This food is the gift of the whole universe: the earth, the sky, numerous living beings, and
much hard, loving work.
May we eat with mindfulness and gratitude so as to be worthy to receive it.
May we recognize and transform our unwholesome mental formations, especially our greed,
and learn to eat with moderation.
May we keep our compassion alive by eating in such a way that we reduce the suffering of
living beings, preserve our planet, and reverse the process of global warming.
We accept this food so that we may nurture our sisterhood and brotherhood, strengthen our
community, and nourish our ideal of serving all living beings.

We know of the other vegan spiritual teachers that Dr. Tuttle mentions as well: we’ve eaten at the Loving Hut restaurants that Master Ching Hai inspires. We’ve also been amazed by the videos produced in multiple languages with vegan cooking lessons. And Dr. Gabriel Cousens has inspired  friends to run a program to reverse diabetes based on a raw vegan diet based on their experiences at his healing center.
Dr. Tuttle’s description of the way that major religions justify non-vegetarianism,  however does not include Jainism. He would have had to detail the peculiarities of Jainism, in which meat is expressly and uncompromisingly prohibited, and yet dairy has traditionally been permitted. There are a few discussions of dairy being a vidai food, one of the rich foods that should be given up to encourage tyag or renunciation. But most Jains somehow believe that Mahavir and other teachers consumed dairy and therefore it must be OK> but the question that could be asked like the WWJD question asked by Christians, is what would Mahavir do, now, in today’s world? We are certain that he  would choose to avoid all dairy products in addition to other forms of dietary ahimsa.

In the book Forks over Knives, companion to the movie that is such a great resource, we found the following: Add 1-2 teaspoons of raw almond butter to each 1 cup of water and blend until smooth. We happen to have roasted almond butter on hand and it tasted good but will try raw next, because it will surely be even better. What a find! No worries about wasting or saving the pulp and we can make a small amount at a time.

Interestingly the website detoxinista.com has detailed instructions on making your own almond butter using a food processor and making your own almond milk using a high speed blender like a Vita-mix. We have not tried to make our own almond butter yet but if you like to make it yourself, you might be able to do this too.

Being immersed in a micro-culture with many friends that oppose GMO, factory farming and chemical pesticides,  I was surprised to hear the host express how great is it that we have chemical fertilizers that improve productivity of crops, that we have established a way to fatten up cows fast to feed the global appetite for beef, etc. I think eventually the tone changed, but he was eating beef while discussing animal agriculture. Having travelled to India and other poor countries and knowing about the poverty even in what is called food deserts in the US, I was appalled that the show featured a town in which CA surplus tomatos were thrown around in a food fight that was framed as a cancer benefit. People paid $10 a person to throw tomatos at each other. Even if there was a cause behind it, it seemed obscene to be wasting plant life like that. And then the show cut to a slaughterhouse scene– as if it were all OK!

Next show was “Half the Sky”. There was plenty to be inspired by,but there was unspeakable violence to women depicted in Sierra Leone, India, Cambodia and Kenya, among other countries. Women raped, beaten, sold to be prostituted and killed. (There are parallels to the way that dairy cows are treated, which we could well consider in terms of karmic consequences). Economic opportunities, education and health care provide a way out, but there are tremendous violent forces that profit from women’s pain.  The message of the documentary is that things can change, if we all  contribute our energy, in some way.

As people that believe in the value of all life, (as vegans, as Jains)  do we really live our principles? Do we  treat the smallest sentient being with care? Do we consciously avoid eating products of violence of 5 sensed beings? Do we respect and encourage girls and women to their highest spiritual evolution?

Or are we stuck mindlessly reproducing cultural patterns that numb us and devalue life?  We might be vegetarian, but don’t want to think beyond that and become vegan. We might avoid killing the insects, but drive an SUV. We might want our daughter to get educated but we tell her that according to the Digambars, women cannot be liberated. Are we living and giving to the world the values that we profess?

The question of whether eggs are suitable for vegetarians is one which most vegetarians living in the UK will have encountered at one point in their lives.  And from the perspective of a young person of an Indian cultural heritage, it is a very confusing one.  In India, the norm is that eggs are not vegetarian – if you see the words “pure veg” on an Indian product or at an Indian restaurant, you can generally be sure that there will be no eggs.  But in the UK, the official definition of a vegetarian, as set out by theVegetarian Society, permits the consumption of eggs.  As a result, products containing eggs are normally labelled as vegetarian in supermarkets and restaurants in the UK, to the dismay of many Indian vegetarians.

