My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.
A Message To The Dalai Lama ~
My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.
The Dalai Lama
The Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama Thicken Coiling P.O. McLeod Ganja
Dharamsala H.P. 176219
India.
His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama ~
Your Holiness, please use your vivid imagination and “oceans of wisdom” to consider the magnitude of the lifesaving opportunity that is outlined in this presentation that will take you on a path that is rarely traveled.
…A path that only a few people like you are capable of traveling.
The journey begins below. Please follow this path to its final destination…
When you occasionally think back about the many personal accomplishments in your life, which accomplishment do you think will stand out as the most worthy, most meaningful, and most beneficial for humans, animals, and the earth?
Is it possible that there is one more accomplishment that could be the most satisfying of all?
Your Holiness, I think you will agree that most people in the world consciously or subconsciously “really prefer kindness and life for all animals.”
Now would be an excellent time for millions of people to prove it.
Now, more than ever, is the time to persuade and convince hundreds of millions of people throughout the world that, not only can they get along perfectly well without eating animal flesh and dairy products, but they can also get along a great deal better, while sparing the lives of billions of animals.
Your Holiness, I keep imagining what kind of amazing positive repercussions would happen if you made an announcement broadcast throughout the world that you have become a vegan!
Your “historic monumental announcement” expressing love and compassion for all animals would reverberate loudly and clearly throughout the entire world and would go a long way in promoting kindness and, ultimately, a full life for all farmed animals.
More than ever before, many reluctant and impetuous leaders throughout the world must now, COME OUT OF THE CLOSET, to check up on the quality and nature of their own beliefs. In the light of new data gained, in the presence of new ideas accepted, an old belief may have to be changed in its form and content.
Stubborn and indifferent world leaders in every profession must have the COURAGE to make the necessary changes to remodel existing beliefs. They must have the courage to check within themselves, to repair and refine their convictions, their beliefs, and their way of life.
Your Holiness, may your sincere affections and sympathy for animals’ lives generate love, compelling you to seek an identity with this cause.
May you then be inspired to become one of the prominent world leaders promoting this righteous campaign motivated by the desire and goal to permanently protect the sanctity of life for all precious and vulnerable creatures on the face of the earth?
With your invaluable leadership, along with the cooperation of brilliant and compassionate leaders everywhere, a worldwide mandate designed to ultimately emancipate all animals from any form of unnecessary cruelty could be established. A mandate that should be accepted and endorsed by most rational government and religious leaders.
Your Holiness, I hope during your golden years of life you will not think back with a deep feeling of disappointment, frustration, and regret because you did not take advantage of the amazing opportunity you had while “you were briefly in the limelight” and could have truly helped to change the world.
That “brief time in history” when your efforts to save the lives of billions of animals could have made an incredibly beneficial difference to the entire world!
You may spend many years thinking and wishing “you could go back in time” to recapture the special opportunity you once had, and let slip away.
Your Holiness, now is your short window of opportunity to make this unprecedented effort to accomplish a goal that only a few people think is possible.
WHY NOT GO FOR IT?
Your Holiness, in closing, let me make one last recommendation.
Please devote 70 minutes of your busy schedule to watch and seriously consider the real meaning and value of the incredible Youtube video of vegan Gary Yourofsky’s magnificent speech titled BEST SPEECH YOU WILL EVER HEAR, which is probably also the most important speech you will ever hear:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=es6U00LMmC4
Thank you Your Holiness for seriously considering the content of this message for the urgently needed benefits of all humans, animals, the earth, and the earth’s atmosphere.
Respectfully,
Arthur Poletti, Vegan
USA
PS: The last meal of the Buddha, which is said to have hastened his death, was a meal of tainted pork.
Vegan Mother, Vegan Baby: Kinder, Safer, Healthier World To Live In!
Best Speech You Will Ever Hear | Gary Yourofsky
Vodpod videos no longer available.
See more by Arthur Poletti:
let us build in our hearts
a house of worship
and a steeple
together we will pray
for the earth
and the japanese people
to ask forgiveness
from the earth mother
every day
to please not take
our planet away
to give our species
another chance
to prove
that we have learned
from our mistakes and
forward we can move
feel the love inside you
share it whenever you can
it is only that goodness
that can save man
Karen Lyons Kalmenson
Our Compass 
You expressed the point very well, now to see if he listens.
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Good luck with getting him to read and seriously consider it. But I thought the Buddha was vegan, or at least vegetarian??
