Rev. Danny Fisher

The following is an article I wrote for a campus magazine at my undergraduate alma mater Denison University six years ago. It is based on a series of short interviews I did with the Venerable Geshe Thupten Phelgye. I spoke with Geshe-la while I was in Dharamsala, India, doing research for an independent study as part of Antioch Education Abroad’s Buddhist Studies in Bodh Gaya Program.

I had come to Dharamsala wanting to know about meat-eating and Tibetan culture. Specifically, I wanted to know if any Tibetans in exile were practicing vegetarianism. It seemed to me that there was at least some impetus for it in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition and that life in Dharamsala offered Tibetans a chance to healthily forego meat-eating. For most people living in Tibet, dependence on animals for food is quite necessary due to the agricultural limitations in huge parts of the country. I wondered if and how things might be different for Tibetan refugees, particularly those living in Dharamsala.

Funny friends cynically wished me luck as I embarked. I could certainly understand where their scoffing was coming from: it didn’t sound like I would find very much. “Tibetans are big meat-eaters” was a generalization I had heard from more than a few people.

So imagine my surprise and excitement when, after spending all of ten minutes in Dharamsala, I came upon a huge billboard that read, “Take Pity on Animals / Do Not Cause Their Slaughter / Be a Vegetarian.”

It turned out that the billboard had been placed there by a local organization called the Universal Compassion Movement (U.C.M.). It further turned out that the driving force behind the sign and the organization was the Venerable Geshe Thupten Phelgye.

Born Dorje Thinley in the Riwoche District of Kham, Tibet, in 1956, Geshe-la’s family began their two year escape to India when he was only three-years-old. A monk by the time he was seventeen, he went on to earn a doctorate in Buddhist Philosophy from the Sera Monastic University in 1991. After doing advanced studies at Gyumed Monastery, Geshe-la spent five years in retreat in the Dhauladur mountain range in the Himalayan foothills above Dharamsala.

In 1998, not long after emerging from his retreat, Geshe-la founded the U.C.M. The organization’s mission statement reads:

The Universal Compassion Movement (UCM) is a charitable trust whose mission is to bring people together to engage in compassionate practice on behalf of unfortunate sentient beings who cannot speak of their wish and their rights to live in peace. Our main focus, as a movement, is to ease the suffering of those helpless animals who are slaughtered for meat, ritual sacrifice, the cruel sport of hunting, abuse in farms and industries and wherever they may suffer.

With the endorsement and support of such individuals as His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Maneka Gandhi, this remarkable monk has been an indefatigable proponent of vegetarianism. In 2003, Geshe-la, a member of the Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile, brought a bill before the other members of Parliament calling for vegetarianism to be more strongly encouraged among Tibetans. It passed.

The two of us first met in the winter of 1999, not long after I spotted the U.C.M.’s sign on Dalai Lama Temple Road in Dharamsala. I was immediately struck by Geshe-la’s intelligence and gentle kindess. To say that he was an important teacher for me would be putting it lightly; he was at once an inspiration and a spiritual friend. After I left India, we stayed in sporadic touch via e-mail, but did not see each other again until 2004, when a mutual friend and colleague of mine at Naropa lobbied the university to bring him to Boulder.

I recently thought of Geshe-la and the article based on our conversations after reading Stephanie Kaza’s terrific piece “Western Buddhist Motivations for Vegetarianism” in Worldviews. When I asked Geshe-la if I could post the article on this website, he graciously gave his permission.

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The White Crow
by Dan Fisher
(originally published in MoYO , volume 9, issue 2, spring 2000)

Walking on the dirt roads of the village they call “Little Lhasa,” it is often easy to forget that you are actually in India and not Tibet’s capital city. It is as if Dharamsala has been plucked from the “Roof of the World” and carefully placed here in Himachal-Pradesh, India.

You are occasionally reminded that this, in fact, India by some stereotypically sights, such as the saddhus you might see while circumambulating the path around His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama’s temple. Local news serves as a reminder, too. The proprietor of a nearby camera shop recently led a fizzled nationalist movement that sought to expel the Tibetans from this place. Of course, your surroundings will always tell you where you are, too. Sure, the Himalayan foothills reach this far, but there are warmer temperatures and a greater abundance of vegetation here.

Still, the preponderance of Tibetan culture and the sheer number of people indigenous to that Central Asian region makes one feel as though they are in an entirely different part of the world than he or she is in reality.