Even though I’ve been a proud “vegetarian” for as long as I can remember, I’ve been confused about what I think about eggs for most of my life, and have switched between shamelessly enjoying them and trying to avoid them.  I think many young people from the Jain community in the West have faced a similar internal conflict.  Having carefully considered the issue, I now believe that those of us who are vegetarian because we think it is wrong to kill animals for food should not eat eggs, regardless of whether the eggs are free range and/or organic.  In this article, I share my experiences of eating eggs and explain why I adopt the position that I do.

As a young child, I loved the taste of eggs, and would eat them several times a week. My dad constantly reminds me of how my favourite meal as a child was scrambled eggs and toast. Then, at the age of eight, I read a Jain textbook by Vinod Kapashi and Ajit Shah which said Jains shouldn’t eat eggs.  I immediately decided to stop eating eggs. My mum and ba were very supportive about the decision and decided to stop bringing eggs into the house.   

A couple of years later at secondary school, I started to feel unhappy that I was missing out on birthday cakes and had a fairly restricted choice of foods when out and about (most sandwiches, for example, contained mayonnaise so I couldn’t eat them).  My desire for cakes and brownies got the better of me, and I slowly started to eat eggs when I couldn’t see them – when they were hidden away in food.  This proved to be a slippery slope.  As I got older, I gradually started to eat dishes containing eggs more often, and occasionally started eating dishes that were predominantly egg based (quiches, omelets). Then, when traveling in South America in a year out between school and university, I started to eat eggs almost every day, initially because they were a filling and easy-to-order option when “pure vegetarian” options were hard to find.  Soon I started to order them because I liked the taste, and would choose to eat them even when “pure vegetarian” dishes were readily available.

Initially, I felt uncomfortable eating them, but this soon wore off.  I tried to forget about the guilt when eating eggs, just like I did when purchasing/wearing leather.  And because I liked the taste of eggs and enjoyed eating them so much, I also tried to justify eating eggs from a moral perspective.  Eggs were generally unfertilised, so by eating them I would not be preventing a living being from being born.  And even though there was “jiv” in the egg of some form or the other, I argued to myself that the pain/suffering inflicted on eggs would be low, primarily because its nervous system would not be developed.

On our travels in South America, my vegetarian friends and I were occasionally offered the option of eating eggs from animals other than chicken – fish eggs, ostrich eggs, quail eggs, duck eggs and so on.  Whenever this happened, our immediate reaction was one of acute discomfort.  We asked ourselves whether fish eggs could ever be suitable for vegetarians.  I started thinking about how a mother ostrich would feel if a human came along and stole its eggs. 

I soon realised that my position with eggs was inconsistent.  I was somehow able to morally justify eating eggs from chickens, but I couldn’t bring myself to eat the eggs of other animals, and would even get upset by the idea of humans stealing them.  Prior to this moment, I would often highlight the hyprocrisy of “animal lovers” who would get angry whenever they hear about cruelty to dogs or the killing of wildlife in Africa, but happily eat the flesh of an abused chicken, pig or cow.  I soon realised that I wasn’t too different from them.

After visiting some farms, I also realised that many traditional breeds of chicken are actually very protective over their eggs.  I had previously known that geese would try and attack humans who attempted to go near their eggs, but didn’t realise that chickens did the same.  On a volunteering visit to Freightliners City Farm in London, I got a bit too close to a silkie chicken that was covering some eggs when trying to refill its water supply. Two of the other chickens in the enclosure kicked and slapped me with their wings in order to protect their broody companion and the eggs it was keeping warm.  I was even more amazed when I found out that the eggs the silkie hen was keeping warm weren’t even her own or those of a fellow silkie. The hen was looking after the eggs of a brahma (another breed of chicken) in another enclosure that had fallen ill. 

After a little investigation, I found out that we humans had selectively bred chickens to produce a lot of eggs and not attack us when we take their eggs from them.  But just because a bird doesn’t attack us or show anger when we take their eggs from them, it doesn’t make the act of stealing the eggs any less bad.

At university I also began to find out more about how animals were treated on farms.  Particularly how chickens are often kept in battery cages no bigger than the size of an A4 piece of paper, and how cows are forcibly milked by machine and not given access to outside pasture.  I felt deeply uncomfortable about this, and started to eat/drink organic, and persuaded others to do the same, thinking it would reduce suffering. 

Then, in the summer of 2007, I did an internship in New York and attended the JAINA convention in Edison New Jersey, an inspirational convention which brought together thousands of Jains from across North America.  At the convention, I discovered that a significant number of Jains in North America followed a vegan diet. In addition to not consuming animal flesh, the vegan Jains did not consume any reproductive animal products such as milk, eggs and other dairy products.  

