The Buddhist Farmer's Challenge

It goes without saying that Buddhism is an ethical not a scientific or productive pursuit. It is not surprising that its view of farming differs from ecology or industrial and ecological farming approaches.

A Buddhist perspective does not preclude the use of scientific information or the achievement of production goals. However, it does clearly define a space of appropriate behaviour in which those goals may or may not be met.

Animals are the best illustration of the challenge Buddism presents for all forms of contemporary western farming, even the most progressive forms of ecological agriculture.

Buddhism’s philosophical basis for the compassionate treatment of animals is clearly elucidated by Matthieu Ricard (2016) in his book A Plea for the Animals. Ricard is a French writer and Buddhist monk who lives and practices in Nepal. His arguments concerning the treatment of animals are founded in his previous work titled Altruism – The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World (Ricard, 2015). They closely parallel the essential Buddhist aspect of altruism outlined by Batchelor in Alone with Others: An Existential Approach to Buddhism (1994).

My farming experience and Buddhist practice have served to starkly reinforce Ricard’s central thesis. For more than a decade, we conducted a relatively conventional goat dairy and beef cattle farming enterprise. Our farm raised animals for slaughter, slaughtered, butchered and traded in animals.

I lived the experience of Buddhism’s aphorism on the link between human suffering and the meat trade inherent in the ‘noble truth’ of right livelihood. I came to clearly see Ricard’s more sophisticated and nuanced treatment of the relative rights of human and non-human animals. I realized first hand the role our treatment of our fellow animals plays in our own suffering, the suffering of the animals we ‘owned’, and the broader suffering in our community and the world.

It was a devastating realization. It hit like a sledgehammer, without warning. One day, shortly after my first silent retreat, I was reading Walpola Rahula’s (1959) What the Budda Taught. His words on right livelihood leaped like an accusatory roar from the page.

To say I was shaken would be an understatement. It led me to the brink of an existential crisis. I had made farming my practice of life. Now it looked like this practice stood in direct contradiction to the equally fundamental philosophical practice of Buddhist ethics.

Was there a better way? Could we continue to farm at all? Is it possible to be a farmer and practice the core of Buddhist philosophy with any degree of integrity?