Dhamma Wheel Buddhist Forum

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You may be onto something. - CedarTree

CedarTree,

I should write this date down. Someone on DW actually agreeing with something I posted instead of locking down to argue until the bitter end, mocking what I wrote, using what I wrote to go off on a tangent, or using what I wrote to split hairs over things that do not matter.

Thank you for the refreshingly different experience [/quote]

Lol it's all part of my master plan to get you to switch to Zen and practicing in the Gyobutsuji Zen Monastery and Antaiji Tradition

Hah jk I think we all need to support each other a bit and you have touched upon something that I think confuses a lot of people that are both new and practiced in the tradition.

I think sometimes in the west we can't get across that the Suttas are not "Written by God and Inerrant" since we have been raised with a cultural backdrop of that perspective with religious texts.

Instead they are guides to spiritual development.

Sometimes when that is brought up people go off the deep end with the other far thing of thinking "Well then there is no truth, it's all post-modern, no point in even practicing"

Haha it's all pendulum stuff of going way to far in either direction. The Suttas in the Pali Canon are absolutely excellent for training and developing on the path. They also provided a very systematic and defined way of approaching many things but in issues like this there may be some elements missing and or not developed as thoroughly as main points.

Simple stuff

Lol well I screwed up trying to edit that quote down a bit in size.... Sorry folks obviously I am a noob.

ieee23 wrote:Garrib,

My own opinion is that the Early Buddhist/Theravada/Historical Buddha's view about meat eating hasn't arrived to us in 2017 as complete. As it is, I don't think it is ethically workable and consistent.

For example, there is this sutta on Wrong Livliehood

Vanijja Sutta: Wrong Livelihood

AN 5.177 PTS: A iii 208

"Monks, a lay follower should not engage in five types of business. Which five?

1. Business in weapons
2. Business in human beings
3.Business in meat
4.Business in intoxicants
5.Business in poison.

"These are the five types of business that a lay follower should not engage in."

Obviously, you can't have a business without customers. This is what I mean by there being a suspicious incompleteness/consistency on an ethical level. It can't work as it is incomplete, so my opinion is that there is something missing.

The advice against going into a business of intoxicants is consistent and workable as the 5th precept advises against consuming such intoxicants. Again, no customers, no wrong business.

Indeed. And as a lay Buddhist I would feel like a hypocrite choosing to buy meat, because I would be expecting somebody else to break the first precept and engage in wrong livelihood.

Spiny Norman wrote:Indeed. And as a lay Buddhist I would feel like a hypocrite choosing to buy meat, because I would be expecting somebody else to break the first precept and engage in wrong livelihood.

Agreed. But there is a formbidable number of those Buddhists who don't think so. I'd like to understand their stance better, simply because it is relatively prominent.

I think its easier to throw ethical logic out the window if you really like to eat meat.

lyndon taylor wrote:if you really like to eat meat.

That can certainly be a powerful factor that is difficult to account for rationally.

This also reminds me of another interest in eating meat: It can help a human feel superior to other species and in control of them. For such a person, refraining from eating meat can seem like evolutionary defeat. Killing animals (for food or otherwise) can seem like a way to keep the "natural order of things" intact, with humans on top.

retrofuturist wrote: This is a topic focused on the subject of Vegetarianism.

Something I forgot to mention is that the Okinawans have one of the highest life expediencies of any population in the world, and they live on mostly a vegan diet:

The traditional diet of the islanders contains 30% green and yellow vegetables. Although the traditional Japanese diet usually includes large quantities of rice, the traditional Okinawa diet consists of smaller quantities of rice; instead the staple is the purple-fleshed Okinawan sweet potato. The Okinawan diet has only 30% of the sugar and 15% of the grains of the average Japanese dietary intake.[4]
The traditional diet also includes a tiny amount of fish (less than half a serving per day) and more in the way of soy and other legumes (6% of total caloric intake). Pork is highly valued, yet eaten very rarely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okinawa_diet

Contrary to the Atkins and paleo diets, the healthiest populations on the planet live on diets consisting of mostly complex carbohydrates.

Spiny Norman wrote:

ieee23 wrote:Garrib,

My own opinion is that the Early Buddhist/Theravada/Historical Buddha's view about meat eating hasn't arrived to us in 2017 as complete. As it is, I don't think it is ethically workable and consistent.

For example, there is this sutta on Wrong Livliehood

Vanijja Sutta: Wrong Livelihood

AN 5.177 PTS: A iii 208

"Monks, a lay follower should not engage in five types of business. Which five?