Impressed by their commitment and perplexed by their decision not to consume animal products at all (I had thought free range/organic milk was acceptable), I immediately questioned the vegans about the dietary path they had chosen.  After interacting with them, I discovered that welfare standards and “stealing” were not the only problems with commercial egg and milk production.  I discovered that cows and chickens were actually routinely killed in the production of milk and eggs.

Initially, I was horrified and argued that they were wrong.  But now I realise not only what they said was true, but that it also makes perfect economic sense.  The truth is that, if these cows and chickens weren’t killed, milk and eggs would be far more expensive than they currently are.

While chickens are very efficient at producing eggs in the first year of their life, the rate at which they produce eggs drops soon after.  Even though they could live for five to seven years if properly looked after, in order to maximise efficiency and reduce costs, egg-laying hens are normally sent to the slaughterhouse after a year, and replaced with a younger, more productive bird.  And while most eggs are not fertilised, in order to ensure a fresh supply of young productive hens, a small proportion are fertilised and hatched.  Half of the chicks born are male,  and are of little value to a farmer.  So they are typically killed when a day old.  This killing takes place regardless of whether the chickens live in battery cages or are “free range”, and whether the eggs or organic or not.*

Even though it is defensible to argue that the taking and eating an unfertilised egg does not result in the direct killing of a living being,  one cannot deny the commercial production process of eggs results in innocent chickens and chicks being killed long before they would naturally leave their bodies.  In the UK there are over 29 million egg laying hens, and over the course a year, apart from a lucky few who get saved from slaughter and adopted by a sanctuary or a nice family, each and everyone of these birds will be killed and replaced in order to supply the British population with cheap eggs.  Over the course of my life, I have probably eaten a couple of hundred eggs.  As a result, I believe that I am personally responsibility for the death of about 10 innocent chickens and chicks.  Even though I think I have always been good natured and well-intentioned, the death and suffering I have caused is something I have to deal with for the rest of my life.

Most vegetarians I know are vegetarians because they believe it is wrong to kill animals for food when it is perfectly possible to live a healthy life without doing so.  And if this is the reason for being vegetarian, given that chickens are killed in egg production process, I find it very difficult to see how eggs can be considered to be suitable for vegetarians, or any adherent of the timeless Jain principle of ahimsa.

*The story for milk and cows is different, but very similar.  Just like humans and all other mammals, in order for a cow to give milk, it needs to be pregnant.  This pregnancy naturally leads to birth of a calf.  While female calves can grow up to become milk giving animals like their mothers, the males are of very little use to a dairy farmer.  They consume a lot of food, but are the wrong type of cow to be reared for beef.  So they are typically killed soon after birth.  And while the female calves are spared immediate slaughter, they too get killed prematurely.  A female cow could naturally live for more than 20 years if given the chance.  But after producing milk for a couple of years, the yield of a lactating cow drops – and it makes economic sense for a dairy farmer to replace her with one of her more productive offspring.  A fully grown cow that does not produce milk is very costly for a farmer to keep, and so the farmer sends the cow to the slaughterhouse.

He is pictured  on the far right at one of the Pratishtas ( temple openings) that he attended.

Gurudev Chitrabhanu came to the US in 1971. I was one year old. As he travelled and authored books, founded Jain Meditation International and spoke to audiences, my parents and their friends founded the Jain Society of Chicago. He helped organize the association of Jain associations  called JAINA.   He wrote books prolifically, and my  mother bought them, kept them in our temple and as she prayed, I read them voraciously.   I grew up reading “Inspiring Anecdotes”, ” A Lotus Blooms” and later, his books about Jain meditation. I heard Gurudev speak at Jain centers and JAINA conferences. And then when I was 20, I went to Siddhachalam, the Jain ashram founded by Acharya Sushilmuniji, the other Jain monk that brought Jainism to America. I became vegan after attending a New Jersey Animal Rights Alliance Conference there. As I, along with  a cohort of Jains in my generation, went vegan, we were reassured that Gurudev and Pramodaben understood and promoted veganism, or pure vegetarianism to our Jain community. They have spoken about the need to remove dairy products from our rituals and our diets, eloquently and persistently.

There has been a remarkable resistance to giving up dairy. Some Jains argue that veganism is a religion separate from Jainism and that Mahavir was not vegan. Despite criticism, Gurudev, with the spiritual understanding borne of 5 years of silence with monks’ vows and a lifetime of practice, maintains the clarity of his message: Ahimsa Paramo Dharma. Non-violence is the supreme religion. Veganism is but one expression. One cannot consume milk and consider oneself a pure vegetarian, practicing ahimsa.

