Reviving Ancient Vegan Wisdom

Can ancient vegan wisdom save the planet? Ancient Vegan Wisdom By Will Tuttle, Ph.D. What sort of world will our children inherit from us? With every passing day, it seems to become more obvious: the mentality that underlies our culture’s socio-economic system is destroying the biodiversity, climatic stability, and ecological integrity of our earth and poisoning human health and damaging communities and relationships. This underlying mentality is mandated and continually reinforced by our culture’s daily meals, in which we are taught as children to disconnect from animals and the suffering we cause them and see them as mere commodities. We are taught to eat like predators, and the industrialized factory farms and slaughter plants permeating our culture are actually systematized predatory mechanisms that have co-evolved with other predatory mechanisms—the massive corporations and financial institutions that prey on the earth, animals, and vulnerable people being one example. Our meals and institutions reflect each other and reinforce the delusion that we are violent and competitive by nature. Spiritual and religious teachings say otherwise. The Bodhisattva ideal that Buddhists emulate, for example, embodies the understanding that our true nature is wisdom, loving-kindness, and cooperativeness. Our greatest joy comes in helping others and blessing them, and we hurt ourselves the most when we harm others for our own gain. This universal understanding has been suppressed in our culture, and we find the predatory violence of our daily meals projected in technologically magnified ways as cluster bombs, universal wiretapping, genetic engineering, whale-killing sonar blasts, and the commodification of the earth and her inhabitants. It’s becoming obvious that our culture’s predatory mentality is blindly self-destructive. Vegan wisdom is ancient wisdom whose time has come—with a vengeance! Though the word vegan is relatively new—coined in 1944 by Donald Watson—the idea behind it goes back many centuries. I…

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