The Shared Vegan Principles of Hinduism, Buddha and Christ
The sacred Hindu writings collectively known as the Vedas highlight the corrupting nature of blood sacrifice in religion. Calasso points out that ‘the futility of sacrifice was the ultimate sacred meaning that only someone who followed the whole story of the Mahabarata could grasp’[1]. Tantra 17 of the Panchatantra states that:
In blind darkness are we sunk when we offer animals as sacrifice. A higher religious duty than the ahimsic laws of harmlessness has never been nor shall be.
The divine non-violent law of ahimsa includes a categorical rejection of animal sacrifice in light of a holy obligation not to harm the living. This is the original Hindu Satya: the truth of God[2].
The deceit that the gods are appeased by the slaughter of an animal is identified in the Vedas as a madness: ‘How can he who sacrifices not be tainted by death?’[3]
Flavius Clemens, a Roman consul of the first century, stated that ‘sacrifices were invented by men to be the pretext for eating flesh’[4]. I would add to Clemens astute observation by making the point that sacrifices were also invented on the pretext of selling flesh. Animal sacrifice is the meat industry in its putative form.
It is a strange dichotomy that religion, whose origins appear to be universally connected to love, compassion and non-violence, presents throughout history as being vulnerable to infiltration by the meat industry via the Trojan horse of animal sacrifice. When you think about it though, it make sense. If the religious order exercises over its flock the non-violent directive of abstention from eating meat, the religious order also possesses the power to undermine that which it is designed to uphold. Belief systems can be flipped on their heads. Priests, seduced by the lure of mammon, can literally transform their temple into a money-spinning slaughter house.
The introduction of blood sacrifice into religious practice offers up a potential lucrative monopoly in the making. The religion has already done all the hard lifting; it has cleared the deck back to a compassionate, vegan purity. The potential then exists for a priest to present certain meat as having been granted immunity from moral laws of abstention by being approved under certain conditions by the gods, or God, whose representatives are after-all the priests. Old beliefs are loosened to accommodate a new commerce of temple-endorsed flesh eating and the butcher/priest double-act expands its influence and power by exploiting the addictive human weakness for meat. Out of the killing the priests make a killing. Fortunes are made and the church transforms into a profligate parody of its former self, until a purifying ethical force usually in the form of a revolutionary holy person shakes up the status quo and returns religion back to it vegan, ahimsic origins. This is the eternal to-and-fro between purity and perversion, between good and evil that plays out over the tens of thousands of years of human endeavour documented in the Sanskrit Vedas.
Gautama Buddha is the archetypal revolutionary holy person restoring human behaviour back to its healing vegan roots. The same direct warnings on the corrupting influence of animal sacrifice that is found at the heart of Hinduism also resides at the heart of Buddhism.
At the time Buddhist thought and practice began to take hold in China in the 5th century B.C, animal husbandry and rituals involving animal sacrifice and blood offerings had become the norm in many regions[5]. Buddha literally ‘untied the knot of sacrifice’[6], purging religious practice of animal sacrifice and any meat offerings in religious ritual[7]. Animals under the sweeping reforms of Buddhism were freed from the sacrificial servitude of the Chinese meat industry. The original ahimsic knowledge contained in the Vedas that animal cruelty and meat consumption warped the human spirit, revived under the powerful influence of Buddha. Buddhism rose to significance by confronting head on the corrupting spread of meat merchants operating under the guise of religiously endorsed animal ‘sacrifice’. Buddha freed the animals and in turn freed the souls of the people who, via their purchase and consumption of temple meat, had been tied as tight as the animal to the moral debasement of the sacrificial pole.
It is widely acknowledged and accepted that the core message and impact of Buddha is the re-establishment of vegan ahimsa by ceasing animal sacrifice and meat consumption. This is the path by which Buddha achieves universal compassion. What is less accepted however, is that Christ was empowered with the same revolutionary mandate as Buddha.
Jesus, like John the Baptist, like Peter and James the Just and all the original early Christians, was profoundly opposed to animal sacrifice and its ensuing partner in crime: meat consumption[8]. Their belief system deferred back to a deeper religious tradition of the Jewish Essenes who ‘rejected animal sacrifice outright’[9]. The anti-sacrifice, anti-meat-eating ethical code of living that defined the Essenes, connected Jesus directly to the universal ahimsic principles of Hindu morality. Christ attempts to re-establish across Judaism the ahimsic wisdom of the east that constituted the origins of Torah morality.
The practice of blood sacrifice was quite possibly initiated in Judea by occupying Roman forces. Jewish priests were forced by the Romans to sacrifice animals in their temples[10]. Animal sacrifice proved a successful method of undermining the traditional authority base of the local religion and also had the added bonus of giving kick-backs to local priests prepared to engage in the commerce of sacrificial meat, further undermining traditional ahimsic principles of Judaism. It was Christ’s fierce opposition to the Roman-endorsed practice of animal sacrifice conducted in Jewish temples that would lead directly to his crucifixion.