And his reply, as Pravin K. Shah wrote recently, to the question of how to respond to people that oppose veganism, continues to inspire me. These are lines from the song that he authored  Maitri Bhavana Pavitra Zharanu :

May I always be there to show the path  

To the pathless wanderers of life

Yet, if they should not hearken to me,

May I bide in patience.

In a world dominated by greed and materialism, the Jain community are leaders when it comes to demonstrating how to live a peaceful, low himsa lifestyle.  For thousands of years, Jains have followed a strict vegetarian diet and lived in harmony with nature.  And Jain monks and nuns illustrate how it is possible to live an empowering and fulfilling life without material possessions.

Jains in the West continue to try to live by traditional principles.  We try to lead modest lifestyles and participate in charitable activities when we can. We steer clear of activities and professions that involve violence or exploitation of other humans and animals.  Despite being confronted with a variety of temptations, large numbers of us have continued to follow a strict vegetarian diet.

While I’m tremendously proud of the example set by members of our community, I’ve always found it very difficult to understand why Jains, Hindus and other vegetarians seem to find it acceptable to wear leather.   As a young child, I often used to ask my mum why it was wrong to kill cows to eat them, yet acceptable to kill them for clothing.   My mum would explain to me that leather was taken from cows that were already dead.

I accepted her response, but always found the prospect of buying leather shoes deeply uncomfortable.  I remember wishing that it would be possible to obtain shoes made from synthetic materials so I wouldn’t need to wear the skin of a dead animal on my feet.  But I never found any.  And I never came across anyone who seemed to care.  After a while, I gave up, and just tried not to think about it…

As I got older and learned to how to use the internet, I started to do research on where leather comes from.  I discovered that my mum was both right and wrong.  From a historical perspective, my mum was right.  But she was completely wrong about the leather products that I grew up wearing and about the leather products that can be found in shops in the West today.

While many Jains in India actually abstained from wearing leather, my mum was correct that many others found it acceptable to wear leather from cows that were already dead.  Historically, Jain households would have had their own cows, treated them as members of the family and looked after them until death.   While I’m not sure if I could ever feel comfortable wearing the skin of a being I consider to have been a member of my family, I see how using such leather could be viewed as acceptable for adherents of Jain principles.  But just because wearing leather may have been acceptable then, it doesn’t mean it should be considered acceptable today.

It is an unfortunate reality that none of the leather that we buy in shops today will come from cows that have died from natural causes.  Almost all of the cows will have lived a life full of suffering and exploitation.  And while we may try to fool ourselves into thinking that the cows are killed purely for the meat industry and that leather is a harmless by-product – this argument falls to pieces if you subject it to some simple economic analysis.

A farmer does not rear cows to just produce meat.  A farmer rears cows to make money.  And every source of revenue is important.  The International Council of Tanners estimates that the skins may be worth up to 15% of the value of the entire animal.  By purchasing leather, members of the Jain community are effectively subsidising the meat industry.  We are handing money to farmers who rear cows to kill them, and we are incentivising them to kill more.  If everyone stopped buying leather, farmers would generate less money per cow, and this would reduce their incentives to rear and kill cows.

The killing of cows is not the only problem with leather.  There are also environmental issues to consider too; processing leather is a polluting and resource intensive activity.   Most leather is chrome tanned, which can result in chromium being pumped into the water table.  Up to 8000 litres of water may be required to process the leather needed to produce just one pair of shoes.

But if members of the Jain community don’t wear leather, what will we wear? Fortunately, abstaining from wearing leather doesn’t mean that we will have to walk barefoot or go around wearing plastic flip-flops.  In the UK and US, we are fortunate to have a number of companies which specialise in making shoes suitable for vegetarians and vegans.   These include Bourgeois Boheme   in Notting Hill, London,  Vegetarian Shoes in Brighton, and Free Rangers  which makes shoes to order.

Post script from drJina :

For the Americans, there are a number of alternatives, including Pangea and Moo Shoes. There are vegan shoes at Zappo’s online and other mail order shoe shops. Many of us have been buying running shoes labelled all  manmade-materials  at a variety of stores, and Payless Shoe Source for  mens’ and women’s dress shoes. In stores such as Payless that are “accidentally vegan” (the term PETA has used for food products that happen to contain no animal products) one cannot be sure that the glue that is used is completely vegan nor that the relatively low prices are not the result of poor  working conditions in the countries where they were manufactured.  Balancing cost, location and comfort with purchasing at item as important to try on as shoes means that some of us go to a store that isn’t all vegan product oriented. But it is a step in the direction of ahimsa, even if it is not perfect.

