Prabhupad, the founder in the United States of the religious movement dedicated to Krishna is to me is one of the truly great religious figures of the 20th century. He came to the U.S. with virtually nothing except his clothes and books; yet his teachings have helped convert either directly or indirectly millions of people to vegetarianism. He contributed to a huge improvement in the lives of other animals and in the health and lives of those his teachings influenced to become vegetarian.

   This chapter or page is a response to an email describing a rift in Iskon that I think even most people in Iskon think should not exist.  But it also catalyzed in my mind some conflicts which need to be aired, which I will get to after the preliminary discussion.

    Isn't it Prabhupad's teaching also that he is in a line of divinely sent teachers?
I believe that he is a good representative of the truth that animals are not to be sacrificed. There is no way I will demean the wonderful fact that Prabhupad has continued the tradition of compassion that is in the vegetarian covenant of Genesis 1: 29-30, which is the real tradition of Judaism, not the phoney tradition that is now called orthodox Judaism.

    However, there is absolutely no doubt that the teachers of Veganism from different organizations are even more perfect teachers of compassion regarding the cow, for example. I am quite sure that people like Ingrid Newkirk, John Robbins and others would smile and reject the notion that they should be regarded as spiritual gurus, as such. But I am also convinced that Prabhupad would criticize anyone who attempted to deify him or to say that his teachings are the final word on everything. He would say that that is idolatry. Most of the teachers of the Vegan diet that I know of (and there are a great many excellent teachers who are not in the public eye) would say that divine guidance pervades all that every true seeker does.
 

   I am always inspired, for example, to see Iskon groups (devotees of Krishna) who respect the vegan diets of people like myself, and also raw food diets.  I went to the Vegetarian Food Fair in Toronto in 2002, and I was so pleased that the followers of Krishna whom I respect, and with whom I sometimes chant, served vegan food.  It showed the vegans and vegetarians there that the Iskon groups are open-minded spiritually. They did not come to the Food Fair to push or even to sell dairy products.
I was deeply impressed with the fact that they too embraced the Vegan ideal. They are more inclined to do so, because they know that many Vegans became vegans out of compassion for other creatures, because they refused to pay to have other animals killed so they could eat their corpses, and also because in the Vegan mind it is also wrong to enslave an animal, even temporarily, as is done when animals are tethered in order to be milked. Cows give milk voluntarily only to their calves, and not to humans who profit from the sale of the milk.
 

   However, once again we must highlight the atrocity of the cow being enslaved or tethered so that one may drink its milk, or, in the case of the large farms, collect it to be sold. Once again we have commerce dominating over compassion. In order to make money selling milk, Hindu, Jain and Buddhist ranchers routinely enslave their cows.

    Yes, of course, at least they don't kill them. We have already praised these cultures for being far superior spiritually than the Judeo-Christian-Sunni Islamic cultures which routinely oppress, enslave and kill animals for food and profit, creating a lose/lose situation: the animals lose their lives and humans lose their health.

   I am asking all true Hindus, Jains and Buddhists to reevaluate their tethering of  cows for food or profit. I would not like it if I were in the cow's place. Neither would any Hindu, Jain or Buddhist. The Golden Rule is to apply to all creatures: Do unto other creatures as you'd have them do unto you. Even to visualize a group of humans subjugating pregnant human women in order to harvest their breast milk for food or profit is an atrocity of thought.  Humans harvesting the milk of an enslaved creature is a degree less atrocious than killing the creature, it is true. But it is still an atrocity to the creature.

  I do not wish to offend those religions teaching the world the virtues of vegetarianism, except when they say that their belief systems arealready totally perfect, and that there is nothing more to learn spiritually regarding compassion to other creatures. To say this is to close ourselves off from both the all knowing and the all compassionate nature of Deity, from one point of view, as well as simply to be close-minded from another.

    When people I meet want to know about vegetarian affinity groups, I give them the addresses of the Buddhist temples in Detroit and Hamtramck and send them to the Govinda Krishna temple in Detroit, and I also inform them of vegetarian and vegan groups.  Those with whom I now relate all know that I myself am vegan and organic in my dietary preferences.

   I want to work together with all vegetarian groups for the benefit of all creatures (including humans).  All vegetarian groups are more spiritual in their diets than those who eat the corpses of God's creatures.  Both Krishna and Shiva, I know, are known as Pasupati, Lords of the Creatures, and Protectors of Cattle, and I'm sure that Kali, Uma, Raddha, Parvati have the same titles. And we all know that the Buddhas taught "may all creatures be happy," and that we should not sacrifice animals.

