Our first module asks core questions about the ways in which Buddhists have understood and approached animals.

As we will see, Buddhism has long recognized a core similarity between humans and non-human animals: we are all sentient beings. This means that animals are, in some important ways, seen as closely akin to humans. We are all fellow travelers in samsara. At the same time, the Buddhist tradition has often dismissed animals as shallow and stupid, too mentally feeble to make moral decisions. This tension, in which animals are both akin to us and also deeply different, runs throughout the Buddhist tradition and has shaped the rest of its attitudes towards animals.

Having explored core Buddhist assumptions about animals in our first module, we now turn our attention to how those attitudes play out in practice. Our first stop in this investigation will look at animals in Buddhist ritual. In particular, we will look at a pair of rituals: life ransoming and animal sacrifice (or rather, Buddhist resistance to animals sacrifice). Between these two forms of ritual, we will see how Buddhist attitudes towards animals have been used to further individual and social goals.

By now we’ve looked at Buddhist assumptions about animals, as well as the role animals play in Buddhist ritual life. We now turn our attention to perhaps the most contested issue in Buddhist approaches to animals: the question of vegetarianism.

When people first hear about Buddhist values like compassion and non-violence, they often assume that Buddhists are (or should be) vegetarians. But the reality is that most Buddhists—both historically and today—ate meat as a regular part of their diet. In this module, we’ll talk about the ethical dilemmas that ground that reality, exploring the question of meat-eating through the competing perspectives of the monastic code and the Bodhisattva vow. As we will see, these two ethical perspectives offer competing visions of whether vegetarianism is required. We will conclude this module, therefore, by looking at how Tibetan thinkers tried to bring these conflicting perspectives into a single ethical vision.

The question of the place of animals in Buddhism is very much a live one, with Buddhist cultures around the world struggling to adapt their practices to new perspectives. In our final module, we will look at some of the challenges shaping contemporary Buddhist attitudes towards animals, asking how practices and beliefs are changing, and why.

Our first foray into this territory is perhaps the most controversial: the conflict between Buddhist ideals and using animals for financial gain. Our case study for this involves Tibetan nomads, who are pulled between a Buddhistic ethical vision that disapproves of killing animals on the one hand, and the reality that without the slaughter of yaks and sheep their nomadic culture will be unable to survive. We then look at the contemporary practice of life ransoming (the same ritual discussed in Module 2). Here the tension is between traditional Buddhist practices and a new awareness of the potential environmental impact of releasing animals.

Finally, we conclude our course by reexamining the core assumption about animals discussed in Module 1. Modern scientific experiments are regularly suggesting that animals are not as unintelligent as Buddhist sources suggest. And this new awareness of animal intelligence has the potential to reconfigure the entire relationship between Buddhism and animals, challenging both longstanding assumptions and the practices based on those assumptions.