Ajahn Guna of Berkeley Buddhist Monastery discusses how good health and beauty are not commodities but the consequences of generosity, compassion and virtue. Next to him is the producer of the documentary “Got the Facts on Milk?”, an informative and provocative film that we watched and discussed with a break for mindful walking, allowing for people to process the information they received with a fresh state of mind.

Most of us are familiar with the current-day concepts of “eco-footprint” and “carbon footprint” – these terms and concepts have become part of our everyday vocabulary and thought processes.Today, we are being encouraged to reduce our carbon footprints (to help slow down, if not reverse, human-induced global warming and climate change), and to minimise our eco-footprints in a bid to reduce our destructive impact on the environment.

At a Young Jains UK event in  Feb 2008 that started as a conversation about why a vegan rather than vegetarian diet would be consistent with Jain values with  keynote speaker and longtime US based vegan Saurabh Dalal,  the term himsa footprint spontaneously emerged.  The group that was to become the Jain Vegans team  discussed ahimsa and eco-footprints as a reason for going vegan.  Very soon, Kewal Shah shouted out the phrase himsa footprint as it simply appeared in his mind, and the Jain vegans have been using it extensively since.

So how does the term himsa footprint help us?  Well, the beauty of this neat and powerful expression is that it speaks volumes.  To me, when we talk about “lowering our himsa footprints”, we are speaking in a holistic sense, covering the direct and indirect himsa inflicted, by our actions, on all life around us. And by extension, this includes himsa on the environment, since harming or destroying life damages the environment, and damaging the environment harms or destroys life.  Thus, to me, the general concept of himsa footprint covers the more specific concepts of eco-footprint and carbon-footprint, for example, as well as many others.

Jains have a long and prominent tradition of embracing ahimsa (non-violence, compassion, peace).  In fact, the concept of ahimsa is at the very core of the Jain lifestyle.  For Jains, and others who believe in karma, practicing ahimsa is also a way of developing spiritually and purifying one’s atma (soul).  Therefore, lowering one’s himsa footprint would be an important activity for a Jain from a karmic standpoint too.  But even if one doesn’t believe in karma, leading life so as to consciously reduce one’s himsa footprint would surely bring about positive inner development, as well as benefiting all life and the environment around us.

Perhaps if we all begin to think in holistic terms of consciously and actively reducing our himsa footprints, then we’ll see many of the global issues facing us today being addressed in one go (e.g. human-induced climate change and other environmental issues).  Indeed, if most human societies, policy-makers and governments around the world started thinking in terms of himsa footprints, then we might even see a dramatic reduction in human-human conflict, bloodshed, war, abuses of human rights and animal rights, poverty, starvation and so on.

Ahimsa is a universal concept which would fit in well with all cultures and religions.  So concepts like ahimsa and himsa footprint can be promoted widely without causing upset.  After all, fundamentally, humans are supposed to be a compassionate, sociable and peace-loving species!  When we’re not, we’ve simply lost our way and need to find the right path again.

The Jain Vegans Team often urges readers and visitors to further reduce our himsa footprints by making the transition to a vegan lifestyle (i.e. a lifestyle that avoids all animal substances, including dairy).  Note, by this, we do not mean to say that one should necessarily forego one’s own beliefs and traditions.  For example, for the Jain community, adopting a vegan basis (over a lacto-vegetarian one) is simply a practical way of enhancing one’s own Jain way of life.

We believe that in today’s world, going vegan is a simple and practical step, yet a profound and powerful one, towards bringing about a more compassionate world.  Not only does a vegan approach provide much-needed value and compassion to non-human multi-sensed living beings (who we humans unnecessarily abuse and slaughter by the billions each year, and this includes cows for milk), but it also indirectly has the effect of addressing other seemingly unrelated issues, such as human starvation, environmental destruction, biodiversity, water scarcity, global food security, etc.  Learn more by visiting this link:

www.vegansociety.com

To join the international Jain Vegans forum (set up to support vegetarian Jains who wish to learn more about or seek support in making the transition to a vegan lifestyle), visit:

www.jainvegans.org

Incidentally, the writer of Happy Healthy Long Life has a scientific and health focus, but recently she wrote about how it felt to learn about the way that dairy cows were treated. I found it refreshing that she discussed the compassion aspect of a diet that she found initially for health reasons.

Farm Sanctuary has a live stream on Thanksgiving of rescued turkeys at their New York Sanctuary (go to farmsanctuary.org from 9am to 4pm). Turkeys are surprisingly cute and friendly as we found out last week when we visited Harvest Home Sanctuary.

I am grateful, dear readers, that you chose to read this blog and that i have a venue for expressing these thoughts. May your holiday be full of joy and compassion.

Have a very happy Thanksgiving.