Disappointed In Dinty Moore (Food Of Boddhisattvas)

Not the food.

"Food," rather.

Not that.

How can one be disappointed in heavily processed, heavily preserved dead animals in a can? "Disappointed" implies expectations. I would never expect to hear or experience anything positive from Dinty Moore, the "food."

W.

Dinty W. Moore.

The author.

Last week, I read his 1997 book The Accidental Buddhist.

To be fair, The Accidental Buddhist isn't a terrible book. Not even really a bad book. At times, I enjoyed it. I even picked up a couple of nice little nuggets-- like the metaphor of there being nothing wrong with the ocean, but you shouldn't expect it to quench your thirst.

The Accidental Buddhist is about Dinty W. Moore's "project" in the mid-nineties, his quest to find the face and flavor or what-have-you of American Buddhism. It is a sometimes funny, generally well-written of his early experiments and dabblings in Buddhist thought and practice. Throughout the course of the book, he attends a retreat at a Zen Center in NY State, attends a series of lectures with a Tibetan teacher, spends a week at a Theravadan monastery, gets a chance to ask some questions of the Dalai Lama, attends a Buddhist festival or two, interviews the head of Tricycle magazine, meets some simple-living folks who pay the bills by making zafus (meditation cushions), reads some books, goes back to that Zen Center, and so on.

It's okay. It's not bad. But I didn't love it. I had some complaints.

I had some complaints, not all of them fair.

For instance, my Monkey Mind (if you will) kept saying "Dinty Moore, huh huh" in a terrible Beavis and Butthead knock-off voice. I mean, that's not fair. But Dinty Moore? Dinty Moore? Sorry. I just kept going back to that, flipping to the cover, looking at his picture, and thinking "this guy's name is Dinty Moore."

Which I suppose I might not have done, if the book had had maybe a little more... substance.

Maybe I'm not the intended reader. I get the feeling that maybe this was written for people in the mid-nineties who were saying to themselves "what's all this 'Boo-dism' I've been hearing about?" The book is sometimes interesting, but it's... shallow. It doesn't really get beneath the surface. Moore bounces from experience to experience, meditates, interviews, has insights, but he never really gets to any discussion of what it is that this is really all about. I mean, beyond the robes. Beyond the sitting still. You get the impression that the difference between the Zen guys and the Theravadan guys and the Tibetan guys is the color of the robes, and maybe that the Zen people are stern and quiet, the Theravadans are laid back, and the Tibetans like to do a lot of talking. Anything deeper than that just really isn't gotten into. At all. Which I find disappointing. Even if this was intended for people who had never heard a thing about Buddhism, it seems it could have gone just a little bit deeper, even while keeping it funny and light.

But okay, whatever, the book is what it is, and my wanting it to have been something else isn't really a criticism.

What really did annoy me, though-- what I found more than a little disappointing-- was his discussion of food. Of meat.

He could have just left that chapter out.

But no, he tackled the "what do Buddhists eat?" question, and he did it poorly.

He's not the only one who has disappointed me here. Other writers-- better writers, deeper writers-- have handled this poorly before him, since him. Always, I groan. Always, I think (especially if I'm really clicking with the rest of what they're saying) that they should have just left this out, they should have just stayed away from it.

The deal is, Dinty W. Moore likes to eat meat.

Buddhism has some pretty clear teachings on killing, on animals.

Not all Buddhists adhere to those teachings. But those teachings are there.

Sometimes, they choose not to adhere to the teachings, but they want to say "hey, I'm being a good Buddhist," and so they kind of twist the words, twist the teachings, decide to believe they say something else.

It's not just meat, either. The basic five precepts of the various traditions include "not to misuse sex" and "not to use intoxicants." I've read the porn-star Buddhist Nina Hartley explaining why making porn is not a misuse of sexuality (and is in fact Right Livelihood), and I've read a number of Buddhists explaining why getting drunk, smoking weed, eating LSD is not a violation of the prohibition on intoxicants. Takes some clever word play, and of course it always rings a little hollow, but they do it, they say, they seem to almost believe it.

