Thirty six years ago when I started practicing Zen Buddhism I gave up meat eating, hunting and fishing to become a “good Buddhist” vegetarian. I had an on and off thing with fishing, I stopped for years, picked it up again as exclusively a Catch & Release practice, stopped it again, then picked it back up again. I never picked up hunting or eating meat again until this last year. When forced out of my vegetarian diet by SIBO I decided that if I was going to eat meat then I was going to participate in the taking of that meat or fish so I began killing fish and recently, killing animals, for food.
Today I started re-reading The Compass of Zen by Zen Master Seung Sahn, the founder of the Kwan Um School of Zen in which I practiced for many years and took precepts. Imagine my surprise when on page 2 I encountered the following in his discussion on why there is so much suffering today.
Perhaps the most important reason for such a dramatic increase in the amount of suffering in this world is the increase in the amount of meat eating that humans do.
He then, however, goes on to say:
For centuries, if a man wanted to eat meat, he went into the forest and shot maybe one or two animals with bow and arrow – piitchhuu! Then he went home and ate it with his family. This animal died. But there was some kind of relationship between the animal and the person who killed and ate it. Their karma was somewhat clear… the karma was very simple: it was only between this one man and this animal. It could be resolved between them and eventually brought back to a balance through the simple operation of cause and effect.
That is a very Paleo statement coming from Seung Sahn and one I totally can relate to. I feel when I am killing a fish or now shooting a pheasant that the situation is very clear, I take the life to support my own life and I thank the animal for giving their life for mine. This is what goes on in nature. Wandering the canyon last week we saw evidence of a pheasant taken by a hawk, the hawk was trying simply to live. I took pheasants too, trying simply to live.
I remember long ago reading a chapter in a book by Minnesota Zen Meditation Center student, Marian Mountain, where she talks about the fact that her partner at the time deer hunted and that she was OK with his hunting and even ate the deer because it was done in a manner that was very Zen-like and respectful of the animal. I recently found a blog, A Mindful Carnivore, by Tovar Cerulli and his book of the same name. Tovar was a former vegan turned hunter, sort of like me. I love the fact that there is a chapter in the book titled “Hunting with the Buddha” where the author hunts with a Buddhist who took up hunting. Tovar has a blog post from a few years ago on Zen and the art of deer hunting which I can relate to after my experience last week, hunting birds and even shooting clays was a very Zen experience for me, totally one pointed focus on the field and the dog and having to not-think in order to hit the bird as it flushed. Instead of “just sit” it became “just shoot”.
Wide Open Spaces had a post on The Zen of Hunting from just last fall that covers the same basic theme, that there really is a zen to the act of hunting that manifests itself in the experience of being in nature, stillness, mindfulness and solitude. I found another article of basically the same name, Zen and the Art of Hunting, that even references Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the book that got me started on my Zen journey decades ago.
My ideal world as a meat eater would be to be able to be like this paleolithic hunter (though with a shotgun and high powered rifle) and be able to hunt, fish and kill all my meat needs. I know people who pretty much live this ideal, they get an elk, a deer and maybe an antelope or two each year along with salmon, trout, duck and pheasant and live on what they kill for meat. They take full responsibility for their meat eating and have personal involvement in everything they eat. I’m not sure I will get to this point or not. I spent a few hours the other day planning a deer hunting trip in the fall which is the next step to this since I need to able to take large animals which supply a good amount of meat to really make a dent in the beef, lamb and pork that I currently have to buy. Until then I will continue to buy local, ethically raised meats where, in some cases, I know the names of the animal that I am eating and have watched it grow up in order to be as personally involved as possible with the animals that are giving their lives to support mine.