in Beerwah, Australia. During this visit you reportedly spoke in support of a compassionate vegetarian diet while admitting that you eat meat “occasionally” for the sake of your health. It is hard to understand how eating meat “occasionally” could benefit your health. It would seem reasonable that if your body did, in fact, require meat—which seems most unlikely—you would have to consume meat more often than “occasionally” for it to have any health effect. And since it is easy in India and the West to eat a nutritious, high-protein diet without meat, perhaps supplemented by vitamin B12 tablets, I cannot help suspecting that this is more a question of appetite and custom than health. It is also hard to understand why you would lend your support to a zoo, which is, after all, a prison in which animals innocent of causing any harm are

incarcerated far from their natural surroundings to live out their lives in bleak, barren deprivation and hopelessness. It is especially difficult to understand why you would visit a zoo dedicated to the memory of Steve Irwin, who was world-famous for teasing and tormenting animals for the sake of television ratings, worldly fame, and money. The lack of consistency between your public statements in support of vegetarianism and animal protection on the one hand and your personal behavior on the other is troubling, to say the least. I am afraid that it is now taken for granted in much of the Western animal protection community that you are a hypocrite who tells his audience what he believes they want to hear and then does whatever he wants to. Your moral inconsistency toward nonhuman animals has even given rise to a website called Bad Karma Lama, www.badkarmalama.com . I have no idea who created the site, but it reflects a view that is very widely held—and, I fear, with good reason. You cannot have it both ways. You cannot be seen as a protector of nonhuman animals and continue to eat meat and visit zoos. You cannot respect the Buddha nature of animals in your speech and continue to disrespect it in your conduct. That is, in fact, hypocrisy. In The Great Compassion, I said that “Buddhism ought to be an animal rights religion par excellence” because of the Buddhadharma’s recognition that there is no intrinsic difference between humans and other animals and its insistence that the First Precept (“Do not kill.”) applies to our treatment of animals as well as our treatment of human beings. If Buddhism does not in actual practice always extend the full measure of its compassionate protection to animals, that is a failure of individual Buddhists, including I am afraid, far too many

teachers; it is a violation of the teachings, not a consequence of them. The world sees you as the living embodiment of the Buddhadharma, and even those who are not Buddhist see you as a great moral leader. “Actions speak louder than words,” and when you eat meat, the public, Buddhist and non-Buddhist alike, takes that as proof that inflicting unspeakable suffering and premature death on sentient beings for the sake of appetite is morally acceptable. In that way, you contribute to the killing of the forty-eight billion land animals and uncounted billions of aquatic animals who are slaughtered every year for food. After more than two decades of waiting for you to bring your personal regime into line with your public pronouncements—and the clear teachings of the Lord Buddha Shakyamuni in the Mahayana Scriptures—I have reluctantly concluded that you do, in fact, speak in soothing platitudes to people like me while continuing to eat the flesh of murdered

mother beings, and that you have no intention of changing. I remain a firm practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism—you have broken my heart, but not my faith—but I no longer consider myself a follower of the Dalai Lama; and I will not consider myself one until your actions toward sentient beings in the animal realm reflect your teaching. I have reached this decision only after much soul-searching and with great reluctance. I am not going to ask you to change your behavior. I’ve been there, done that. We have a saying in America that “Anybody can talk the talk. What matters is do you walk the walk.” You can talk the talk with the best of them. But after twenty years, I can no longer pretend that everything is fine while I wait for you to walk the walk. Sincerely yours, Norm Phelps n.phe... (AT) myactv (DOT) net P. O. Box 776 Funkstown, MD 21734, USA cc: Office of Tibet, New York Version: 7.5.472 / Virus Database: 269.8.15/848 - Release 6/13/2007 12:50 PM

Be a better Globetrotter. Get better travel answers from someone who knows. Answers - Check it out.