   When I lived with Iskon in Kauai, Hawaii, I learned much that was for my spiritual benefit, but there was still some coercion over other creatures among the devotees.  During on feast day, one member of Iskon prodded a bull into pulling the Juggernaut wagon.  The devotee was not happy with the task. We all could visibly see that by the expression on his face.  Because he had been taught to be compassionate to all creatures he prodded the bull very softly at first, more like little pushes than actual prods, but then, to his obvious regret, when the bull didn't budge, he prodded more forcefully, in order to get the unwilling bull finally to move and pull the wagon. The devotee was obviously unhappy about the situation, and it was an object lesson, a living case study, for those of us who wanted to treat all creatures compassionately.  We saw that, though we daily ate our vegetarian food, we were still involved in coercing other creatures, and that this too was part of the tradition we now embodied as devotees of Krishna. The bull was not treated kindly as a child, the metaphor some devotees use to describe their relationship with other creatures.

    So too in the matter of dairy products, virtually always cows do not give their milk willingly to humans, only to their calves. Humans have to tether the milk cows in some way.  And this is coercion. There is no other word for it.  At the time we tie an animal, tether it, we are making it unfree.  It no longer has the free will to divorce itself from the relationship. To tether a cow is to enslave it, to subdue it, and to have dominion over it.  In this respect, Hindus, Buddhists and Jains tethering cows are also following the evil scriptures of Genesis

    The truth is to be spoken and lived by us all.  Prabhupad taught and practiced the truth in a manner far superior to the fundamentalist Jews and Christians of the United States.  It took great courage for him to do so. I love him and admire him for doing so. This does not mean that his teachings should be regarded as perfect and that they cannot be improved upon. To say that Prabhupad's word, or that the Vedas,for that matter, are a totally perfect compendium of truth that needs no improving upon is to enter the same arena of bigotry and narrow-mindedness in which the fundamentalist Jews, Christians, and Muslims excel when they point to their scriptures as the final truth. All of these groups say that the complete truth necessary for our spiritual lives exists in the Torah, the New Testament and the Quran, respectively.

   So too are all of these carnivorous cultures imperialistic, unlike the Hindu and Buddhist vegetarian cultures. All of these cultures are a scourge and curse on the creatures of earth and on nature, the environment, supporting as they do the predations of industry.  Yet they claim their teachings are perfect!  One may safely conclude that these cultures that say they already have the total perfect truth, and do not need to improve, are precisely those which manifest the most evil.  In contrast, though the various temples of Iskon may be somewhat different in their emphases, they all are vegetarian and have far more respect for the creatures and creation.

   In my personal life, it's my constant prayer to Deity to recognize that I am but a spirit in the form of flesh, and to help me see my faults and to grow deeper in truth and love.  I prayed to be humble and to know the truth when it was time for me to leave behind  carnivorism, a tradition in which I had been raised for over thirty years. It was hard to leave behind my family's diet, and a diet accepted in the scriptures of the Old and New Testament  (I had not read the Quran at that time), and a diet that I had said (to vegetarians criticizing my diet) I would defend till my dying days. Changing to a vegan diet was by far the greatest spiritual event of my life, however, and once I decided to not eat animal foods, I literally felt an emotional weight lifted from me.  But before that occurred I had to go through the painful admission that I had believed something that was wrong, namely, that God said animals could be killed and enslaved so I could eat those foods.  It was a belief I had carried with me for over thirty years.

  All praise and inspiration to those devotees of Krishna who recognize that we all need to walk further on the path to perfect love, and that it may mean that we have to give up falsely cherished notions in order to do so.  If we choose to believe that we know all there is to know about love and truth, and that we no longer have any moral challenges left in our lives, aren't we, though vegetarians, still similar though on a lesser scale to the Falwells and Pat Robertsons and televangelists who regularly teach the evils of absolute obedience to tyrannical state governments; who sanction animal sacrifices and the disease-promoting diet of carnivorism; who promote sexism, leading to the crimes of battering women; and bigotry towards homosexuals, leading to hate crimes against them?

   We must not be like the carnivorous sects of the world.  Iskon members, devotees of the Mother, Shauvites, Shias, Buddhists and vegetarians and vegans of all kinds should seek each other out and support each other in so far as they are able.

   At one point in history, as Helen Ellerbe points out in her The Dark Side of Christianity, Jews, Christians and Muslims all worshipped together in places that were controlled by French and Italian Albigensians or Cathars (whose teachers were vegan). What we are not aware of is that these vegetarian Jewish, Muslim and Christian groups were all influenced by Hindus and Buddhists. Nor are most people aware that the vegetarian Sabeans are praised in the Quran. The Sabeans were followers of Saba, which is just another name for Shiva. All religions began as vegetarian and egalitarian.  The original Jews, Christians and Muslims knew that. Carnivorism is the diet and mind-frame from which we are to be healed. Carnivorism, every objective person, and every doctor who has read the journals of medical research knows, promotes many diseases.