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As far as I know, His Holiness tried doing without meat and did not do well. He has health issues, and, like me, requires some animal protein. Wouldn’t it be more fruitful if you encouraged people to do with less meat and to purchase only that which is grown in more humane fashions? The people of Tibet are meat eaters because Tibet does not have the climate or soil for many crops to prosper. So, the Tibetan dietary need for meat is genetic. I, too, tried a vegan diet and became mentally dull and, in fact, was even more seriously ill than I already am and risked dying altogether. I eat a small amount of organic, free range meat and I get really tired of being preached to by vegans trying to “convert” me. I also run an animal sanctuary and spent hours every day helping other animals and other people. Please don’t judge us by our diets.
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Very well-written, Lisamarie.
Catherine, here is a site that you may be interested in dispelling the “humane” moniker: http://www.humanemyth.org/
I would add that it may be easier to understand by, in mind, replacing non-human animals with human animals: if a hostage was given access to the outdoors prior to be executed, would that be considered humane treatment of a hostage despite being murdered? No, of course not. And, too, factory farms and feed lots are the norm, not the exception. It’s the small farms that are the exception these days, and all the “people” on them are slaughtered regardless. A non-human animal, as a human animal, used is abused.
Let me know if I can explain better, I’m more than happy to provide online materials or guides or videos. Thanks, Catherine.
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Too funny when people say that. Sorry but that is a rationale or a license to do the wrong thing. Perhaps you didn’t have the tools or the knowledge regarding how to pursue a vegan lifestyle? Now it is soooo easy and there are so many high-quality resources, including about a million fabulous cooking sites (such as Post Punk Kitchen and Fat-Free Vegan Kitchen) and gateway sites such as “The Kind Life” and One Green Planet that deal with everything from food to fashion. There are even sites devoted to vegan performance athletes (Meat Free Athlete, for example). the American Dietetic Association has for years endorsed vegetarian and vegan diets as appropriate and healthful for all stages of life, including pregnancy and lactation. Even more importantly, people need to realize that there is nothing healthy about meat and dairy, in particular. In fact, they are grotesquely unhealthful. The only reason for so much confusion about this is that the US government has meddled and propped up these industries, as with corn, and duped the public into thinking that these “foods” are healthful and essential. They are not. They are unhealthy and flat-out dangerous. I am a medical writer, by the way, who is in mainstream medical journals all day long. There is substantial evidence. All you have to do is look.
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Catherine, I’m sorry but NO one “requires” animal protein; did your doctor tell you that, by any chance? Also, veganism is NOT a diet; it’s a moral imperative. Now maybe after giving up animal products you initially may have felt run down and like you said, “dull”, but this is normal. It’s your body’s way of cleaning house, if you will, getting rid of all the toxins, and once it is finished doing that you should start to feel great!
May I ask you what you ate when you first went vegan? What you ate-or didn’t eat-may have had something to do with how you felt as well. Or perhaps your body was going through some withdrawal after being addicted to animal products for so long. This is also normal.
Animals are not here for us to exploit and do whatever we want to to or with; they’re not here for us, we’re here for THEM! They are their own individuals with their own interests in living their own lives and NONE of them want to die because some wants, or thinks they need, to eat their flesh. I don’t care if they are “free range”, “grass-fed”, “humanely raised”, “organic”, or whatever label you want to put on it to make yourself feel better and more comfortable about eating them. Even if they are treated well while they are on the farm, they are still being exploited nonetheless and eventually wind up in the same place and killed the same slow, gruesome way as thier factory-farmed counterparts; make NO mistake about it!
And that is not preaching. That is FACT!
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Thank you, Stacy. Also, Catherine, let me further add that the probable reason His Holiness has health problems is due to his consumption of animal products, and so if he switched to an all plant-based lifestyle and did it sensibly, chances are good that his health problems would subside.
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his Holiness needs to lay off the burgers. what a sad example.
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Catherine, here is another publication that you might find interesting that covers many of the health hazards of eating animal flesh and or diary products as well as other links to many other problems connected to the livestock industry. These are the types of publications The Dalai Lama and The Pope should read. Real awareness changes everything–All the best to you– http://whyveg.com/health/
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His Holiness cannot become vegan because he is sick. He suffer of hepatitis. He eats meat because of a medical prescription. He eats vegetarian food 4 times a week. For people with serious cronic disease it’s very difficult, even not impossible, becoming vegan. I my own suffer of a cronic disease. I was vegetarian, I strongly believe in this cause, but I had to stop and to eat meat again, because my health was rapidly worsened due to the vegetarian diet. In the future, if my health conditions will improve, I will try to become vegetarian again. But now I cannot. Every time I eat meat I remember the sacrifice of that animal. I look at him/her with compassion. I bless him/her and pray for his/her fortunate rebirth. This is what we no-veg buddhist can do. We are not vegetarian or vegan, but not for choice. All we sentient beings have not choice in everything we want. This is the samsara. We have only to do our best or at least try to do it.
