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Krishnamurti on Eating Meat & Vegetarianism
Krishnamurti: Is that
really a very great problem, whether we should have an egg or not? Perhaps most
of you are concerned with non-killing. What is really the crux of the matter,
is it not? Perhaps most of you eat meat or fish. You avoid killing by going to
a butcher, or you put the blame on the killer, the butcher - that is only
dodging the problem. If you like to eat eggs, you may get infertile eggs to
avoid killing. But this is a very superficial question - the problem is much
deeper. You don’t want to kill animals for your stomach, but you do not mind
supporting governments that are organized to kill.
1950 3rd Public Talk, Colombo, Ceylon
K: Meditation means attention, care. That’s part of it, care for my
children, for my neighbour, for my country, for the earth, for the earth, for
the trees, for the animals. Don’t kill animals. You follow? Don’t kill them
to eat. It’s so unnecessary. It’s part of the tradition which says, you must
eat meat. Therefore, sir, all this comes to a sense of deep, inward
seriousness, and that seriousness itself brings about attention, caring and
responsibility and all that we have discussed. It isn’t that one has gone
through all this. One sees it. And the very perception is action which is
wisdom. Because wisdom is the ending of suffering. It isn’t callous,
callousness, the ending of it. And the ending of it means the observation, the
seeing of suffering. Not to go beyond it, to refuse it, rationalize it or run
away from it. Just to see it. Let it flower. And as you are choicelessly
aware of this flowering, it comes naturally to wither away. I don’t have to do
something about it.
18th Conversation with Dr. Allan W. Anderson,
San Diego, 1974
Q: If you are a vegetarian and don’t get enough vitamin C and all the rest of it
then the vitality of a vegetarian goes down.
K:
The speaker has never eaten meat in his life.
Q: I don’t eat meat either.
K: Good! So physically most of us are not sensitive,
alive physically. Psychologically, inwardly, we are hardly sensitive to what is
going on inwardly - aware of our hurts, aware of our ambitions, violence,
hatreds, personal antagonisms and so on and so on. And mentally, intellectually
we are secondhand people. So mentally, intellectually, psychologically,
physically there is not total sensitivity. And shouldn’t there be that quality
of sensitivity, not to your particular desires, to your particular wants, but
being sensitive. And that is the beginning of awareness. Right?
4th Public Dialogue, Saanen, 1974
Because one of the reasons of suffering is this
loneliness, this self-centred isolation, and you fill that loneliness with
knowledge, with entertainment, religious or otherwise. And the more you try to
fill that emptiness, that poverty, that vacuum of the self, the more pain, the
more isolation. And from that lack of communication, lack of relationship,
arises suffering. And also there is physical suffering because we have misused
our bodies, overeaten, indulging in every form of tasteful habits, alcohol,
drugs, smoking, you know what you are all doing. And the stress and the strain
of modern civilization, with its shocks, does affect the mind, the
consciousness, your being. And when there is that physical suffering one can
deal with it without affecting the rational, clear, intelligent mind. But that
again demands an awareness of the body, the organism, to see that it has the
right nourishment - and I don’t know why you all eat meat. I don’t know if you
have gone into the whole question of cruelty, compassion, but when one is
addicted to a particular form of taste, and it is as difficult and perhaps more
difficult than to give up a particular habit of thought. And to observe, to be
aware that this sickness of the organism does not affect the mind, it is not a
psychosomatic disease.
3rd Public Talk, San Francisco, 1975
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