    I trust that Iskon members, though having their differences will respect each other and not act as the fundamentalists of Judaism, Christianity and Sunni Islam act, who condemn all who do not believe as they do as infidels.
 

  The question of the sacredness of the cow, for example, must be raised. Do we truly venerate the cow as sacred if we exert even the smallest force in order to milk it? It is, of course, a rhetorical question. The assertion that cows are sacred is regarded by some as having a Shamanic source in that psyllisybin mushrooms spawn from cow dung; by others as having an economic source, the cow being the source of milk, dung, and (once dead) leather, as well as being a source for transportation and useful in agriculture pulling plows; and by others as a simple realization that all creatures are sacred, and that since the cow and its products were so functional in ancient Hindu civilizations, perhaps that the cow was even more to be venerated than other animals, which of course is just another form of speciesism.

  Most of us who haven't been to India have heard stories about how traffic stops in certain areas whenever cows come on the roads, and how in some places people in cars simply wait until the cow leaves the road in order to proceed. There are a number of variations of this which I have heard. To me these events display the wonderful Hindu appreciation for the sacredness of all life, which is also seen in those wilderness villages in which monkeys roam the streets and even steal (usually food, but other things as well) from unwary humans. These true accounts have also stimulated in me a desire to go to these places in India and live there for a while and witness first hand the compassion for all creatures that I have heard about.

    But though the cows mentioned above are venerated, cows from whom dairy is derived are treated differently, and tethered, so that they can be milked.  The cows are tethered because the cow objects to its milk being taken from it by any being other than its calves. No matter how one rationalizes this event, it is slavery.  I would not want to be tethered even for a moment by anyone.  And should this occur, it would only be because I was enslaved and it was out of my power. I pray to have the good karma not ever to experience such enslavement. And I'm sure that every cow wishes the same.

   Still, those who use dairy products shouldn't feel as though they are being totally condemned.  At least you're not enslaving the cows (though one Iskon branch became notorious for experimenting with factory farming) in the typical manner of the animal foods industry, and at least the cows are not being slaughtered.

  The ideal as taught in the Ethiopic Book of Enoch is for us not to tamper at all with creation, and to live with it as it is.  It's really simple.  It is only our shortcomings, living and accustomed to living with the needless gadgets of industry, gotten at the price of polluting our planet, that make us think that it requires some superhuman force in order to living without offending the creatures of creation.  We can learn and employ non-invasive types of agriculture in order to live a life that is free from exploiting even the smallest of creatures.  We don't need to tether animals, to make them pull plows, carts or chariots or wagons for transportation. We certainly don't need to break the spirits of elephants or horses in order to ride them. All of these are radically evil offenses against other creatures; they are acts of enslavement.

   So, if one follows the above logic, our work is cut out for us.  We are to establish non-invasive forms of agriculture to support ourselves when nature's foods are not abundant enough. Therefore we won't be oppressing, displacing, killing or in any way abusing the insects and small creatures living in the earth. Needless to say, if businesses and governments would use their money to establish such non-invasive vegetarian agricultural communities, the crime rate would drop radically. Our present society, so dependent on animal foods, would no longer exist.  It would truly be a non-industrial new world. The ideals of the Book of Revelations would be put into action: there would be no sorrow, death or dying, and therefore no animal sacrifices.
And what the Book of the Hopi says was the original condition of creation, a time when animals and humans lived peacefully together, would once again exist.
 

  It would be quite negative for any religious group to believe that it cannot grow.  And it is a truism to say that no human religious teacher is to be seen as equivalent to God. This is in fact the glaring defect of orthodox fundamentalist Christianity.  There are, of course, many, maybe even a majority of Christians, who respect Jesus as one of the world's greatest religious teachers. For me the real Jesus is the Jesus of Ebionite Gospel, seen in the Gospel of the Nazirenes, published in England in the 1870s in Elizabethan English and republished in the U.S. in modern English in 1996. This Jesus is vegetarian and egalitarian, who virtually always preaches compassion for all creatures as well as compassion for all humans in the same breath.  In other words, Jesus constantly lets his followers know that other animals are to be treated with compassion, not subdued, not dominated, not oppressed, enslaved or killed.

   One of the things that impresses visitors to India is that in many places cars in traffic will stop if a cow is in the road. The will of the cow is honored, at times even when the cow lays down in the road. The cars will either go around the cow if they can, or they will simply wait. This is amazing in itself, as are tales in which visitors to India, like some visitors to Central and South America, relate stories about monkeys who cavort as equals among humans. In orthodox Jewish and Christian cultures especially, animals that are not pets are seen imprisoned in pet shops, zoos, and vivisection labs, and of course, their corpses are seen, and even salivated over, on dinner plates. So, once again we have a legitimate reason for praising the compassion for other creatures had by India and by various so-called Third World nations.