Buddhist Practice Theory and Animal Ethics

Event date:16:30–18:00 (EST) Thursday, 15 February, 2024 | 05:30–07:00 (Taiwan) Friday, 16 February, 2024
Organizer: Princeton University

In this lecture on Buddhism and animals, Professor Gyatso departs from ideological and cosmological analyses of animals in Buddhist scripture and story literature, focusing instead on real, living animals in the contemporary world. Drawing on her current book project on animal ethics, she mobilises practical resources from Buddhist traditions to address the ongoing crisis of farmed animals in the global agro-industrial complex. Three main threads from Buddhist practice theory are considered: the cultivation of compassion towards animals; an “aleatory” lifestyle of interdependence and auspiciousness as lived and exemplified by animals; and technical distinctions in Buddhist meditation theory, particularly the interplay of swift insight and sustained habituation, as frameworks for moral cultivation. The talk cites Buddhist theorists Vasubandhu and Santideva alongside the speaker’s own phenomenological observations, and proposes original meditation practices for developing the moral conscience, intelligence, and commitment required to advocate effectively for animals.

 Lecture Report:  “Buddhist Practice Theory and Animal Ethics”

Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series 
Princeton University, February 15, 2024, at 16:30–18:00 EST
Lecture by Professor Janet Gyatso (Harvard Divinity School)
Response by Professor Brook Ziporyn (University of Chicago Divinity School)

Report by Tzu Chi Charity Foundation

Supported by the Buddhist Tzu Chi Charity Foundation, this lecture was hosted by the Center for Culture, Society and Religion at Princeton University as part of the Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series on Buddhism. Professor Janet Gyatso of Harvard Divinity School delivered the keynote lecture entitled “Buddhist Practice Theory and Animal Ethics.” The discussant was Professor Brook Ziporyn of the University of Chicago Divinity School. The event was introduced by Professor Jonathan Gold, who offered a warm welcome and a detailed account of Professor Gyatso’s scholarly career, noting that she had been his own teacher at Amherst College in the late 1980s, a personal connection that lent the occasion a particularly warm atmosphere. Welcoming remarks on behalf of the Tzu Chi Foundation were read by Kelly Carlton, a Princeton graduate student in Asian religions.

Prof. Janet Gyatso is the Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Harvard Divinity School. Her PhD is from the University of California, Berkeley, and she specialises in Tibetan and South Asian cultural and intellectual history. Her 2015 book Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet won the Toshihide Numata Book Award, the Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title, and the E. Jean Smith Inner Asia Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. Her earlier book Apparitions of the Self: The Secret Autobiographies of a Tibetan Visionary has stood for over two decades as a model of innovative scholarship. Her current book project concerns the phenomenology of living well with animals and the related ethical and practical questions this raises.

Prof. Brook Ziporyn is the Mircea Eliade Professor of Chinese Religion, Philosophy, and Comparative Thought at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan and is the author of seven books on Chinese thought, with special interests in Tiantai Buddhist philosophy and philosophical Daoism. His works include Emptiness and Omnipresence: An Essential Introduction to Tiantai Buddhism and The Penumbra Unbound: The Neo-Taoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang.

The Crisis of Animals and the Limits of Intellectual Ethics

Professor Gyatso opened by describing her current book project on contemporary animal ethics, a work driven by her deep concern about the “absolutely horrendous situation” of animals in the global agro-industrial complex: factory farming, shipping containers, the dairy industry, and industrial slaughter on a massive scale, which she did not hesitate to characterise as a holocaust. She framed her talk around a central frustration with Western ethical thought: intellectual formulations of ethics, however well-reasoned, have repeatedly failed to translate into action. The example she offered was Immanuel Kant, whose rigorous rational ethics did not prevent his countrymen from perpetrating the atrocities of the Second World War. Buddhist philosophy, by contrast, has long understood that having the right ideas is not enough. One must practise.

The challenge, then, is not simply to convince people that animals deserve moral consideration, but to develop practices that can actually transform embodied habits, motivate genuine commitment, and move people from intellectual acknowledgement to sustained ethical action. This is the animating question of Professor Gyatso’s book, and of this lecture.

The Beauty and Intimacy of Animal Life

Before turning to Buddhist theory, Professor Gyatso devoted considerable attention to the phenomenological case for why animals deserve our moral attention. Drawing on personal observation and footage she regularly watches on Instagram and social media, she described cows leaping and running when let out of the barn in spring for the first time, geese gliding onto a river in perfect synchrony, horses resting with their heads together, pigs cuddling side by side. Her purpose was not merely sentimental. She argued that this pleasure in watching animals, and the emotional response it generates, is itself ethically significant. To feel that pleasure is already to have taken a step toward moral relationship.

