The Venerable Tashi Nyima (vegan) - Compassion for Animal-people is Our True Nature, Part 1 of 2

The Venerable Tashi Nyima was born in the West Indies where he studied with Dominican and Jesuit priests in his youth. Later he also trained to become a priest before following his Buddhist inner call. After which, the enthusiastic Tashi Nyima traveled and practiced with many distinguished Tibetan teachers from various Buddhist schools. Finally, he settled his heart wholly with the Jonang lineage and devoted himself to Kyabje Tashi Norbu Rinpoche. Currently, the Venerable Tashi Nyima is leading the Universal Compassion Buddhist Congregation, a spiritual organization that has solid footprints in the USA and Mexico. To the surprise of many, the Venerable Tashi Nyima has been vegan for more than 50 years and is well-known for his animal-people rights advocacy. Specialized retreats for animal-people activists and “The Buddha’s Bowl” spiritual book are some of his remarkable contributions to a new vegan world. Known for his compassion and straightforwardness, the Venerable Tashi Nyima welcomes real-truth seekers, but he also has non-negotiable rules for his sangha: such as no initiation for meat-eaters and no animal-people consumption in the group.

“There’s the five traditional Buddhist precepts, right? Avoid killing, avoid taking what is not given freely, avoid deceiving others, avoid abusing others for your own pleasure and avoid intoxication leading to the other four, right? And it’s very simple. it’s the baseline for human life.”

“The Buddha actually stopped animal sacrifice in India. And he gave extensive teachings on what is appropriate food for humans. When we hear the actual teaching of the Buddha is compassion for all sentient beings, not for human beings, but for all sentient beings.”

“You know, we have driven over 60% of other animal species to extinction. And what are we doing? We are driving ourselves to extinction because what we do to others, we do to ourselves.”

“I mean, (“The Buddha’s Bowl”) (has) always been available for free to download. And here we have collected instructions, not only from the Buddha but from Buddhist teachers of all denominations, telling us what is the clear teaching of the Dharma in regards to our relationship with animals, how should we behave.”