 Thank you very much for the introduction. Thanks to Peter Flugel for inviting me. I'm very happy to be here. Thanks to the donors, not to forget. As she said, I'm also director of a small center and I can tell you how difficult it became in the recent years to get money for events like this. So thanks to the donors in particular and of course all to the individuals who contributed to this event. So it is not an easy task to speak about how Buddhism is relating to the natural world, as you can imagine. We've already heard a little bit about it this morning in the talk by Ema. And I think there's quite an amount of literature on that topic, written by academic specialists. You mentioned my teacher, Professor Schmitthausen. He has written extensively about that. There's literature written by Buddhists themselves and there's literature written by authors who mostly from a perspective which is quite sympathetic to the Buddhist tradition has a lot of things to say about it. But opposite to what one would expect, the situation is not so straightforward, given the fact that first of all, and you all know that probably there is no single Buddhist tradition, there is no single Buddhist standpoint which indiscriminately can stand for all Buddhist traditions. This does of course not come as a surprise if you think of a 2,500 year long history Buddhism has had throughout nearly all of Asia. It's encounters with diverse indigenous cultures and traditions in Asia which are all very different in themselves and of course in regions which have been very differently affected by the impact of modernity and by its distinct encounters with what we can call Western culture. And second, it is not really clear how the Buddhist traditions relate to the natural world given that there is so question of how to evaluate certain doctrinal statements in the scriptures, to evaluate what their position within the religious tradition is, how they have been transmitted to the practitioners and interpreted and as a matter of fact, whether these doctrinal issues have ever had any impact on the actual behavior of the religious representatives and the followers or if they had not the impact we would assume. To me, this last point seems to be very crucial when it comes to the intriguing question of how doctrinal or philosophical reflections by the thinkers of a tradition, by a religious tradition play out in the daily lives of the followers. How much of an impact can theoretical reflections have on a living tradition? And to what degree are particular codes of conduct and morality firmly based on the continuum of social norms from times before Buddhism became a dominant factor in a particular regional setting? So it's not so easy that everything we see, let's say in Thailand, everything we see in Japanese must be Buddhist. Buddhist is just one factor of many factors which is somehow influencing a culture there. Questions like these draw our attention to a complex methodological background of our inquiry into religious and philosophical perspectives on the issue of animal rights and biodiversity conversation. Do we have to deal with some core elements which can be identified as particularly prominent and universal in the Buddhist traditions? Do the relevant teachings laid out in Buddhist text encourage followers to behave in a way we might wish them to behave when seen against the background of the problems we face today? And to what degree are those issues which seem important to us today discussed in the religious canonical writings of the past, issues which may only have come to our own attention not too long ago reflecting developments alien to the period when the foundations of those religious traditions actually came into existence? So judging alone from the doctrinal background, I think it can hardly be said that a position nature and animals hold in Buddhist worldview is very positive. At best it could be labeled as ambivalent. On the one hand, it is certainly true that the Buddhist tendency to include animals in the moral universe based on the sentence positions them, at least theoretically, on the same level with human beings. If animals are seen as they are in Buddhism, as feeling pain and joy in the same way human beings do, then we do not need to speculate about the cognitive abilities about what is called rational soul which seem to have been made the decisive criteria here in the Western hemisphere in regard to a question where they can have their own rights and dignity or not. According to the Golden Rule, which we find quite often provided in Buddhist scriptures, one should not treat other sentient beings in a way oneself would not like to be treated by others. The Pan-Indian Ahimsa doctrine, we had already heard about that quite often. So this Pan-Indian Ahimsa doctrine of non-injury plays an absolutely crucial role here. On the other hand, the Buddhist traditions are not scarce in descriptions of the deficiencies of life as an animal. Somebody is born as an animal because in a former life, a person has violated the moral code of behavior, becoming an animal as a kind of karmic punishment, so to say. Let me give you an example just to bring over to you the taste of these early Buddhist scriptures, of some of them, of a way in which animals are portrayed in these earliest writings as they have come down on us and this is a passage from the Pali Khanum, so one of the oldest transmissions of Buddhist scriptures we have and it is spoken by the Buddha. Won't read all, but I will give you a taste at least of that, Bhikkhus, so that's the name of the ordained monks in the Buddhist tradition, Bhikkhus. There are animals which feed on grass. They eat by cropping fresh or dried grass with their teeth. And what animals feed on grass? Elephants, horses, cattle, donkeys, goats and