1. Business in weapons
2. Business in human beings
3.Business in meat
4.Business in intoxicants
5.Business in poison.

"These are the five types of business that a lay follower should not engage in."

Obviously, you can't have a business without customers. This is what I mean by there being a suspicious incompleteness/consistency on an ethical level. It can't work as it is incomplete, so my opinion is that there is something missing.

The advice against going into a business of intoxicants is consistent and workable as the 5th precept advises against consuming such intoxicants. Again, no customers, no wrong business.

Indeed. And as a lay Buddhist I would feel like a hypocrite choosing to buy meat, because I would be expecting somebody else to break the first precept and engage in wrong livelihood.

The Okinawans eat a mostly whole food plant-based diet, with fish and meat as either a rare delicacy to be eaten occasionally, or as a small garnish for a mostly plant-based meal. This is a far cry from the typical American diet, which is based almost entirely on meats and processed foods.

For those who aren’t able to control their meat consumption as well as the Okinawans do, studies have shown that it would be healthier for the prevention and reversal of disease to live on a strictly vegan or vegetarian diet than on the typical American diet.

The traditional Okinawan diet was about 80 percent carbohydrates. Before 1940 Okinawans also consumed fish at least three times per week together with seven servings of vegetables and maybe one or two servings of grain per day. They also ate two servings of flavonoid-rich soy, usually in the form of tofu. They didn’t eat much fruit; they enjoyed a few eggs a week. Dairy and meat represented only about 3 percent of their calories. On special occasions, usually during the Lunar New Year, people butchered the family pig and feasted on pork…
Following the war, western influences — and economic prosperity — crept into traditional life and food habits changed. Okinawans doubled their rice consumption, and bread, virtually unknown before, also crept in. Milk consumption increased; meat, eggs, and poultry consumption increased more than seven-fold. Between 1949 and 1972 Okinawans’ daily intake increased by 400 calories. They were consuming more than 200 calories per day more than they needed — like Americans. Cancers of the lung, breast, and colon almost doubled.
Yet older Okinawans, whose diets had solidified before that time period, are the world’s longest-lived people.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-buett ... 12042.html

Studies have also shown that Adventists, whose religion recommends a vegetarian diet, live longer, with fewer diet-related diseases, than the general American population:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventist_Health_Studies
https://www.livescience.com/37102-veget ... onger.html

This article puts okinawa behind
•Andorra—the mountainous region between France and Spain
•Vilcamba Valley—the Andes mountains in Ecuador
•Himalayas—the Hunzas in Pakistan are the 3rd longest-living group of people
•Abkhasians and Georgians live in a mountainous region near the Black Sea in Russia
•Macau in Southern China

https://draxe.com/the-worlds-longest-living-cultures/

Interesting article. I don't now how well researched it is though.
chownah

Here is a good article which contains this:
https://www.theactivetimes.com/places-w ... onger-life

Where exactly do these people live? You may be surprised to learn that some of them actually reside in the U.S. In Loma Linda, California, members of the Adventist community outlive the average American by 10 years.

Then there are the people from Ikaria in Greece: compared to Americans, they tend to live eight years longer, experience 20 percent less cancer and 50 percent less heart disease, and have almost no cases of dementia.

Sardinia, Italy is home to more male centenarians than anywhere else on earth; the world’s longest- lived women come from Okinawa, Japan; and in Nicoya, Costa Rica, compared to Americans, people are more than twice as likely to reach the age of 90.

chownah

Here is an article which claims that asian americans live longer than the people in the countries that they came from.....I'm sceptical of that finding....but I don't now for sure.
http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/worl ... ing-people
chownah

What's the point of living longer (or healthier, for that matter), if one is miserable anyway?

binocular wrote:What's the point of living longer (or healthier, for that matter), if one is miserable anyway?

To get enlightenment and stop being miserable!

binocular wrote:What's the point of living longer (or healthier, for that matter), if one is miserable anyway?

When the Buddha taught that life is dukkha, he meant that material things are ultimately unsatisfying, not that everything in life is miserable.

It's a common misconception that you don't need to take care of your health, because you'll just die sooner anyway. It's just as likely, if not more likely, that you will live the last years of your life in disability and pain if you don't take better care of your health toady.

Everyone dies, everyone gets sick, but we can take steps to have less sickness and misery in our lives, which also creates less of a burden and less sadness for our loves ones.