Printed in the Spring 2019issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Will, Tuttle,"The Enlightenment Fallacy" Quest 107:2, pg 22-26
By Will Tuttle
Flesh free from the three objections, not prepared, unasked, unsolicited, there is none. Therefore one should not eat flesh.
—Arya Shantideva
Theosophy, while not a religion but a search for truth, draws heavily from Buddhist insights. Buddhism, like Theosophy and most religions, is a system of teachings aiming to assist its adherents to attain spiritual enlightenment. The underlying idea is that as we cultivate our awareness and awaken spiritually, we naturally help to bring healing and harmony not just to ourselves, but also to our society.
Spirituality transcends the particularities of religion, history, and culture, and addresses the dimension of ourselves that is consciousness and is not essentially separate from other beings. Spiritual awareness, whatever the religious or nonreligious trappings may be, naturally gives rise to compassion for others, including animals, and also to ethical behavior, because it’s the lived realization that beings are not merely material objects, but are sentient manifestations of life inherently deserving of respect.
The Consequences of Herderism
Animal agriculture is the antithesis of spirituality. It reduces beings to the status of harvestable commodities, stealing their sovereignty through routine sexual abuse, mutilation, and death. This destroys not just their lives, purposes, and happiness, but undermines ours as well. It fosters a desensitized awareness focused on separateness, denial, entitlement, competition, and consumerism. Our freedom is eroded by enslaving animals. Herderism, the core organizing principle of our society for the past 10,000 years, is the practice and accompanying mentality of routinely and relentlessly reducing beings to mere material commodities to be imprisoned, killed, and used. Herderism’s hubristic mentality of entitlement suppresses spiritual awareness in individuals and in our cultural institutions, including our religious institutions. Through acculturation, this has become invisible to us.
When we have religious teachings, practices, and teachers that do not question animal agriculture or eating animal-sourced foods, we have religions that lack spirituality and that tend, ironically, to reduce spiritual awareness while contributing to delusion, injustice, and war. The four core practices of animal agriculture are: mentally reducing beings to mere material objects; enslaving them from birth to death; sexually abusing them and stealing their offspring; and premeditatively killing all of them. On every level—physically, cognitively, emotionally, sexually, spiritually, culturally, and ethically—animal agriculture undermines our sensitivity and awareness, and promotes materialism and the exploitation of the weak by the strong. The fact that it is so widespread and deeply rooted makes its devastating effects virtually untrackable to their source, even to those of us who consider ourselves to be spiritually oriented.
Because all of us have been raised in a culture organized around herding animals for food, we have been wounded from birth by the medical, educational, religious, familial, economic, and governmental institutions compelling us to participate in animal agriculture. When we eat animal foods, we are not only harming our physical health, we are also eating attitudes that reduce our psychological, cultural, and spiritual wellness. Food is our most intimate connection with nature and with our culture, and being required from infancy to eat foods of terror and toxicity suppresses our innate wisdom and sense of connectedness with the other intriguing and beautiful expressions of life on earth. Herderism, because it requires and ritually indoctrinates both desensitization and disconnectedness, reduces our capacities to care, feel, and make connections, eroding our ability to understand the cause of suffering.
We have been told from childhood that hot dogs, hamburgers, cheese, eggs, and fish sticks are our tasty friends, giving us needed protein, calcium, and other health benefits, and that ranching and fishing are natural and noble activities that help to feed us and keep our world healthy. Fortunately, we are waking up from this erroneous narrative and realizing that our “friendly” foods, and the industries based on animal exploitation, are actually our deadliest enemies, as cows, pigs, and chickens have certainly long realized. They relentlessly harm every dimension of our health, but this reality—and our capacity to awaken and understand it—is suppressed by our social institutions.
Spirituality and Religion
Religion is the social institution that is perhaps best-suited to upholding ethical standards and demanding protection of the weak, but it is compromised by two competing loyalties. It has a mission to encourage the spiritual impulse in people, but it also has a mission to support and transmit prevailing cultural norms and values. Spirituality, however, has no such divided loyalty, and propels us only to discover our true nature, even if it means questioning cultural narratives. Spirituality recognizes the pig in the bacon, the cow in the cheese, and the injustice and trauma that we are causing by eating these foods and feeding them to our children. Spirituality rejects this unnecessary violence and calls for an awakening from this abusive behavior, as well as from the underlying materialism and reductionism that inform animal agriculture.