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The fact that he is sick is all the reason to go vegan, yeah?? Please don’t hand me the BS, if you’ll pardon me, about “I tried being a vegetarian once but it may me sick….” How could something that is so healthy for you make you ill?? Also, if you were still eating eggs and dairy products, then don’t you think they are likely the reason you got sick?
Also, animals do NOT “sacrifice themselves”; do they really come up willingly to you, stretch out their throats and if to say, “slit my throat open so I can suffer immensely and bleed to death”? I think not!! They resist very violently, just as we would if someone was holding us down and was about to kill us! If you truly have compassion for animals, then GO VEGAN and stop making excuses to murder and eat them. It is NOT healthy nor is it necessary! Animals die for our selfish pleasure because “WE say so”, not because the have to! We have the power to leave them ALONE, and should!
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I would also remark a thing. Every time we plow up a camp, we destroy the
life of innumerable little animals which live in the soil. They are insects, but
their life is not less precious than that of a mammal. We have to look with
compassion also to them. I know that the industry of meat is horrible. I don’t
accept it and His Holiness too. Who says that His Holiness likes burger
ignore who His Holiness is and his inner thoughts. They ignore the buddhist
phylosophy. His Holiness was vegetarian since he was a child, as every
buddhist monk. But recently, when he got sick, doctors prescribed him to
eat meat, because of a lack of vitamine B12. He tried to refuse this
prescription, but he had to do it. Only animal products contain vitamine B12.
Also the vitamine B12 contained in the pills is taken from animal products.
So, even if you refuse to eat meat and you chose to take pills, it will as if you
eat meat. Meat is full of toxines. This is not a news or a mistery. In reality, if
we examine carefully our life, we will find that there is nothing in it-self which
is unable to damage our health. Every thing we eat cause us intoxication in
some way. Every time we introduce in our body a substance, food included,
vegetable included, organical products included, we cause us an intoxication,
because everything in this world, less or more, contains toxines, which our
body must metabolize and eliminate in some way. For example there are a
lot of common vegetable that cause me several form of allergia. I cannot it
them, because otherwise my sickness get worse very seriously. I am sick
and I have a lot of health problems, but even the body of an healthy person
have to metabolize the toxines which naturally are contained in the food, in
every kind of food, less or more, for some reason and in some way. Also
the air that we breath is full of toxines. This is due to the pollution.
Everybody knows it. Everybody hate pollution, but very few people in the
world work against pollution or try to limit their behavior in order to avoid
pollution. However, even if we try to do everything we can to avoid
pollution, to respect the enviroment and the life of the other sentients being
(insects, bugs, worms and parasites included), if we examine carefully our
life, at last we must find that there is not a single action that is unable to harm
someone else. This is why we are in the samsara. Here, in samsara there are
innumerable wrong things. This doesn’t mean that we must leave things go,
because everybody wants happiness like us, but we have to be very
conscious about it. We have to try to do our best, knowing that here, in this
world there is not a single action which is unable to harm someone else. This
thought would let us to avoid of judging others. If you analize thing in that
way you will find that every time we spent a moment to judge others, we
lose time which we would have to invest to make our life meaningful.
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The animals get their b12 from PLANTS!! There are vegan B12 supplements out there, so that is another excuse. Yes, there are an incidental number of animals who may be unintentionally killed during the harvesting of plant foods, but although that is unfortunate that is NOTHING compared to the thousands of animals who are DELIBERATELY killed so we can eat them!
If you respect life as you claim you do, the you need to PRACTICE what you preach and leave ALL beings alone, at least to the extend that you have control over it.
Yes there can be certain toxins in plants, which is why you buy organic. When plants become contaminated with pathogens, this is often from the FACTORY FARMS–if people would stop eating animals this would take care of the problem with food contamination!