[Guest guest]

Just a couple comments on Tibetan Buddhism to maybe give some

additional perspective on the Dalai Lama issue.

 

Traditionally, Tibetan Buddhists were not vegetarian because if you

didn't eat meat in Tibet - well, you didn't eat. All of my vegetarian

friends who have done pilgrimages to Tibet have had a very hard time

of it because of the lack of vegetables, even at the best times of year.

 

That said, there seems to be increasing concern with meat-eating in

the exiled Tibetan Buddhist community. Recently, His Holiness the

17th Gyalwa Karmpa instructed all centers and monasteries in the Karma

Kagyu lineage that official events are to be vegetarian. The use of

milk is okay. But eggs are discouraged in general, and free-range

eggs are to be avoided since they may be fertilized. This change was

a major shift in practice for the Karma Kagyu community.

 

It's also probably important to recognize that the Buddhists conceive

of things a bit differently that we do here in the West.

 

Here we have the attitude that one big justification for becoming a

vegetarian/vegan is to stop contributing to the suffering and death of

the animals that we eat as meat.

 

To Buddhists, this is small potatoes - because a sentient being is a

sentient being, and in eating a single carrot we have indirectly

caused the death and suffering of many hundreds of sentient beings

(insects) through the cultivation techniques used to grow the carrot.

This is true even for organically grown vegetables.

 

So vegetarian Buddhists are urged not to be prideful about how good

and superior they are compared to meat-eaters, because vegetarians are

also involved in the death and suffering of countless sentient beings.

 

One important practice in Tibetan Buddhism is meditation on the fact

that through countless previous lives, every sentient being that you

see - every person, dog, insect, worm, whatever - was at one time your

mother who loved you and would have given her life for you. By

meditating on this fact, meditators develop the right view of loving

compassion toward all sentient beings, and out of that right view

there will be an automatic flowing of right motivations and right

actions.

 

But unfortunately, it is the nature of the relative world that

sentient beings cause the suffering and death of other sentient

beings, and there is no escape from that reality for any of us while

we continue to be reborn in the relative world.

 

Anyhow, that's my two cents. I hope it helps.

 

Tim in Dallas

 

 

, Nichole

Fausey-Khosraviani <ms_fausey wrote:

>

> Not to get into a comparison of religious leaders here, but Abd'ul

Baha, the son of Baha'u'llah, prophet leader of the Baha'i faith, said

that there is only one time that it might be necessary for humans to

eat meat, and that is when they are very ill and cannot eat normal

amounts of food. Then small amounts of meat are advisable because

they concentrated nutrient foods. He advocated a vegetarian diet and

believed humanity would evolve into a vegetarian race.

>

> Since I've only recently become vegan, I was/am very surprised,

and sadly so, to learn these things, below, about the Dalai Lama. His

picture is on the front of Peta's Vegetarian Starter Kit.

>

> (

> Nichole

> in Little Elm

>

> jjpippin <jjpippin wrote:

> The Dalai Lama has been much in the news

lately, and I posted the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article on the

NTARN message board a couple of weeks ago. His recent pronouncements

on animal experimentation and food animals have reopened the

discussion of how his life does not reflect his words. This open

letter states the case pretty well, I think. So each of us can begin

to reach our own conclusions about the Dalai Lama.

>

> By the way, I can't figure out why hepatitis and liver damage

require the ingestion of animal carcasses. I suspect this is just an

excuse for his actions. JJP

>

> An Open Letter to the Dalai Lama

>

> Norm Phelps <n.phe...

> An Open Letter to the Dalai Lama

> June 15, 2007

> The Dalai Lama

> Thekchen Choeling

> P.O. McLeod Ganj

> Dharamsala H.P. 176219

> India

> By mail and email to: o...

> Dear Sir:

> I am writing to you with great sadness.

