Part 2 : Becoming Aware of the Suffering behind Eating Meat Matthieu: It seems also that slaughterhouses are guarded as if they were top-secret military facilities. You can’t see anything. But if it were shown even a little bit to people, they would find it intolerable. Jane: There is a wonderful woman in America. She got a job in an abatt...

In honor of Jane Goodall's birthday this week, we have the pleasure to post a never-before published dialogue between Matthieu Ricard, author of the recent book, A Plea for the Animals , and the renowned primatologist, animal rights activist, founder of Roots and Shoots and UN Ambassador of Peace. They have been friends for many years, and b...

Journalist Elizabeth Kolbert and Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard each had big books in 2015. Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History—winner of the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction—takes an unflinching look at the history of extinction and the different ways that human beings are negatively impacting life on the planet. Ricard’s Altruism...

In his most recent book, A Plea for the Animals: The Moral, Philosophical, and Evolutionary Imperative to Treat All Beings with Compassion, Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard makes a case for ending our exploitation of non-human animals. If we stopped eating animal products, he says, we could start to alleviate global hunger, significantly reduce ou...

“It just takes just one second to decide to stop. The main reason not to eat meat and fish is to spare others' life. This is not an extreme perspective. This is a most reasonable and compassionate point of view.” My first Buddhist teacher, Kangyur Rinpoche, was a very strict vegetarian. I was inspired by him and also by a deep inner reasonin...

The dolphinarium industry is a perfect example of institutionalized selfishness. Money is the driving force that creates and runs them. Their educational, recreational, and environmental facades are covers for the merciless enslavement of species gifted with rare intelligence and who enjoy a rich and complex social life. In the people who run...

“One of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites, so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love,” said Martin Luther King. “We’ve got to get this thing right, ” he added, emphasizing that power without care, without love and compass...

Inside the main temple, the monks are getting ready to come out in the courtyard of Shechen monastery, in Nepal, to engage in the Tsechu Festival of Sacred dances. (March 29th, 2015)

In October, I had the honor of participating in a public discussion at Princeton University with philosopher Peter Singer, Professor of Ethics and author of The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically (Yale University Press). “Effective altruism," writes Peter Singer, "is based on a very simple id...

In line with Darwin's emphasis on the importance of cooperation in nature, new advances in evolutionary theory allow us to envision an extended altruism that transcends the ties of family and tribe, and emphasizes the fact that human beings are essentially "SuperCooperators," to use a term coined by Martin Nowak. Evaluating the capacities for...