She developed the concept of “being with” as a fundamental existential category: the way animals are with each other, licking, cuddling, sleeping together, communing with their environment, is not incidental but reveals something philosophically important about the nature of interdependence. Animals, she argued, are particularly good at making their interdependence visible. Their bodies merge into the ground on which they rest; their intimacy with one another is immediate, physical, and unguarded. Against thinkers like Merleau-Ponty who have claimed that animals lack a “world,” Professor Gyatso insisted that anyone who has actually watched animals could not seriously sustain that position.

Interdependence as Moral Imperative

This observation of animal interdependence connects directly to Buddhist metaphysics. Professor Gyatso argued that interdependence, or pratītyasamutpāda, is not merely a philosophical description of how things arise in dependence on one another, but a moral fact that generates obligation. If our very being overlaps with and is constituted by the beings around us, then to care for others is in some sense to care for ourselves, and to be indifferent to their suffering is a kind of self-contradiction. The challenge, however, is that knowing this intellectually is not the same as feeling it in the body. What is needed is to bring the cognitive recognition of interdependence down into what the Japanese philosopher Yasuo Yuasa called “dark consciousness,” the embodied, pre-reflective level of our being, as opposed to the “bright consciousness” of rational thought.

It is here that Buddhist meditation theory becomes relevant.

Insight and Habituation: The Abhidharmakosha Framework

Professor Gyatso turned to Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośa, specifically its chapter on meditation, which articulates two fundamental categories: darśana (seeing or insight) and bhāvanā (cultivation or practice). Insight is swift and compact. It happens in a flash, a single cognitive breakthrough that permanently dismantles certain wrong views. In the context of animal ethics, it might take the form of a logical inference (“if I cry when someone hits me, and this dog is so like me and is crying, it is likely suffering as I do”), or a direct perceptual encounter with an animal’s suffering that strikes the observer with undeniable force. Such moments are rare and precious. Buddhist theory holds that they are often preceded by bodily sensations of heat and forbearance, and that they do clear the ground in a genuine and lasting way.

But insight alone is insufficient. Ignorance, aversion, greed, and pride are not dismantled by a single moment of realisation, however powerful. They are habits of the embodied mind, and they require a different kind of medicine: sustained, repeated, patient practice. This is bhāvanā: bringing one’s attention back again and again to the same object, not because the insight is not real, but because realisation needs to be neaded into the body, understood from multiple perspectives, applied broadly, and allowed to slowly displace the deep emotional obscurations that intellectual knowledge alone cannot reach. Professor Gyatso drew a memorable analogy to the legendary Japanese flautist Kogen Murata, who was instructed by his teacher to blow a single note on the shakuhachi for an entire year before being permitted to move his fingers.

Animal Fast and Slow: A Phenomenological Parallel

One of the most striking and original contributions of the lecture was Professor Gyatso’s observation that animals themselves embody a structural parallel to this Buddhist dialectic of insight and habituation. Animals, she noted, tend to move in a leisurely, unhurried manner for much of the time, resting, grazing, cuddling, digesting. But when required, they can react with extraordinary speed: the condylostylus fly responds in under five milliseconds; jellyfish in under 700 nanoseconds; cheetahs and house cats in approximately 20 milliseconds. This fast-slow rhythm, she argued, is not merely a function of predation and survival. It also characterises how animals navigate their worlds, explore, size up unfamiliar situations, recognise a beloved companion from across a field, and respond to love as well as danger.

The slow dimension is equally instructive. The image she returned to was the cow chewing cud: taking in material, processing it in stages, resting with it, allowing it to be fully digested before it becomes nourishment. This is, she suggested, formally analogous to what the Abhidharma had in mind when it insisted on the necessity of extended practice for needing insight into the body. She was careful not to claim that a cow chewing cud is cultivating compassion. What she argued for was a structural similarity between two dynamics: the fast-slow rhythm of animal knowledge and the insight-habituation rhythm of Buddhist meditation theory. Both, she proposed, may reflect a deeper material logic of how knowledge becomes embodied in a three-dimensional, physically extended world.

Original Meditation Practices for Animal Ethics

In the final section of her lecture, Professor Gyatso described two original meditation practices she is including in the fourth chapter of her book, practices she has developed herself and, unusually for a Buddhist scholar, recommends directly to the reader.

The first she described as a form of mindful attention practice, adapted from basic Buddhist mindfulness but with one crucial difference: the practitioner does not sit still, but instead follows an animal on its own terms. If walking a dog, one relinquishes control and allows the dog to lead, following its logic, attending to its attention, listening and looking with it. One returns to the animal whenever the mind wanders, just as one returns to the breath in standard mindfulness practice. Professor Gyatso attested personally to the transformative power of this approach: by following this method during her sabbatical year, she found herself seeing, hearing, and understanding her cats in ways she never had before, despite decades of loving them. What the animal communicates becomes legible in ways that habitual inattention had previously obscured.