deer, and any other such animal. A fool who formerly delighted on tastes here and did evil actions here on the dissolution of a body after death reappears in the company of animals that feed on grass. So you realize, of course, immediately this is the rebirth doctrine about which it is spoken here. One more example. There are animals that feed on dung. They smell dung from distance and run to it, thinking, we can eat, we can eat, just as Brahmins. So here you have a punch to the Hindu or Vedic priests at that time. So just as Brahmins run to the smell of a sacrifice, thinking, we can eat, we can eat. So too, those animals that feed on dung smell dung from a distance and run to it, thinking, we can eat, we can eat. And what animals feed on dung? Fouls, pigs, dogs and jackals, and any such other animals. A fool who formerly delighted on tastes here and did evil actions here on the dissolution of a body after death reappears in the company of animals that feed on dung. The same you have done with the same ending sentence, covering animals that are born age and die in darkness, which are moths, maggots and earthworms. And yeah, they have two more, which I didn't give you here. Animals living in water and animals living in filth, which is always compared with those who have led a bad life and then are born among these animals. But now the important part comes, the Buddha continues to speak, namely, because I could tell you in many ways about the animal kingdom, so much that it is hard to find a simile for the suffering in the animal kingdom. Suppose a man threw into the sea a yoke with one hole in it, and the east wind carried it to the west, and the west wind carried it to the east, and the north wind carried it to the south, and the south wind carried it to the north. Suppose there were a blind turtle that came up once at the end of each century. What do you think, Bikus? Would that blind turtle put his neck into that yoke with one hole in it? He might, venerable sir, sometime or other at the end of a long period, Bikus. The blind turtle would take less time to put his neck into the yoke with a single hole in it than a fool once gone to perdition would take to regain the human state, I say. So regain the human state out of the animal world. Why is that? Because in the animal kingdom, there is no practicing of the dharma, so there is no practicing of Buddhist doctrines. There is no practicing of what is righteous, no doing of what is wholesome, no performance of merit. The mutual devouring prevails and the slaughter of the weak. So that's one perception of early Buddhism of the world of animal life. The last passage touches on an important issue. Animals are, doctrinally speaking, not granted the capacity to spiritual liberation. Once fallen into a rebirth in the animal world, it is hard to get out from there again, given that animals do not keep the standards of Buddhist morality. The stronger kills the weak to make use of him as food and animal sexuality appeared Buddhist to be equally un-Buddhist and thus unacceptable. The commonly used image to underline the degree of difficulty to get reborn as a human out of the animal world is that of a turtle as you have just seen. Rebirth as an animal clearly holds a very disparaged position and animal life is often portrayed mostly with didactical purposes in order to threaten human beings away from the violations of Buddhist principles of morality. Let me be following focus on one of the most important issues regarding the living together of humans and animals, namely the question of what Buddhist traditions have to say about eating meat. Please allow me to start with some personal recollections from some events in the years I have spent in Nepal, Thailand, and Japan. When as a young student, I was for the first time traveling in Buddhist countries, I was very much like other Western Buddhists too, shocked to learn that eating meat is from the religious Buddhist perspective considered to be an issue without any negative karmic consequences. In the earliest Buddhist texts, which have come down to us, so it's a similar strata of texts from which this text here comes, the Buddha's portrait is having taught his monks and nuns that meat can be eaten if it is only pure in three respects. The monk should not have seen, he should not have heard, and he should not have any suspicion that the animal whose meat he's offered has been killed specifically for him. That's very important specifically for him. Obviously, it is the act of killing the animal which appeared to be problematic to early Buddhists and not the act of enjoying the fruit, so to say, of the action. As long as the animal has died a natural death or had been killed by somebody else, always under the condition that it has not been killed specifically for oneself, then there's absolutely no problem to eat that meat. In Nepal, in one of the Himalayan valleys in which temples of both dominant religious groups, Hindu and Buddhist, can be found, I once entered a temple and pretended not to know with which religious group I would have to do there. The people who were preparing for some ritual told me that they were Buddhists, and on my question of what would make them different from Hindus, they told me the following. It is only us who do not kill animals. That is what makes us Buddhists different from the Hindus. I'm quite sure that what they had in mind were the bloody animal sacrifices which are still performed in Nepal on particular days in the Hindu ritual cycle. They most certainly do not oppose to consume meat, so I guess all the Buddhists there, they eat meat. However, the reaction documents to what degree the act of killing an animal or ordering to kill, as in the case of the sacrifices, is disparaged by Buddhists. Leading these Buddhist followers to choose