This is the great tension between spirituality and religion. Spirituality can never condone the culturally approved practices of animal exploitation and abuse for food, clothing, entertainment, research, or any purpose, because it is rooted in respecting the interconnectedness and unity of life and consciousness. It is not concerned, as religion is, with supporting existing cultural values. Spirituality includes animals because they are endowed with sentience as we humans are. Thus teachers and teachings are fully spiritual when they explicitly renounce all forms of animal agriculture, animal-sourced foods and products, and other forms of animal abuse.
There may be religious teachers who do not question animal agriculture because their primary aim is to maintain the prevailing cultural narratives, be popular, and be financially successful. However, as soon as spirituality comes into play, materialism and practices of exploitation are vigorously questioned and abandoned, and replaced by teachings that cultivate respect, kindness, and freedom for all.
Buddhism seems to have begun as a fully spiritual teaching in this sense, questioning injustice and violence, and helped shift the ancient Indian culture away from the practice of animal sacrifice and toward vegan living based on respect for all. This may have been somewhat easier at that time, because Indian cuisine was more organized around plant-based foods then, except for the practice, apparently brought by immigrants from Egypt and central Asia, of exploiting cows for their milk. When Buddhism later spread to East Asian countries like China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, which had no tradition of using cows for milk, the Buddhist teachings and teachers evolved to explicitly encourage vegan living, a practice continuing to this day.
Buddhism, rooted as it is in ahimsa, has thus been an often hidden thread in the centuries-old tapestry of vegetarianism and veganism as they have evolved throughout the world. Both Buddhism and veganism are living, transformational forces in peoples’ lives.
The gift of veganism is the insistence on practicing ahimsa in daily life by explicitly including animals within our sphere of mindful caring and kindness. But veganism in itself lacks a foundation in cultivating deeper awareness, inner stillness, and receptivity. As vegans, we can fall prey to despair and anger because of our unique and still unaccepted orientation, and may become mired in depression, anger, or alienation, or in blaming, shaming, and criticizing behaviors.
Although Buddhist ahimsa has been watered down in many cases by corruption, convenience, conformism, fear, hubris, taste, ambition, hypocrisy, and sloth, Buddhism brings the gift of mindfulness and the cultivation of meditative awareness. Just as vegan practice can bring an essential clarity and accountability to Buddhist practice, Buddhist practice can bring depth, mindfulness, and resilience to vegan practice. Together they can create a more comprehensive framework for personal and social transformation.
For example, a primary danger for Buddhist practitioners is sometimes referred to as “Zen sickness,” a dull pseudoserenity in which our routinized meditation and way of thinking keep us stuck in a detached, enforced calmness. Buddhist practice calls us to awaken out of any enforced mental state to full aliveness and responsiveness in the moment-to-moment awareness of our lives. Eating animal foods dulls our sensitivities. Mindful vegan living can help reconnect us with the purity, passion, joy, and aliveness that our cultural wounds have repressed, and can reconnect us with the compassion and awareness that have been covered over by years of indoctrination.
On the other hand, some of us try to justify eating animal foods because we tell ourselves we are bringing the Buddhist practice of mindfulness to our nonvegan meals. Not far from where we live in northern California, for example, there’s a local slaughter facility advertising that it provides “mindful meats.” This coopting of Buddhist terms and ideas is readily apparent. We would never consider promoting mindful raping, mindful stealing, or mindful harming, because mindfulness is the antithesis of these behaviors. Mindfulness is the cultivation of awareness, and to willfully abuse others requires us to submerge our awareness beneath a distorting narrative that rationalizes toxic attitudes and behavior. Buddhist practice is an effort to liberate our minds from the narratives that hold us in delusion and cause violence. Veganism is clearly a helpful ally in this effort.