> By way of introduction, or actually re-introduction, I am the

author of The Great Compassion: Buddhism and Animal Rights, a copy of

which I sent you soon after it came out in 2004, and an additional

copy of which I am enclosing with the hard copy of this letter. I have

been a practicing Tibetan Buddhist for more than twenty years. You

may also recall that in November 1998 you generously granted me a

private audience in Washington, D.C. for the purpose of discussing a

vegetarian diet as Buddhist practice. You were very gracious in

providing me an opportunity to urge you to adopt a vegetarian diet on

full-time basis. You told me that because of liver damage resulting

from hepatitis B, your

> doctors had instructed you to eat meat, and that for some years you

had compromised by eating vegetarian every other day. You spoke

movingly of your deep compassion for animals and your desire that as

many people as possible, including Tibetans and Buddhists, adopt a

vegetarian diet as an expression of Buddhist compassion for all

sentient beings. Less than three weeks after this interview, Agence

France Presse (AFP) reported that at a dinner at the Elysee Palace for

Nobel Peace Prize laureates, you refused the vegetarian meal that you

had been served with the comment, " I'm a Tibetan monk, not a

vegetarian, " and insisted on being served the same entrée that the

other guests were having, which was reported

> to be braised calf's cheek and vol-au-vent stuffed with shrimp.

> I understood that the dinner might have been held on a meat-eating

day of your one-day-meat, one-day-veggies regime, but I could not

understand why you would publicly go out of your way to dissociate

yourself from a compassionate vegetarian diet when just days earlier

you had spoken to me with such apparent conviction about the need for

" everyone who can " to become vegetarian. There were no reporters

present at the dinner; the AFP reporter heard the story from you the

next day, which suggests that you wanted the world to know that you

were not vegetarian. In other words, quite inexplicably, you

apparently wanted to promote meat eating as consistent with Buddhist

practice. I wrote you asking about this, but received no response.

> In light of this background, I was overjoyed to read in April 2005

that you had announced to a wildlife conference in New Delhi that you

had lately adopted a vegetarian diet on a full-time basis. On February

16, 2007, Rinchen Dhondrup wrote a thank-you letter on your official

letterhead to Ms. Dulce Clements of La Verne, California, who had sent

you a copy of a wonderful book on vegetarianism as spiritual practice,

The World Peace Diet by Will Tuttle, Ph.D. In this letter, Dhondrup-la

said that " His Holiness the Dalai Lama's kitchen here in Dharamsala

is now vegetarian. " Thus, as you may imagine, I was greatly

dismayed to read an article from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel dated

May 15, 2007, reporting that you had attended a fund-raising luncheon

on May 3, in Madison, Wisconsin for the Deer Park Buddhist Center and

Monastery. According to the article, the food served included veal

roast, stuffed pheasant breast, and soup made with chicken stock. The

chef told the

> reporter that you " chowed down " on everything you were served,

including the veal. Veal calves are separated from their mothers just

hours after birth, confined in tiny crates too small for them to turn

around in, fed an iron deficient diet that gives them severe, painful,

chronic anemia, and killed while they are still small children. When

you ate the veal, you lent your public support to some of the most

egregious cruelty that our society is capable of. Someone who

attended a public talk that you gave in Madison around this time

reports that you mentioned the vegetarian issue, saying that you had

been vegetarian for two years " because the big monasteries are

becoming vegetarian, " but that you had gone back to meat eating

because of your health. I presume that the two years were spring, 2005

to spring, 2007. I would have expected you, as a great bodhisattva, to

follow a vegetarian diet because it is the compassionate thing to do

and was taught by the Lord Buddha

> Shakyamuni, not because it is the popular thing to do in the

context of monastic politics. Even more recently, it has been

reported in the world press that on June 13, 2007 you visited a zoo

created by the late television performer Steve Irwin in Beerwah,

Australia. During this visit you reportedly spoke in support of a

compassionate vegetarian diet while admitting that you eat meat

" occasionally " for the sake of your health.