the non-killing of animals as their primary identity providing religious characteristic. Thus, I think is quite surprising. If you go to that country, you would think that they would argue with some doctrinal issues, the Four Noble Truth, the Eightfold Path. No, no, no, it's really this criteria. It is a weird Buddhist because we don't kill animal in sacrifices. Except for the East Asian traditions of Buddhism, nowadays particularly Taiwan, which in the monastic setting keep strict vegetarian diet and I've seen inspire many of the followers to do so too. Vegetarianism has never been widespread among Buddhist followers. The ancient karma laws of direct responsibility are prevailing here. The unwholesome act of killing, more than anything else, is seen as a real threat to one's own karmic account. That's how it is often expected. You have a kind of karmic account, you do good deeds, you get plus points, you do bad things. When you violate Buddhist moral behavior codes, you get negative points. So the unwholesome act of killing, more than anything else, is seen as a real threat to this karmic account. Killing, so the early Buddhist commentators can never be karmically neutral or positive. As it is rooted in the negative emotional and cognitive forces, which keep us prisoners here in Sam Sahara. Already the planning and preparing of the killing, let alone the act itself, which depending on the size of the animal you kill can make a considerable degree of determination and implementation of physical strength necessary, accompanied by the suffering of the victim, and this all makes killing a highly negative charged karmic act. That the consumption of the victim's meat has nothing to do with that all seems hardly understandable for us today. At least that's what my students usually ask, how can that be? If killing is bad, why could you eat that meat without getting any kind of bad karmic influx? However, if karma is seen as a force with a strictly individually and directly operating agency, the eater of meat will indeed remain free from any evil consequences because he has not killed the animal. It's so easy. How deeply this view is still at home in the traditions of Buddhism is shown by modern developments in Thailand, and I'll give you just one example. There, we have indeed a Buddhist group which, among other regulations, introduced vegetarian diet as the daily standard. That was, I think, in the 1980s. The case is complicated, but the fact that the group made strict vegetarianism part of the rules contributed to the general impression in Thailand that that group did not go along the correct Buddhist path, Buddhist mainstream norms. And finally, it was forbidden to call themselves Buddhists. So this group was not allowed to call themselves Buddhists by the authorities. The monks of this group had to disrobe. We issue at heart is a very old one. The canonical writings of Buddhism already tell us of the Buddha's evil cousin and permanent opponent, by name Devadatta, who tried to compete with the Buddha and requested him to introduce stricter rules, among them also a vegetarian diet. All these attempts were interpreted as having the goal of splitting the unity of the Buddhist community, and therefore rejected by the Buddha. Vegetarianism, thus, came to be seen as a threat to the solid endurance of Buddhism's foundations with the potential to lose hold, also of a major part of its supporters, of its donors, who would feel alienated when confronted with a mangkut who would turn to a diet different from the diet of the common people. Also in Thailand, I made acquaintance with a highly ritualized act of liberation. So there's something called animal liberation, and this is just one example I want to show you here in which, in this case, fish, which were actually destined to be sold and slaughtered were bought from the local market and by lay representatives of a large monastic setting close to Bangkok, bought from the market and then transported to a lake where the lay followers, after reciting passages from the canonical writings of Buddhism together with the monks, set them free in the lake. An act by which the follower is believed to gain spiritual merit by way of saving the fish from their otherwise secure death. You see, I took this nice photo here. You can see the monks praying in the back with white clothes for the lay Buddhist and what you see in front are the buckets filled with fish. Then each of the participants took one bucket and you put all these fish into, set them free in the lake. I don't know what kind of fish it is, but especially some money you will, of course, recognize, and the whole ceremony closes with a donation of money in order to compensate for the money which was needed in order to buy the fish from the market. However, little later, when we gathered again in order to serve food for the monks of a monastery, and this is quite a huge monastery with up to 1,000 monks, I was rather surprised to see that the food which had been bought and prepared by the same lay representatives of the monastery consisted of, guess what, meat and fish. A fact which I could only explain to myself in terms of the ritualistic character of the liberation ceremony. The ceremony for the spiritual benefit of the lay people and of course the spiritual benefit of the donors who participated in the liberation of the fish on the one hand and on the other hand, the daily routine, the daily eating routine on the ground which simply would not take into consideration that the buying of dead fish and meat at the market would somehow, though not particularly, so not directly, but it would somehow also fool the slaughtering of the animals needed to provide the monastery with the meat and fish to be processed as food for the monks. As I said, we're not talking about little