The world’s religions promote ahimsa, and yet virtually all of them, even Buddhism and Jainism, which seem to champion it, continue to be hijacked into justifying violence toward animals by the pervasive demands of animal agriculture. As we as individuals make efforts to awaken from the cultural trance of herderism and routinized animal abuse, our transformation is our contribution to our collective transformation, helping our spiritual and religious communities reclaim their authentic foundations. We liberate animals from the violence of “mindful meats” and liberate Buddhism from this violence to its teachings as well, freeing it to illuminate and inspire compassion and liberation for all as originally intended.
The Enlightenment Fallacy
Outer compassion and inner stillness feed each other. Veganism and ethical living are essential to our spiritual health because they remove a fundamental hindrance to our individual path and help create harmony in our community.
There’s a saying attributed to the eighth-century lama Padmasambhava: “Though the view should be as vast as the sky, keep your conduct as fine as barley flour.” This essential teaching, emphasizing vegan values of caring and kindness, is an important healing antidote to a damaging delusion common in many spiritual communities. We can call this delusion the “enlightenment fallacy,” because it arises as a false sense of individual license to do as we like because we believe we are spiritually advanced. This fallacy activates and reinforces the basic sense of entitlement and arrogance that is inserted into all of us as products of a culture organized around eating foods sourced from animals. This violence is well understood today to be completely unnecessary and counterproductive to our physical, cultural, and environmental health. However, the enlightenment fallacy attempts to justify this by “spiritualizing” our disconnectedness, denial, and daily contribution to violence through propagating what seems to be a more lofty and enlightened perspective. This fashionable perspective clouds our awareness and convinces us that our behavior of buying and eating animal-sourced foods either is not relevant to our spiritual practice or is actually an indication of our spiritual attainments. There are several versions of this enlightenment fallacy.
One is that because of our spiritual attainment, we are now free of attachments and judgments. We are no longer trapped in the net of discrimination, this fallacy affirms, and are therefore free to eat anything we like. We see that everything has “one taste,” and now that we have discovered this and have freed ourselves from the discriminating mind, we can live our lives free from the rules that are only meant for those who are less accomplished.
Another version is that because we are more enlightened, we now realize that the whole phenomenal world is but maya, an illusion, and therefore no animals are really killed, and in fact nothing negative ever really happens. Love is the only power, so we can eat our hot dogs with love and understanding and no harm is done. This narrative assures us that we either transform the negativity with our high vibration or that we are so awake that we realize that the animals we’re eating are illusory, as is all pain and suffering, so it doesn’t matter what we do in the outer world. All that matters is the quality of our consciousness.
A similar narrative is that we have attained the “karmaless” state, where we are free from karma, duality, and consequences. We realize there is no essential self, and no world, and we are thus free to do as we like. We are no longer bound by conventional morality, which is a system of rules that is artificial and imprisons us in delusions of “good” and “evil.” Now we are free of this confining dualism, the narrative goes, and we can act as we please.
Many Buddhists and other spiritual practitioners follow a similarly tempting rationalization, proclaiming that spiritual illumination is liberation from dualism and rules and that they are free to do as their “heart” tells them, or to eat the foods to which their “body” guides them. They love the animals they eat. They are blessing them and helping them to have a more evolved rebirth. Or even better, they see that it’s all just a play of illusion and that the One Light is always shining, no matter what is happening in the outer world.
Padmasambhava’s wisdom (and there are many other examples of this wisdom in the Buddhist teachings) addresses the devastating fallacy in these hubristic narratives. When our view is as vast, deep, bright, and all-encompassing as the sky, then we keep our conduct as fine as flour. It’s precisely because our view is vast that we are more sensitive to the consequences of actions and take them seriously. We experience the infinite interconnectedness of all manifestations of life, and our heart is naturally bursting with compassion for others, even as we see they are not “others” at all, but essentially inseparable from us. This realization is the foundation of authentic morality, kindness, and spiritual awakenings. We naturally delight in helping and blessing others as best we can, and recoil from actions that exploit or abuse others for our own advantage.
We should be suspicious of any narrative that allows or encourages harming or using others because of seeing they are not separate, or seeing they are eternal and undamageable, and so forth. Clinging to either duality or nonduality is still clinging. There are many aspects to the enlightenment fallacy, and the various rationalization narratives are all the more insidious because of the armor they bestow, hardening hearts and conveying a toxic pseudospirituality that harms not just animals but everyone touched by these delusions. While it may be helpful and healing to practice viewing the pain and loss that we personally experience as transient and illusory, it is the height of delusion to discount the pain and loss we inflict on others by rationalizing it as being transient and illusory. We may often add further layers to the narrative, for example that it’s just for their own good, or it’s just their karma, or that we’re just not attached to outer forms, or that we’re just reflecting back to them their own violence. The “just” in all these narrative excuses is the just of justification.