The second practice is a visualisation adapted from Tibetan Buddhist tradition, specifically the practice of visualising the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara pouring healing light onto suffering beings. Professor Gyatso’s adaptation focuses this visualisation explicitly on animals: imagining in specific and unflinching detail the suffering of animals in factory farms, in shipping containers, in slaughterhouses, the pigs in squalor, the cows separated from their calves at birth, and then visualising them bathed in healing light. She noted that this practice requires courage and determination, acknowledging that she herself cannot always sustain it. But she argued that being able to look at suffering, to stay with it rather than turning away, is not merely an emotional matter. It is a spiritual and ethical one. Only by developing the capacity to see the implications of our actions without flinching can we arrive at the kind of committed, embodied resolve that might actually change our behaviour.

She shared that these practices had, over the course of the past year, genuinely helped her reduce her own consumption of meat and dairy, more than any intellectual argument had managed. She was candid about her own imperfection, acknowledging with some wryness that translating love for animals into consistent dietary choices remains difficult when hungry at dinner. This honesty was warmly received.

Response by Professor Brook Ziporyn

Professor Ziporyn offered a rich and philosophically ambitious response that approached the themes of the lecture through the lens of the Buddha’s enlightenment narrative as recorded in the Pali Mahāsakata Sutta. He noted that the enlightenment under the Bodhi tree is typically presented as a realisation of high-level Buddhist philosophical truths: emptiness, non-self, dependent co-arising, the Four Noble Truths. But the actual narrative presents a three-stage process unfolding over the course of a night, and the most philosophically advanced teachings only arrive at the end of the third watch, not the beginning.

The first watch of the night was not about theory at all. It was a direct personal recollection of billions of past lives in excruciatingly specific detail: different names, clans, bodies, foods, pleasures, and pains. What was experienced first, before any general philosophical insight, was the sheer diversity of forms of experience the Buddha had inhabited, including, as the Jataka tales suggest, an enormous range of animal embodiments. The second watch extended this expanded vision outward to encompass all other sentient beings, their past lives and karmic trajectories, experienced with the same quality of intimate personal recollection. Only after dwelling in these two modes of direct, particular, embodied vision did the generalised philosophical understanding of the Four Noble Truths crystallise in the third watch.

Professor Ziporyn drew from this sequence a methodological lesson: one should not skip straight to the philosophical conclusions before doing the experiential groundwork. He endorsed Professor Gyatso’s meditation practices enthusiastically, particularly the practice of “being with” animals, which he associated with the traditional concept of darśan, seeing and being seen by a sacred presence. He testified personally that he had never felt more in the presence of an enlightened guru than when living with cats. He extended the temporal argument: just as the first phase of the Buddha’s enlightenment compressed vast stretches of past experience into the present moment, the practice of being with an animal can be understood as an act of expanded temporal perception, seeing in the present being before you the long chain of incarnations and sufferings of which it is the current expression. He proposed that learning to see as one remembers, and to remember as one sees, might be the bridge between compassion as feeling and compassion as action.

Discussion

The floor was then opened for questions, which ranged across a wide spectrum of topics and revealed the depth of engagement among the audience.

One question raised the familiar problem of whether individual choices about diet make any real difference in a vast global system. Professor Gyatso replied that the question of causal efficacy, while real, should not eclipse the separate and equally important question of living in accordance with one’s principles. Consistency with one’s values, she argued, matters independently of whether one’s individual choices measurably reduce demand. One becomes a model for others; one demonstrates that a different way of living is possible. Consumers do have collective power, even if that power is realised only in aggregate.

A question about the Pali teaching that monks may eat meat provided it was not killed specifically for them prompted a discussion of the relationship between individual intention, structural complicity, and consumer responsibility. Professor Gyatso distinguished between purchasing meat and encountering roadkill, arguing that purchasing even indirectly supports the industry and does constitute a form of moral responsibility, while acknowledging that the question of ethical consumption becomes genuinely difficult when extended all the way to plants, a domain where new research on plant sentience is complicating older assumptions.

A question about the risk of meditation on animal suffering leading to despair rather than action was met with a frank acknowledgement that such a risk is real, and that the practice requires developing what Buddhist texts call the forbearance to stay with difficult truths. Professor Gyatso was candid that there are images of industrial slaughter she herself cannot bring herself to look at. But the broader principle, she insisted, is that turning away from suffering is not ethically acceptable at this moment in history, and that developing the capacity to bear witness is itself part of the ethical work.

Questions also addressed the potential mammalian-centrism of the approach, the difficulty of extending compassion to less charismatic or visually engaging animals, the problem of predation as an ethical conundrum for anyone who simultaneously admires and seeks to emulate animal ways of being, and the broader question of how to draw principled distinctions in a system where all life in some sense eats other life. On all of these, Professor Gyatso was characteristically candid about the limits of her current thinking, describing them as challenges she is still working through, while insisting that the absence of a perfect philosophical system should not be used as an excuse for failing to act on the ethical low-hanging fruit that is already visible.

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