Evidence of Jesus passionately denouncing animal sacrifice miraculously survives the mass Dark Ages destruction of records pertaining to Christianity’s vegan, ahimsic roots. Epiphanius, known as ‘the patriarch of Christian orthodoxy’, writing in the mid 4th century A.D, quotes Jesus, in a confrontation with a Jewish high priest as saying:
ἤλθον καταλῦσαι τὰς θυσίας, καὶ ἐὰν μὴ παύσησθε τοῦ θύειν οὐ παύσεται
ἀφ᾽ ὑμῶν ἡ ὀργή: I have come to abolish sacrifices and feasts of blood;
and if ye not stop eating flesh of flesh and blood of blood, the wrath
of god will not cease from you[11]
Here, Jesus mirrors Buddha’s announcement that his role is to ‘untie the knot of sacrifice’. The synchronicity between Buddha and Christ is uncanny.
Epiphanius cites the above Jesus quote from a manuscript titled The Gospel of the Ebionites, which criminally did not survive the later medieval purges of Christian records. It is believed to have been written around the middle of the 2nd century[12].
Christ announcing he is ‘here to abolish the sacrifices’ is substantiated by other sources, to the extent that:
There is such a fundamental agreement among the Pseudo-Clementine sources (especially Rec. 1.27–71), the “Gospel of the Ebionites”, and Epiphanius’ description of the Ebionites that there has to be a connection between them. The idea that Jesus came to abolish the sacrifices and that the temple was destroyed because the people were reluctant to cease sacrificing is unique within the early Christian tradition, making its appearance both in Rec. 1.27–71 and the “Gospel of the Ebionites” hardly coincidental.[13]
Epiphanius refers to the Gospel of the Ebionites in a critical manner. By doing so, he inadvertently preserves against the later medieval sanitization of Christianity evidence of the ahimsic origins of Christ’s message that Epiphanius and his conservative ilk were so keen on first refuting, then repressing and then destroying. By the time the Christian Church unifies with its previous oppressor — the Roman Empire — in the 4th century, meat-eating has emerged as a standard defining behavioural trait of an ‘orthodox’, Pauline Christian. Veganism in the meantime becomes a sign of heresy punishable by death. Historical writings that cite the sentiments of ahimsa and veganism such as the Gospel of the Ebionites are classed as heretical and destroyed. Safe-guarded within the writings of the ‘patriarch of orthodoxy’ however, we uncover the clearly articulated task of Christ to ‘abolish the sacrifices’.
Epiphanius gifts us another insight into Jesus’s antipathy toward animal sacrifice when he quotes him refusing Jewish Passover:
‘I have no desire to eat the flesh of this Paschal Lamb with you’.” (22.4)[14]
There has been debate among biblical scholars over whether Christ ate Passover during the Last Supper. Google these debates at your risk. Like much of Christology, the discussion can become lost in a labyrinth of metaphysical posturing. For our purposes, by cross-referencing Epiphanius with the other above quoted sources, it is self-evident that Christ refused the lamb of the Paschal. It would make no sense for him to indulge in that which he is sent to end.
Christ’s opposition to Passover fits perfectly with early Christianity’s commitment to returning Judaism back to its pre blood-sacrifice vegan origins. It appears the Ebionites, given they abstained from ‘meat with soul in it’[15], reflect more accurately the word, actions and spirit of Jesus than much of the writing contained in the New Testament.
Once we acknowledge Jesus’s self-proclaimed task to abolish blood sacrifice, we can better appreciate his outrage when he comes across the merchants during Passover operating out of the Temple of Jerusalem. We can also understand the reason Pontius Pilate tried and crucified him and the reason the Jewish priests declined to exercise their discretionary powers of pardon. Central to this understanding is the lucrative Temple meat trade Jesus and his followers posed a direct threat to.
The repulsion Christ must have felt when the packed Passover scene greeted him at the Jerusalem Temple has been captured by the Bible: the courtyard filled with livestock; doves and pigeons for sale to those who could not afford other meat; money changers and priests with bloodied hands carrying goblets filled with giblets. The temple had not only become ‘a den of thieves’ but a den of murderers. Enraged at the scene that confronted him, Christ drove with a stick the blood-splattered priests and peddlers and money changers and money lenders and the poor-suffering animals from the Temple. At least for the day, Jesus cleansed the holy temple of the bloody violence and grubby profiteering synonymous with animal sacrifice.