To the degree we are wounded and abused as children, we tend to grow into adults who are propelled to likewise inflict abuse on others. As products of a technocratic herding culture, we are all harmed from infancy in countless ways, and our woundedness can erode our capacity to be mindful of our conduct and sensitive to our inner wisdom and to others. The Buddhist teachings call us to heal, to look deeply and mindfully, and to question the fundamental narrative of the herding culture into which we’ve all been born. This herding narrative, which reduces beings to commodities, is the utter antithesis of both bodhi and karuna, wisdom and compassion, the prime teachings of Buddhism, which free us as individuals and create the foundation of communities where harmony, joy, equality, and abundance are possible for all.
Awakening from the desensitizing stupor inflicted on us from infancy by the herding culture is a monumental effort. It calls us to question virtually all of our inner narratives and explanations, and to cultivate our capacity for inner silence so that we can be free from this harmful conditioning. In receptive awareness, we find that intuitive insight emerges, and this can be seen as the foundation of the wisdom and compassion that are at the heart of the Buddhist dharma.
Ahimsa and Cultural Transformation
The transformative insight that the historical Buddha experienced and shared as best he could is a direct understanding of the deeper truth of our nature, bringing peace, joy, and freedom. It is insight into the cause of suffering in the delusion of essential separateness, which compels us to try endlessly to get what we want and keep away what we don’t want, and to see others as instruments in this miserable struggle. This is samsara, the suffering that never ends in countless lifetimes until we awaken our heart and mind and realize that we are all waves on the same ocean. This awakening and teaching, the hidden thread that has brought healing through the ages, is available to each and every one of us now.
We live in challenging times. Animal agriculture continues to devastate our earth’s ecosystems, our culture’s harmony and sanity, and our physical health. More insidiously, it also erodes our cultural and personal intelligence, and our awareness, empathy, and creativity. Our short-term future is in question at this point. It’s well understood that we could go extinct soon, without ever understanding why it happened. The vegan dimensions of many traditions of wisdom, including Buddhism, have been repressed for too long under the din of animal agriculture’s narrative of domination, greed, and elitism.
Nevertheless, by opening our eyes and looking deeply, we can discern a bright and beckoning path into a positive future. Increasing numbers of us are being called to this path and are calling others to join us. There is nothing stopping us from proceeding along this bright path to new dimensions of peace, abundance, and freedom. Fear, delusion, attachment, and conformism are the primary obstacles.
Virtually all religious traditions today are open to more explicitly recognizing the importance of a commitment to respect and kindness for animals. Each of us can contribute in our unique way to this opening of awareness. We are called to more fully embody the values of kindness in the crucible of our relationships with all kinds of animals, including the most difficult ones, humans. It is through congruence and transparency that living truths are transmitted.
The earth we inhabit is beautiful and abundant and can easily feed and support all of us. When we awaken from the consumerist trance of animal agriculture, the land and waters will heal, along with our minds, bodies, relationships, and communities. This is the vision of engaged and caring awareness and action implicit in Buddhism and veganism. Buddhist teachings call for vegan living, and vegan living calls for the same awakening from deluded narratives toward which Buddhist practice aims.
May we give thanks every day for another opportunity to awaken, to contribute to our community, and to cultivate our minds and hearts so that our view becomes as vast as the sky and our conduct as fine as barley flour.
Dr. Will Tuttle is author of the acclaimed best-seller The World Peace Diet, published in sixteen languages. 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, as well as the creator of online wellness and advocacy programs. A vegan since 1980 and former Zen monk, he is cofounder of the Worldwide Prayer Circle for Animals. With his spouse, Madeleine, a Swiss visionary artist, he lectures extensively worldwide.
This essay is adapted from a forthcoming book of essays edited by Dr. Tuttle: Buddhism and Veganism: Essays Connecting Spiritual Awakening and Animal Liberation.