amounts, but 1,000 monks, if you have to feed them, it's actually quite a lot here, you can see them eating. When I later had a chance to discuss this issue with the abbot of a monastery, the line of argument was basically two-fold, so his line of argument was two-fold. Namely, first, he made the point that the Buddha himself had no objection to meat eating as long as it was pure in three respects. You remember the three respects I mentioned before. And secondly, he argued that even when sticking to a vegetarian diet, in order to grow the plants, pests harming the plants would have to be killed and thus, there would be no way at all to live and get food without killing sentient beings. Whereas the first argument came as no surprise and indeed it is covered by the canonical writings, the second line at least hinted at the fact that killing, even when not done by the person benefiting from the act, appeared somehow to be problematic even to the abbot as otherwise pest control, when done by another person, would not have been brought in as an argument in order to legitimate the killing of the animals for meat. A similar argument I had come to here several years before when I started at a Buddhist university in Japan, so a Buddhist university in Japan, where to my surprise, among the three or four daily alternative menus offered in the canteen for the students, none of them would be vegetarian. Here, in the East Asian context, the point was made after I inquired with the head of the kitchen that everything on earth is connected with each other, the so-called interconnectedness, it's a key Buddhist Mahayana, Buddhist doctrine, and everything is suffused with the perfectness of Buddha nature, so that there would be no way to argue that the use of meat for food would be less destructive than the use of vegetables. Another interesting argument against the vegetarian diet I learned in Japan when I was invited to dinner by a leading Jodo Shinshu priest and scholar. Jodo Shinshu is one of the largest Buddhist groups in Japan, it's the so-called pure land school of Buddhism. To be a vegetarian, so I was told, would amount to an ascetic practice, and thus violate against the basic principle of their particular understanding of Buddhism, of the Jodo Shinshu Buddhist, namely that liberation from samsara can exclusively be gained through the boundless grace of the almighty Buddha, Amida, that's the main Buddha in that school, initiated by the unsparing realization of one's own degenerated character. Any act in presumptive behavior, including ascetic forms of practice, equals vegetarianism, based on the assumption that one's self could gain positive karmic results would only lead one deeper into the illusionary world of self-aggrandism, which, so the teaching, constitutes the most intricate obstacle for awakening, and of course, awakening is where usually Buddhists would like to go. So before I come to the last section, let me add two more views on the relation between animals and humans. Both come from important contemporary Buddhist leaders from Tibet, who live in exile outside Tibet. The first statement I want to read to you comes from Shama Rinpoche, born in 1952, who is considered an important representative of a quite old Tibetan incarnation lineage and head of a particular subgroup of the so-called Kama Kaguya, so that's one of the Tibetan Buddhist groups, with monasteries and centers in the east and the west. He's quite an influential figure, and on the question of the relation between animals and humans, he has the following to say, he has written a small booklet called Creating Transparent Democracy and New Model, and in two pages he's covering the topic of animals. So he says, animals have the same inherent right as human beings to use the earth. However, humans currently dominate the earth, and because of this dominance, humans must take primary responsibility for ensuring the right of animals. This translates to ensuring practices that are both humane and farsighted and balance the often conflicting interests of human and different species, so that benefit comes to the greatest number of beings possible. One of the most fundamental rights that humans must extend to animals is the right to exist, to the extent possible, without suffering. This means emphasizing humane animal treatment, particularly for those animals that serve humans as sources of food, fiber, work, entertainment, or as pets. For example, chickens, cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, and other animals sacrificed for their meat must be provided comfortable conditions and satisfying lives up to the point of their slaughter. End of the quote. As far as I can see, Shama Rinpoche Moussir long a not very convincing line of argument. If we only take a little bit serious what he says in the first paragraph, namely that animals have the same inherent right as human beings to use the earth, versus demand for comfortable conditions and satisfying lives up to the point of their slaughter, it will certainly be very welcome by activists of the animal right movement. I wonder how his obvious unresisting acceptance of animal slaughter can be made compatible with this statement that animals and human beings have the same inherent right to use the earth. Do we have to understand this statement in the sense of human beings acting as we have heard it before kind of stewards who by slaughtering animals help them gain access to better rebirths as it is not uncommon to argue in Buddhist groups in order to let appear the acts of consuming meat less drastic. It's a kind of beneficial act. You slaughter them and then they get access to a better rebirth out of the bad incarnation as an animal or does it simply reflect Shama Rinpoche's pragmatic yielding to the facts in this world, assuming that