The schizophrenic warping of Christ’s call to ‘end the sacrifices’ that saw Christianity mutate into a mass cult of flesh-eating, required nothing less than the re-writing of history. As Napoleon said, ‘history is a set of lies agreed upon’. The job of perverting Christ’s ahimsic message fell initially to the Roman Saint Paul who, after his epiphany on the road to Damascus, began the process of watering down the vegan, ahimsic principles Christ lost his life defending. Paul’s motivation appears to have been to make Christianity more appealing to a wider Roman audience. Christ’s message that he had arrived to abolish the sacrifices, was itself sacrificed to the greed, hubris and cruelty of the very church that would carry his name through the centuries into almost unimaginable cruelty and violence perpetrated against human and animal alike.
Jesus, like Buddha five hundred years before him, agitated for a return to ahimsic, vegan peace. He dies the very public, brutal, martyred death of the rebel, bitterly opposed to the Roman infiltration of Judaism and bitterly opposed to the corrupting practice of animal sacrifice and its cohort in cruelty: meat-eating.
The death of Jesus, in theory, renders blood sacrifice obsolete. Unfortunately however, blood sacrifice done in the name of Christ — the very person whose mission was to rid religion of sacrifice — continues grossly expanded to this day in the form of the daily eating of flesh by millions of people calling themselves Christian. We can see how utterly maligned Christ’s vegan message has become with the accepted ‘Christian’ convention of slaughtering and devouring billions of animals over Christmas and Easter to celebrate Christ’s birth and commiserate his death. Or is it the other way round? This is the very horror of blood sacrifice that Jesus abhorred, but on a scale he could not have dreamt of in his worst nightmares.
The Abrahamic religions have attempted to maintain moral integrity through the tokenistic process of restricted meat consumption. Some meat ordained by the church is ok, but others not. We have examples of particular restrictions on the type of animal that can be slaughtered: cows okay, but pigs out; pigs okay, but dogs not; etc. There is even a crazy list in the Bible of animals that are pure and can be eaten and those deemed to be impure and therefore which can’t be eaten. Sometimes it depends on who is killing the poor beast whether a belief system deems it can be slaughtered and eaten. Sometimes it depends on which direction the blood is going to squirt. Sometimes it depends on a muttering of a special invocation. Sometimes it depends on the day: certain days you eat flesh and others you don’t. Token effort is made to ‘thank the Lord’ for the dead body about to be eaten, and to ‘bless’ the food.
History demonstrates what the Hindu Vedas were at pains to point out: that the loosening of ahimsic directives to abstain from any flesh-eating leads to the death of human compassion by a thousand cuts. One concession leads to further concession. The meat industry begins to grow and get a hold on the religion and on the populous. The power of killer priests and their doctored killer belief systems expand and you end up with a stampeding meat industry crushing humanity under the demonic weight of accepting violence and cruelty as an ethical norm. You end up with the fracturing of morality. You end up where we are today: facing a brutal hegemony of global corruption in which a mendacious, mega-powerful meat industry threatens the very viability of the planet.
Contained however in the holy revolutionary lessons of Buddha and Jesus, is the clearly enunciated antidote for our contemporary disarray, which demands of each of us no more than a personal rejection of meat consumption and a return to the universal compassion of vegan ahimsa.
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[1] Calasso, R Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India, Jonathon Cape, London p 312
[2] Ibid p151
[3] Ibid p183
[4] in Williams, H The Ethics of Diet An Anthology of Vegetarian Thought, White Crow London 2009 1st published 1905, p113
[5] See Komjathy, L Animals and Daoism in Encylopaedia Britannica Journal September 26 2011 http://advocacy.britannica.com/blog/advocacy/2011/09/daoism-and-animals/
[6] Calasso p367
[7] See Foer, J.S Eating Animals Little, Brown and Company, New York 2009r
[8] During the three of four first centuries, that the most esteemed of the Christian heroes or saints were not only non-flesh-eaters but vegetarians of the most extreme kind, is well known to everyone at all acquainted with ecclesiastical and, especially, eremitical history : Williams p 110
[9] Akers, K Vegetarianism and Christianity — Are they compatible? In F.R.A 01/09/2017 https://fra-respect-animal.org/vegetarianism-and-christianity-are-they-compatible-keith-akers and Joseph, p2
[10] See (398) Who Was The Real Jesus Christ (Biblical Documentary) | Timeline — YouTube
[11] Joseph, S.J ‘I Have Come to Abolish Sacrifices’ (Epiphanius, Pan 30.6.5) Re-examining a Jewish-Christian text, in New Testament Studies, Vol 63, Issue 1 p3: (16.4–5)
[12] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_the_Ebionites accessed 19/12/20
[13] Bauckham, in Tomson, P & Lambers-Petry (eds) The Image of the Judeo-Christians in Ancient Jewish and Christian Literature Mohr Siebeck Publishers, London 2003 p 168
[14] Joseph, p4
[15] Ibid, 15.3