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SEAN OAKES
Sean Feit Oakes, PhD (he/they, queer, Puerto Rican & English, living on Pomo ancestral land in Northern California), teaches Buddhism and somatic practice focusing on the integration of meditation, trauma resolution, and social justice. He received Insight Meditation teaching authorization from Jack Kornfield, and wrote his dissertation on extraordinary states in Buddhist meditation and experimental dance. Sean holds certifications in Somatic Experiencing (SEP, assistant), and Yoga (E-RYT 500, YACEP), and teaches at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, East Bay Meditation Center, Insight Timer, and elsewhere.

LINKS
Website: seanfeitoakes.com
Community Page: In It To End It
YouTube channel: In It To End It
Spirit Rock: spiritrock.org/teachers/sean-oakes
Insight Timer: insighttimer.com/seanoakes

GIVING
All of Dr. Oakes’ independent teaching is offered on the model of Gift Economy, in the Buddhist tradition of dāna, inspired giving. Support of our teaching and community is gratefully received. Thank you for your generosity.

Donate:
seanfeitoakes.com/gift-economy

Blessings on your path.

Last week discussing Buddhist ideas about eating meat we went right up to the bell, and of course there are questions, anxieties, cultural issues, and strong views and opinions about this topic that we didn’t get to. So tonight I invite questions and discussion on the topic, or on other things arising for you in our conversation about food.

The strongest views on the topic in North American culture tend to come from folks committed to vegan diets, who hold variations of the view than any kind of meat-eating or using animal bodies as resources in many ways is unethical. This is a beautiful, Dharma-supported view, and I appreciate the clarity of it.

As we touched on last week, there are other ways of interpreting the Buddha’s instruction to not take life, including systems-level approaches to participation with the global economy that look at the harms caused by human exploitation of natural resources broadly, not just on animal life.

These different approaches are not just variations in how we interpret the first precept—they also indicate important differences in our fundamental view of what it means to be a sentient being worthy of protection. Vegan practice emphasizes the sentience of animals, which is an important corrective to the common idea that animals are a “resource” at all, rather than our kin and neighbors on the planet. Eco-systemic approaches often emphasize a more Animist world view that doesn’t separate the plant and animal kingdoms into discrete orders of sentience. If we understand everything as possessing a kind of self and consciousness, as an animist view suggests, the killing of an individual animal is different from the killing of a plant in degree but not in kind (and even that distinction is philosophically tenuous). This is how some Indigenous societies think about meat, and is behind the many rituals often woven around killing and eating.

What I want us to hold in this ethical discussion is awareness of how our underlying worldview conditions our ideas about what actions are ethical and which are not. This has profound implications for every aspect of how we live together on our planet. So I will be interested in where the discussion goes tonight, and will focus on this way of approaching practice—looking for any place where our views about how things are is creating unnecessary suffering for ourselves, our neighbors, and the planet we share.

SEAN OAKES
Sean Feit Oakes, PhD (he/they, queer, Puerto Rican & English, living on Pomo ancestral land in Northern California), teaches Buddhism and somatic practice focusing on the integration of meditation, trauma resolution, and social justice. He received Insight Meditation teaching authorization from Jack Kornfield, and wrote his dissertation on extraordinary states in Buddhist meditation and experimental dance. Sean holds certifications in Somatic Experiencing (SEP, assistant), and Yoga (E-RYT 500, YACEP), and teaches at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, East Bay Meditation Center, Insight Timer, and elsewhere.

LINKS
Website: seanfeitoakes.com
Community Page: In It To End It
YouTube channel: In It To End It
Spirit Rock: spiritrock.org/teachers/sean-oakes
Insight Timer: insighttimer.com/seanoakes

GIVING
All of Dr. Oakes’ independent teaching is offered on the model of Gift Economy, in the Buddhist tradition of dāna, inspired giving. Support of our teaching and community is gratefully received. Thank you for your generosity.

Donate:
seanfeitoakes.com/gift-economy

Blessings on your path.