> It is hard to understand how eating meat " occasionally " could

benefit your health. It would seem reasonable that if your body did,

in fact, require meat—which seems most unlikely—you would have to

consume meat more often than " occasionally " for it to have any health

effect. And since it is easy in India and the West to eat a

nutritious, high-protein diet without meat, perhaps supplemented by

vitamin B12 tablets, I cannot help suspecting that this is more a

question of appetite and custom than health.

> It is also hard to understand why you would lend your support to a

zoo, which is, after all, a prison in which animals innocent of

causing any harm are incarcerated far from their natural surroundings

to live out their lives in bleak, barren deprivation and hopelessness.

It is especially difficult to understand why you would visit a zoo

dedicated to the memory of Steve Irwin, who was world-famous for

teasing and tormenting animals for the sake of television ratings,

worldly fame, and money. The lack of consistency between your public

statements in support of vegetarianism and animal protection on the

one hand and your personal behavior on the other is troubling, to say

the least. I am afraid that it is now taken for granted in much of the

Western animal protection community that you are a hypocrite who tells

his audience what he believes they want to hear and then does whatever

he wants to. Your moral inconsistency toward nonhuman animals has even

given rise to a

> website called Bad Karma Lama, www.badkarmalama.com . I have no

idea who created the site, but it reflects a view that is very widely

held—and, I fear, with good reason. You cannot have it both ways. You

cannot be seen as a protector of nonhuman animals and continue to eat

meat and visit zoos. You cannot respect the Buddha nature of animals

in your speech and continue to disrespect it in your conduct. That is,

in fact, hypocrisy. In The Great Compassion, I said that " Buddhism

ought to be an animal rights religion par excellence " because of the

Buddhadharma's recognition that there is no intrinsic difference

between humans and other animals and its insistence that the First

Precept ( " Do not kill. " ) applies to our treatment of animals as well

as our treatment of human beings. If Buddhism does not in actual

practice always extend the full measure of its compassionate

protection to animals, that is a failure of individual Buddhists,

including I am afraid, far too many

> teachers; it is a violation of the teachings, not a consequence of

them. The world sees you as the living embodiment of the

Buddhadharma, and even those who are not Buddhist see you as a great

moral leader. " Actions speak louder than words, " and when you eat

meat, the public, Buddhist and non-Buddhist alike, takes that as proof

that inflicting unspeakable suffering and premature death on sentient

beings for the sake of appetite is morally acceptable. In that way,

you contribute to the killing of the forty-eight billion land animals

and uncounted billions of aquatic

> animals who are slaughtered every year for food. After more than

two decades of waiting for you to bring your personal regime into line

with your public pronouncements—and the clear teachings of the Lord

Buddha Shakyamuni in the Mahayana Scriptures—I have reluctantly

concluded that you do, in fact, speak in soothing platitudes to people

like me while continuing to eat the flesh of murdered mother beings,

and that you

> have no intention of changing. I remain a firm practitioner of

Tibetan Buddhism—you have broken my heart, but not my faith—but I no

longer consider myself a follower of the Dalai Lama; and I will not

consider myself one until your actions toward sentient beings in the

animal realm reflect your teaching. I have reached this decision

only after much soul-searching and with great reluctance. I am not

going to ask you to change your behavior. I've been there, done that.

We have a saying in America that " Anybody can talk the talk. What

matters is do you walk the walk. " You can talk the talk with the best

of them. But after twenty years, I can no longer pretend that

everything is fine while I wait for you to walk the walk. Sincerely

yours,

> Norm Phelps n.phe...

> P. O. Box 776

> Funkstown, MD 21734, USA

> cc: Office of Tibet, New York

>

>

>

>

>

>

>

>

>

> Version: 7.5.472 / Virus Database: 269.8.15/848 - Release Date:

6/13/2007 12:50 PM

>

 

> Be a better Globetrotter. Get better travel answers from someone who

knows.

> Answers - Check it out.

>