a position arguing against animal slaughter would be unacceptable for his followers and maybe in his few non-Buddhist, unorthodoxly, non-mainstream Buddhist. I'm not sure about that. I have to ask him when I meet him next time. Be that as it may. We also hear, I think, refreshing other voices coming from contemporary eminent figures of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, namely here, as you can see from the webpage, the 17th Karmapa, Argyan Trinly Dorje, born, and I think this is important, 1985. So he's one of the youngest Buddhist leaders at the moment and also one of the most respective religious leaders from Tibet coming close after the Dalai Lama. Himself being strict vegetarian in some rather remarkable speeches since 2007, I was really young at that time, he expressed his strong conviction of a vegetarian diet aiming as his followers and monks of his order. He intensely encouraged them to reduce the consumption of meat along the way to finally giving up meat, eating completely. In particular, and this you can see here, here, he made the claim for these four points here. Namely, no meat is to be prepared in the kitchens of any monastery of his lineage or center. No one is to be involved in the business of buying and selling meat. So for all his students, this practice must stop. There is no killing of animals on monastic premises. This is quite bewildering because it means that before there was killing of animals on the temple ground. And finally, he says that he's aware of monks and robes going to buy meat. That's mostly for the exile community in India and Nepal and he does not want to see that again. Now, we don't have enough time to go into detail, but his so to say theological argument he is trying to bring in is quite interesting. In so far as he puts meat eating on one level with the use of weapon, the dealing with weapon and the use of alcohol. He also brings in the argument that it's his duty to protect life. It's an argument which I don't think comes harmoniously out of the Buddhist tradition, but it's probably due to Western influences. And he makes, of course, the important point that even though you are not killing yourself an animal by buying flesh, the meat of an animal, of course you'll carry responsibility. So here, the direct principle of karma is extended to an indirect principle. I would judge with clear statements by the 17th Karma Paorgian Trinly Dorje as somehow revolutionary. It is, in my view, a breaking point within the mainstream Tibetan tradition, which is a very conservative tradition, given that the focus is laid on the adaptation of the dietary system to a new modern situation and to new global needs rather than on the orthodox, conservative and uncritical continuation of mainstream Buddhist positions. It is, I think, a true victory of compassion if you want to use this word, one of the key values in most, if not all, Buddhist traditions. But keep in mind he's a very young guy and that might be a crucial factor in this change of the dietary system among Buddhists nowadays. That brings me to the final point of my paper and I will be very short. I believe that the often formulated, all-encompassing compassion Buddhists are promoting in some way opens the door to radical anthropocentrism. No doubt, compassion is one of the most fundamental attitudes to be cultivated according to Buddhist scriptures. At the same time, the commitment to its universal application, as it is called for, also holds the potential danger of turning it into a shallow rhetorical device, a device which, if promoted without critical investigation of the de facto situation nowadays of our world, can easily serve as a lip service with the ugly face of adamant and unreflected anthropocentric positions lurking behind its beautiful facade. Maybe the faith that Buddhists display often in terms of holding that in their own Buddhist moral universe, animals and the whole natural world to get a better tree than in other religions has to be shaken. I've tried to illustrate some instances in regard to the question of vegetarian diet in which anthropocentric perspectives, in my eyes, hinder a real and, if you want, unbiased examination of the situation of the natural world as it really is, be that due to traditional rituals, as you have seen in the case of the liberation ceremony, due to overrating the unique sociological superiority of human beings, or due to the rejection of any new ethical standards which do not go along established mainstream Buddhist ideas. If Buddhist traditions want to start to take care of the natural world more seriously, there are, and I have no doubt that similar to the talk which was given by Professor Lindsay, the Buddhist tradition has plentiful potentials. For sure, the Buddhist clergy needs more worldly education and awareness for the problems we nowadays face. That's also we touched upon. They have to know what the issues in environmental ecology is, actually. Most of the leaders have no idea about that. Buddhist clergy all over the world remains still a very influential factor. Just as the 17th Kamma Parorgian Trinidadi has shown a high degree of courage in breaking with long-established dietary traditions, Buddhist leaders will have to face the challenges of today with greater readiness and creativity, and let go of some of the cherished theological positions if they turn out to be counterproductive. New times need new paths to begun. This, I hope, will not be seen as a violation of what the Buddha might once have taught, but I think this is only a creative adaptation of the spirit of true compassion promoted by the Buddha to nowadays times. And by the way, that's my end, but by the way, this photo here was given to me by a friend. It's from a vegetarian Buddhist restaurant in Dharamsala, India. Thank you.