Since 1959, when the Chinese Communist Party forcibly invaded and violently claimed sovereignty over Tibet, Dharamsala–which is comprised of Upper Dharamsala, Lower Dharamsala, and the abandoned British military outpost of McLeod-Ganj– has served as the receiving center for the thousands of Tibetans have escaped or been exiled from their home. His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama was the first to come here after Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru made the land available for the Tibetan people to establish their government-in-exile. The majority of Tibetans who have made the difficult journey from their devastated country have made Dharamsala their home (including, most recently, the His Holiness the Gyalwang Karmapa).

For the independent research component of a study abroad program that has brought me to India, I decided to spend a month here in Dharamsala researching the phenomena of vegetarianism among Tibetan refugees. I was curious about this issue for three interrelated reasons: first, because His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama has advocated so strongly for meatless eating (although health problems prevent him from following such a diet himself); second, because certain texts important in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, such as the Lankavatara Sutra and the writings of the yogi Shabkar, also espouse a vegetarian ethic; and third, because India affords agricultural opportunities that many parts of Tibet do not. For Tibetans living in Tibet, following any kind of Buddhist prescription for vegetarianism has been difficult. With the country’s cold weather and high mountain winds, only certain crops (mostly grains) can be grown in the valleys. Meat and animal products must be eaten for most Tibetans, especially the nomadic pastoralists, to survive.

With all the new seat of the government has to offer as far as food options are concerned, it would seem that the new locale of Dharamsala might make a historic impossibility possible for Tibetans in exile. Strolling along the busy streets of McLeod-Ganj, one notices things that might suggest a sea change, such as the large number of vegetarian restaurants. There’s the Gakyi Vegetarian Health Food Restaurant, which offers traditional Tibetan dishes made sans animal products. A few doors down is the Shangri-La Restaurant, another diner offering purely vegetarian, authentically Tibetan cuisine. (It is noteworthy that the Shangri-La enjoys the distinction of being maintained by the monks of the Gyumed Monastery of Southern India–on the wall behind the cash register you will find a photograph of all the monks with a placard that dubs them “The Management.”) And every westerner who finds their way to Dharamsala quickly becomes acquainted with Khananirvana (“Liberation Through Mastication”), a vegan restaurant managed by a group of young Americans.

In all likelihood, though, the existence of these restaurants better reflects the appetites of the large number of western visitors than the eating habits of the community. That said, there seems to be at least some interest in vegetarianism among Tibetan youths–at one point during my stay, a group of students from the Tibetan Children’s Village even took a pledge to convert to vegetarianism. For the most part, though, occurrences like this are infrequent, and there seems to be little evidence to suggest that members of Dharamsala’s community of Tibetan refugees are moving towards vegetarianism in great numbers.

If there is any one person in this community who is trying spearhead a mass movement in the direction of vegetarianism, however, it is most certainly the Venerable Geshe Thupten Phelgye. Geshe-la is the founder of the Universal Compassion Movement (U.C.M.), an organization that makes its home near His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s temple in a newly constructed office building called Ahimsa (“Non-Violence”) House. A monk for his entire adult life, Geshe-la earned his doctorate in Buddhist Philosophy from the Sera Monastic University in 1991. From 1993 until 1998, he was in solitary retreat in the mountains above Dharamsala. Not long after leaving his retreat, Geshe-la, a committed vegetarian, attended a meeting of India’s People for Animals in New Delhi. Maneka Gandhi, the organization’s president, delivered a talk at the gathering that greatly moved the Tibetan monk. “After I became a vegetarian, I thought that I must do something for those poor animals,” Geshe-la told me. “I was inspired and encouraged by Ms. Gandhi. As I listened to her, I thought, ‘I can do something.’”

That something was the founding of the U.C.M. A charitable trust that works for all sentient beings, the mission statement makes clear that the main focus of the organization is in response to “the unbearable sufferings of helpless animals, resulting from their unlimited slaughter for meat consumption, ritual sacrifice, hunting and the abusing of animals in farms, industries, and cruel sports, etc.” Geshe-la explained to me that the reason animals come first in the U.C.M.’s mission is because “humans are more capable of fighting for their rights–the human condition is much better than the animal condition. Animals are thrown away from people’s minds.”

Geshe-la concentrates his explicit work with human beings through the Gelugpa Institute, a humanitarian aid project directed exclusively by Tibetan monks and nuns out of Ahimsa House. He does, however, see the work of the U.C.M. as a helpful segue to truly meaningful work with other human beings. If humans can learn to extend their hearts out to animals, he explained, they can develop tremendous compassion for their fellows. In the U.C.M.’s literature, Geshe-la writes, “Compassion and justice are our common realizations…as Buddhists, since we talk about compassion to all other sentient beings, enjoying the flesh of innocent animals is very unjust and a contradiction [of what we espouse to believe].”