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I appreciate your cause, but I don’t agree with what you say. The insects you kill when you plow up a camp are deliberately killed like the mammals which are killed in the factory farms. This is due to the fact that when you plow up a camp you are aware about the fact that you are killing innumerable insects, worms and bugs which live in the soil. If you didn’t know this, you could say that your action is not deliberated, but, since you are conscious about it, you have not excuses. It’s for this reason why a buddhist monk cannot work the soil as a farmer. This is forbidden by his vows. Moreover the sentient beings which live in the soil and are killed with the plowing are a moltitude and the number of the mammals which are wrongly killed in the farms cannot exceed their number. The only fact that they are very tiny and you are unable to see all of them, doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. At least they are the same number. All of us know that the insects are the most representative animals in the world. Anyway, if you really want to support your cause you should eat only fruits and vegetables which spontaneously grow up in nature. You would renounce to all the products which result from the industry, vegetable and supplements included. This means you should be fruitarian. If you would be fruitarian, I would totally agree with you. But I comprehend that being fruitarian it’s very difficult. Only few people who lives in certain parts of the world could follow this lifestyle, wherever there is an abundance of wild fruits. It would be very happy, if everywhere there would be this opportunity.
If everyone would be unable to kill by their own hand, this would be a better world. I think that in this case I wouldn’t have all the health troubles which are due to the damages I received from other people and I would have no need to eat meat. But this is my karma and we live in samsara. Every brave choice implies a risk. Maybe If you are healthy you could be vegan without problems. This is what you can do and this is good. I am poor, I have no extra money to buy all the supplements in order to continue the vegetarian diet, because it is just very difficult for me buy the medicines I need yet. This is an excuse? No, this is a reality. I live in Italy, not in US or in UK. I am unemploy. Due to this and also to my allergias, I have often no opportunity to chose what I buy to eat. Here in Italy there is an high rate of unemployment and many people have not enough money to make ends meet. Many of them, like me, are also sick. When Doctors noticed that eating only rice plus vegetables or only boiled vegetables and sometimes a little bit of cheese, was putting me into a serious risk, they prescribed me to eat a little bit of meat. Now I eat meat 2 or 3 times maximum a week, but I hope in future, if my conditions will improve, to become vegetarian again. This is what I can do with my effort and I excuse me if it is not enough.
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“The insects you kill when you plow up a camp are deliberately killed like the mammals which are killed in the factory farms.”
Honestly, I’ve never understood that point of view, it makes no sense to me; it would be like validating war where innocent people are killed by comparing it to another war where other innocent people are being killed. In other words, Darfur is okay because history is replete with similar human rights atrocities? My goal is not perfection, perfection is impossible. My goal is to diminish as much as possible my contribution to suffering and death. The insects killed for crop harvesting are killed in far larger numbers for the crops that feed animals than for the crops that feed human animals.
I understand that whenever I walk I kill insects. But how that justifies some 150 billion other animals being skinned for fur, slaughtered for medicine, or dismembered for food is completely beyond me. To me it seems like a child’s game with neenerneenerneener the goal.
I wish you the best and for an improvement in your health.
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Stacey maybe you didn’t understand what I said I think. It’s very difficult to me explain what Buddha said in regard to the killing, about 2500 years ago. It’s difficult because it’s very profound and I am not able to repeat this depht. The concept is based on the fact that here, in samsara, every single action we do, unless we are enlightened, causes suffering to others. One of the differences in doing a spiritual practice or not is in the fact that we are aware of this or not. Obviously, having a vegetarian or vegan diet is less negative than eating meat. But, if we analise with more attention, we cannot say that under everything we eat or drink, there is the death of some beings. If you know this, if you are aware of this, you cannot say that those beings are not deliberately killed, because you are aware of the fact that every time someone plows up the camp where grow the fruits or the vegetables you eat a moltitude of bugs die in an horrible manner. Anyway, we have to eat for living, similar to a tiger who needs to kill a lot of animals to live. We are not tigers in this life, fortunately, but we have to be aware to the fact that, because of we are in samsara, every single action we do, causes the suffering of someone else, anyway. This doesn’t mean we have to leave things go, as you say, we have to try to do the best. This is good. My best in this moment, I think is what I’m doing. If not, I am sorry. I know I have a lot of limits and obscurations. But, if His Holiness is not vegetarian or vegan at the moment, is because for some right reasons, he can’t, even because normally monks and nuns are vegetarian and a some of them are vegan. If it would be possible, His Holiness would be vegan or at least vegetarian. If it is not, is because evidently it’s no possible. I say this because he is an enlightened beings. His only purpose is to benefits others. Do you think that if he could benefits others he wouldn’t do? If you had the fortune to know His Holiness, sure you think in this way.
Now, I thank you for your wish. I hope I could become again vegetarian as soon as possible (even because I don’t like meat!).
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