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Releasing Animals in Tibet
Chapter in a Book
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Description
This chapter examines Tibetan Buddhist relationships with the natural world through the organizing concept of "sustainable taming" — the ideal of putting nonhuman resources to human use in ways that remain ecologically viable. Drawing on ethnographic, historical, and textual sources, it explores how Tibetan practices including soul-sharing beliefs, pilgrimage, animal sacrifice, vegetarianism, and ritual animal release reflect complex and often contradictory attitudes toward animals. A key doctrinal context for these contradictions is the Mūlasarvāstivādin Vinaya followed by Tibetan monastics, which permits meat eating — in contrast to the Chinese Fanwangjing that shaped East Asian Buddhist vegetarianism — contributing to an environment in which meat consumption is deeply embedded in both religious and ecological life on the plateau. Against this norm, the chapter highlights Shabkar (1781–1851) as a prominent vegetarian dissenter who drew on the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra and other Mahāyāna sources to argue that eating animals — understood as reincarnated kin — is morally intolerable, and who dismissed the common practice of reciting mantras over slaughtered animals as a moral evasion. The chapter also notes a contemporary movement toward meat abstention in Kham documented by Barstow and Gayley, as well as the explicit link between animal release and vegetarianism in the practice of Khenpo Tsültrim Lodrö. While the extension of personhood to mountains, lakes, and animals fosters relational and ecologically minded sensibilities, the chapter argues that traditional Buddhist compassion remains limited in its biocentric focus on individual animals, falling short of a fully ecocentric environmental ethic.
Citation
Capper, Daniel. "Releasing Animals in Tibet." In Roaming Free Like a Deer: Buddhism and The Natural World, 165–90. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022.
Interconnections