At the first annual Gelugpa Conference, held in 1998, Geshe-la expounded on this very issue. The conference, held in New Delhi, was an assembly that invited all of the worlds geshes [doctorates in Buddhist Philosophy] and tulkus [recognized reincarnations of Buddhist gurus]. Geshe-la spoke to them and offered a proposal which called for Gelugpa monasteries and nunneries to practice and advocate vegetarianism. It passed.

When I spoke to Geshe-la about his beliefs regarding animals, he revealed that his own move towards vegetarianism came in 1980 after a routine walk through an Indian market. He happened to catch sight of some particularly bloody work being done inside a butcher shop. “Butchers were not only doing their killing, but fighting and wrestling with the animals, too–such a horrible sight to see. And they did not care if animals were dead or half-dead when they would cut and skin them.”

I asked Geshe-la about the possible Buddhist argument that vegetarianism is a form of attachment, perpetuating suffering. “Nothing changes, the suffering of animals does not stop when we think that vegetarianism or veganism are forms of attachment. I think actually that eating meat is maybe a form of attachment for some people–they are addicted to the taste or the way things are. This is why we must work to show them that there is a process–a very terrible process–to their delicious momos [Tibetan dumplings].” He went even further, arguing that the specific and sometimes contradictory instructions about meat-eating in the different Buddhist traditions have been misinterpreted by literalists. Geshe-la understands them as gradual teachings meant to wean the practitioners off of meat-eating completely. “The Buddha’s teaching was always step-by-step–the easy way first. When his followers had ripened their minds, the Buddha would go further with his teachings, encouraging a progression.”

While exploring these ideas with others is important to Geshe-la, the biggest challenge is convincing people to think about the issue of vegetarianism at all. “So far in our Tibetan world, it is difficult to be a vegetarian, whether one is a monk or not. Ninety-nine percent eat meat and they don’t even think about it. This is why we are trying so hard to bring more awareness.” While he believes that the older generation can grow and change, Geshe-la has put a lot of faith in the younger generations of Tibetans. “I think there are a lot people trying to be vegetarian, but especially the young people. They are more educated and sensitive, and they also have a better understanding of the issues and are more open-minded.” At the same time, though, the older generations have a responsibility to help the younger generations. Holding up a plain white khata [prayer scarf] in front of me, Geshe-la said “Children are like this when they are born. They can be dyed any color. As a society, we must make sure that they are dyed so that they cause no harm and look after and take care of their fellow human beings and all sentient creatures.”

Today, Geshe-la and the U.C.M. is hard at work on a number of projects to help in this endeavor. Its board of trustess now includes Maneka Gandhi and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Visitors to Dharamsala quickly become aware of the U.C.M.’s courtesy of a gigantic billboard in front of the Tibetan Dialectical Institute that reads, “Take Pity on Animals / Do Not Cause Their Slaughter / Be a Vegetarian / Join the U.C.M.” Geshe-la is collaborating with a professional chef on a Tibetan cookbook for vegetarians, as well as trying to raise money for an office computer (so the U.C.M. can broaden its visibility on the worldwide web). The U.C.M. is also hoping to gather enough funds for to produce a short video about vegetarianism. (Geshe-la is hoping to appeal to the illiterate with the video.)

At present, however, all of the donations received by the U.C.M. are going toward the maintenance of the billboard. While the lease and artwork for the sign only costs around $170, it’s a small fortune in rupees for a monk operating a non-profit organization. “I have many dreams, but am empty-handed,” Geshe-la told me with a chuckle. [NOTE: Funding ultimately fell though on the billboard.]

With all of the difficulties that he faces, I asked Geshe-la if he ever felt lonely in his quest to promote vegetarianism. “In Tibet, we talk a lot about white crows. They say it is very inauspicious to see a white crow. A white crow among black crows is greeted, ‘Why are you here? What are you doing? You are different!’” Then, leaning in close, his characteristic hopefulness and good cheer radiating from his twinkling eyes, Geshe-la whispered, “One day, Geshe-la will be ashes, but someone will be working for animals. This is my dream and this is my practice.”

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To find out more about the Universal Compassion Movement (U.C.M.) and how you can help, visit http://www.universalcompassion.org.