Compassion for Lobsters

Jeff Wilson | He/Him/His | Toronto Buddhist Church

Buddhism and Nondiscrimination

It’s fun to be a teacher of Buddhist Studies, because you learn a lot from the students. For instance, they’ve helped me think through the meaning of compassion in Buddhism.  

Every year I show a short film named “The Trap” to my class. It’s set in Nova Scotia, and shows the interaction between the local Buddhist community and the local lobstermen. The Buddhists leave their monastery and go down to the docks periodically, where they buy a bunch of the lobsters. Then they take them out in a boat, say some prayers for the lobsters’ long lives, and release them back into the sea.  

This is an attempt to put compassion into action, and recognize that, as Shinran (the founder of Jodo Shinshu, my particular tradition of Buddhism) says,

“all sentient beings have been our parents and brothers and sisters.”

It continues a long-standing practice of purchasing and releasing animals that are destined to end up as food or will otherwise suffer after capture. In China, monasteries have often built a pond or moat on their grounds specifically so they have somewhere to do ritual releases of eels, fish, and other creatures. In premodern times there were ritual releases of animals into the Kamogawa river in Kyoto, but I haven’t heard of anyone doing them recently.

When I used to live in New York City, I would take my lunch hour in Central Park. After eating, I would walk over and sit on some rocks by a pond. The ponds in Central Park are overrun with red-eared slider turtles. That’s because Chinese Buddhist groups would purchase the baby turtles and then release them in the park. So, I’ve always figured all those turtles are probably Buddhist. And when I visited Thailand, there were men with small birds in cages outside many of the Buddhist temples. For a small fee, you could purchase the birds and release them. Most people do animal releases because they believe it creates good karma for the person who releases them.  

After we watch “The Trap,” I have my students do an exercise. I asked them whether it was easier to feel compassion for a lobster, or a human being. I want them to think about who we feel compassion for, and why, so they could begin to interrogate their own assumptions and prejudices. Although they admire the nuns and monks who released the lobsters, the students usually admit that it’s rather hard to feel compassion for a lobster. They talk about how lobsters have eyes on stalks and too many legs and live in the water. A lobster is very strange to them, and they feel so little compassion normally that they’re alright with eating lobsters.

Actually, there are always a handful of students who prefer lobsters over human beings. They point out that lobsters had never done anything wrong to them, but that human beings have mistreated them. This was an interesting insight that really made me think deeper about the situation. When I told my family at the dinner table that a few students felt more compassion for the innocent lobsters, my teenage son said, “They’re not innocent. What about all the toes that lobsters have pinched?!”

In the end though, nearly all my students still feel more compassion for people than for lobsters. At this point in the discussion, I often point out that the issue is really about how close or how far we feel in relation to something or someone. We feel compassion more easily for those who are like us, and feel less compassion for those we imagine are different. Because we feel that lobsters are unlike us, we (well, most of us) feel less compassion for them than we do for human beings.  

This is a natural part of human psychology, but it has dramatic consequences in real life. Even when just talking about human beings, we focus on the small differences between us, rather than noticing that all human beings share almost everything with all other human beings. Then, because we paid attention to those differences without also noting the similarities, we magnify the differences and make them important.  

Compared to a lobster, I have almost everything in common with practically any other human being, even if they have very different political opinions or lifestyles or whatever. But I form my identity based on how I differ from most others, rather than how I am the same with everyone, and then I unconsciously value or devalue other people based on those differences I perceive.

This type of mind is the discriminating mind. Although there is something natural about it, it is a source of suffering for ourselves and others. It is a manifestation of our ignorant clinging to false ideas about the self. 

Shinran talked about this in a hymn he wrote more than 700 years ago:

“When a person realizes the mind of nondiscrimination,
That attainment is the ‘state of regarding each being as one’s only child.’
This is none other than Buddha-nature;
We will awaken to it on reaching the land of peace.”

So there is the current foolish mind of discrimination, and there is the true mind of nondiscrimination. The mind of nondiscrimination is the mind of awakening, the mind of Great Compassion, which regards each being as one’s only child. This is the mind of Amida Buddha, who embodies the compassionate wisdom of all buddhas.

Because Amida Buddha, the light of wisdom, sees all things and all beings as they really are—as empty of separate selfness and deeply interconnected with one another—the buddha values and embraces everyone as if they were the buddha’s only child. The mind of nondiscrimination appreciates me, and my so-called enemies, and lobsters, all equally.

Manifesting this nondiscriminating mind is none other than manifesting buddha-nature, as Shinran says in the hymn. It’s an ideal that we can try to live by and pursue in our lives.  When we find ourselves favoring one group or disfavoring another group, we can ask ourselves whether it is just because of egocentric preference for those we think are similar to ourselves. We can try to expand our circle of compassion to be more embracing, more buddha-like, less discriminating. Maybe we can even extend it to lobsters and others who seem foreign to us.  

The mind of nondiscrimination goes beyond not hating people for being different. It’s about treating everyone the same, even lobsters, because they suffer and need our help. In other words, compassion shouldn’t be self-centered, where we only help those whom we identify with—it should be other-centered, where we help those who need help, period.

Total realization of the mind of nondiscrimination is seemingly an impossible goal during this lifetime. We are too tied down by our foolish blind passions, too bound to human societies that teach us to favor some and ignore others. My students are all intrigued by the possibility but have a hard time believing they could really reach it.

Furthermore, Buddhism operates on the principle of two truths, the mundane and the transcendent. The transcendent truth is the Dharma in its fullest. But the mundane truth is true as well, within specific situations with limited parameters. While nondiscrimination is best in the abstract, there are situations where careful, right discrimination is actually necessary.  

For example, it is generally best in principle to strive to treat others fairly and equally regardless of their race or ethnicity. But there are also times when it is best to keep the realities of people’s racialized experiences in full view. Reparations, affirmative action, and other programs that help repair the evils of past and present oppression can only operate successfully when we understand that lack of nondiscrimination in society in the past sometimes requires wise discrimination in the present in order to reduce suffering. Because that’s what the actual heart of Buddhism is about: the elimination of suffering. All people suffer, but that suffering is in no way equal and the same across all peoples, and historical suffering and trauma require carefully targeted solutions to ensure a better future.

Although we never fully achieve nondiscrimination, and there are situations where it wouldn’t even be desirable, nevertheless nondiscrimination is a key part of the Buddha’s teaching and an important guiding star for us in our lives. And as Shinran says, it is the awakening of buddha-nature, and he insists that “we will awaken to it on reaching the land of peace,” the Pure Land. In Jodo Shinshu the Pure Land is the ultimate medicine for the poison of discrimination, the poison of racism, the poisons of sexism and homophobia, the poisons of self-attachment, and other-disregard.  

So, the perfection of nondiscrimination is everyone’s final inheritance. That’s a beautiful teaching. It moves me to try to do my best to recognize our inner togetherness, to try to care for others, whether human beings or lobsters. Like my skeptical students I don’t know if I can ever fully view a pinchy lobster as my only child. But I’m glad that the buddha can, and that both lobsters and myself are held in Great Compassion.