I wish writers like Dinty W. Moore would get to the meat issue and say "I know that there's really no defense for this, I know that it is pretty much prohibited in Buddhist teachings, but I really like eating meat, and I'm not going to stop." That would at least be honest.

Instead, Dinty tells us that lots of Buddhists eat me (true), and that the whole vegetarian thing is just a "shallow" reading of the precept (which really bugs me, because it's not, and this book for the most part is). He explains that a deeper understanding of the precept to not take life would require us to look at the whole picture-- the life of plants, for instance, is also very important, just as important to a "deeper" understanding of Buddhism as the life of animals. And also, you know, clearing fields to grown broccoli kills lots of field mice and moles, which is worse than just killing one cow. Hence, the whole vegetarian thing is kind of hypocritical and silly. Plus, the Buddha ate meat (even died from eating bad pork, according to some traditions).

All of which, of course, is kind of silly.

The Buddha and his followers did sometimes eat meat. But it's a little more complicated than that. The Buddha and his monks were sort of the equivalent of today's freegans. They were wandering monks and teachers. They were homeless, and they stood with their begging bowls to receive whatever people were willing to give them. The teachings on not killing animals (and not asking others to kill for them) were pretty clear, but there were exceptions to the rule. One exception had to do with begging-- if you were begging, you didn't ask for meat, you didn't choose meat, the animal wasn't killed on your behalf. If that was the scrap you got, you ate it. If you ever had the choice to make, you chose something else. A far cry from today's American Buddhist stopping at the grocery store and picking up a steak when there are plenty of other options available.

And that whole "field mice" thing is nonsense. Nonsense that I've heard too many times before.

It's true, of course. Any kind of agriculture has the potential to kill animals. Growing corn and beans will certainly result (unintentionally) in the deaths of some animals.

But let's say my daily meals combined came at the cost of one mole. One mole to give me breakfast, lunch, and dinner (not going for an accurate number here, just making a point). One dead mole. Sad.

The vast majority of crops grown in this country go into animal feed. In the ballpark of 90-95% of soybeans and corn are grown simply to feed animals. On average, it takes seven times as much vegetable matter to produce a calorie of meat than if we were just eating plant calories straight.

So my meals equal a dead mole. But if I added meat to my diet, I'd have seven dead moles. Plus a dead pig at breakfast, a dead chicken at lunch, a dead cow at dinner. Not to mention the methane, the run-off into water supplies, the treatment of the animals raised (a harsher life and death than the inadvertantly killed mole, to be sure), and so on.

Which makes Dinty's point a cop-out. Bullshit, more or less. Nonsense.

Dinty W. Moore says that the precept really should lead us to be like the Native Americans, "appreciating" the life that has been given for us, enjoying it, respecting it, etc. It should lead to some sort of inner understanding, not to any sort of action.

Bullshit. Weak.

Just say "I like hamburgers, and I don't care." Just go ahead and say that. It's more respectable.

Anyway, reading Moore's book sort of irked me. It wasn't bad, exactly. There were high points. But it wasn't what I hoped, and that whole veggie chapter just bugged me.

Bugged me enough to immediately pick up Shadkar's Food of Boddhisattvas when I put The Accidental Buddhist down.

Food of Boddhisattvas was written by an 18th/19th century Tibetan Buddhist teacher and monk. I'm not much into the Tibetan tradition, and there was a lot here that didn't click with me at all (they're way into all the Hell realms and whatnot, very very different from other traditions), but I give this guy credit for being a crazy, hardcore animal rights guy, for having some pretty heated things to say on the issue. And this was a guy living in the mountains of Tibet, where crops didn't grow, where being vegetarian meant eating nothing but butter, sweet potatoes and clumps of dough for years and years and years.