re: #106 Stanley Sea

Are Buddhists vege?

Many are. It’s not uniform throughout the faith.

Most interesting thing I have learned about Tibetan Buddhism is that while it is sometimes necessary to kill an animal for food (they’re not exactly in the grain belt), they believe it’s better to kill something big, like a cow, than something small like a fish. More people get fed from one death, instead of from many.

When I first heard this, this boggled my Western mind, and I don’t often go around saying “Wow, man, I was like, so enlightened by the cool wisdom of the East, it’s like, totally different from the way white people think”, because I know people who do, and they’re idiots. But I realized that I had this entire hierarchy in my head of people on top, then big carnivorous mammals, then big herbivores, then little mammals, then birds, then fish—and this utterly set that on its ear. It’s not the size of the animal or its connection to humanity at all. The lives are all the same size, or at least, the same import.