The Spiritual Case for Veganism: What Every Tradition Already Knew
Most of the vegan conversation happens in spreadsheets: protein grams, B12 levels, carbon footprints. That's a great conversation to have, and an important one. But it's not the only one worth having, and for most of human history it certainly wasn't the main one when considering the question of eating animals. Whilst many people think of veganism as a modern day fad diet, before anybody measured a DIAAS score, some of the most people in known history were asking a straight question about what they ate: what does this cost me, morally and spiritually, to consume foods of animal origin?
That question shows up in some surprising places once you start looking for it. Below, we’ll look at a lot of very different people, working independently across a very long time, circling the same (contemporarily disappointingly unpopular) idea from different directions.
The Neuroscience of the World's Happiest Man
In the early 2000s, a neuroscientist named Richard Davidson wired up 256 sensors to the head of a French molecular biologist turned Tibetan Buddhist monk, Matthieu Ricard, and had him meditate on compassion. The scan showed the highest gamma-wave activity recorded in the literature at that point. Journalists took the result and ran a much simpler headline: the happiest man in the world.
Ricard has pushed back on that framing more than once. He doesn't describe his happiness as something internal he retreated into. It came from turning outward. "True happiness can only be attained when we avoid causing pain to others," he's written. He later made the ethical case explicit in a book called A Plea for the Animals, arguing there's no real justification, moral or evolutionary, for how we currently treat the animals we eat. For Ricard the diet isn't separate from the compassion practice everyone was so impressed by. It's the same discipline, just applied practically rather than remaining theoretical.
Every Meal as Practice
Will Tuttle takes a less gentle route to a similar place. He's a Zen-trained pianist and philosopher whose books The World Peace Diet and Food for Freedom argue that eating animals is the most repeated act of desensitisation that most people ever perform; several times a day, every day, for a lifetime, we practice not feeling something whilst participating in violence towards a creature that can feel. He traces the pattern back roughly ten thousand years, to the herding cultures of the ancient Near East, where domesticating (his chosen word is enslaving) sheep, goats, and cattle first built systemic coercion into human life. His argument is that it never stayed contained there.
"What we do to animals, we do to ourselves."
There's confirmation for this from modern psychology. Researchers studying what's called the "meat paradox", the tension between caring about animals and still eating them, have found that just describing an animal as food, rather than as a living creature, measurably changes how much suffering people think it's capable of. The psychologist Melanie Joy has a name for the belief system underneath all this: carnism, the largely invisible set of assumptions that lets people love one animal and eat another without ever feeling the contradiction. Her point isn't that carnists are hypocrites, it's that the system is built intentionally so nobody has to notice.
Ahimsa, Mostly Buried
Ahimsa (nonviolence or non-harming) is a word explicit and central in Jainism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, where compassion extends by definition to every sentient being, not just the human ones. What's less obvious is how far the same thread runs through traditions people don't usually associate with it.
The Hebrew Bible's very first dietary instruction is plant-based: "Behold, I have given you every herb-yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed - to you it shall be for food" (Genesis 1:29). The prophets return to a version of this vision more than once. Isaiah pictures a restored world where the wolf lives with the lamb and the lion eats straw like an ox, "they shall not hurt nor destroy in all My holy mountain" (Isaiah 11:6–9). Hosea has God saying flatly, "I desire goodness, not sacrifice" (6:6). In Daniel, a small experiment plays out where young men on legumes and water outperform the ones eating from the king's table (1:12–13), which to me sounds straight out of a scene from the documentary The Gamechangers. Isaiah 66:3 goes further, comparing the slaughter of an ox to the killing of a man, though the standard scholarly reading treats that as a condemnation of hollow ritual sacrifice specifically, not a general statement about diet.
Within Judaism this has a real name: tza'ar ba'alei chayim, the prohibition on causing unnecessary suffering to living creatures. The medieval scholar Nachmanides put it plainly: cruelty expands in the soul of the person practicing it, he wrote, and you can see as much in anyone who slaughters cattle for a living.
Christianity's version of this thread is real but has mostly been pushed to the edges. Some early ascetic communities were vegetarian by conviction. Clement of Alexandria wrote in the second century that it's "far better to be happy than to have our bodies act as graveyards for animals." A lot of twentieth-century writing extends this into more explicit territory. The best known example is Edmond Bordeaux Szekely's Essene Gospel of Peace, which puts extensive vegetarian teaching directly into Jesus's mouth. It's worth knowing what that text actually is before quoting it anywhere someone might check: Szekely claimed to have translated it from a manuscript in the Vatican archives, though the Vatican has denied it exists, and biblical scholars treat the book as a modern composition rather than a first-century document. That doesn't erase it from the tradition of Christian vegetarian writing, but it is broadly considered a modern reflection, not ancient scripture.
Buddhism doesn't have this ambiguity. The Lankavatara Sutra states outright that a bodhisattva should refrain from eating flesh, "in any form, in any manner, and in any place... unconditionally, and once and for all." The Mahaparinirvana Sutra is shorter about it: eating meat "extinguishes the seed of great compassion." And in Islam, the Quran describes animals as "communities like yourselves" (6:38), with several hadith condemning cruelty toward them directly.
A Long List of People Who Got There First
None of this is new. Pythagoras was teaching kinship between humans and animals six centuries before Christ, so thoroughly that for the next two thousand years, vegetarianism in the West was simply called "the Pythagorean diet." His own line on it hasn't dated much: "As long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seeds of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love."
Tolstoy connected the same dots on a civilizational scale. "As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields," he wrote, and elsewhere, more personally: "Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself." Einstein made his own version of the same widening-circle argument, writing that our task is to free ourselves "by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty," and went as far as to say a shift toward vegetarianism could do more for human survival than almost anything else available to us.
George Bernard Shaw wrote it into verse:
Like carrion crows, we live and feed on meat Regardless of the suffering and pain We cause by doing so... Thus cruelty Begets its offspring, war.
Gandhi built an entire political philosophy on the same root as his vegetarianism. For him, nonviolence toward animals and nonviolence as a strategy against colonial power weren't two separate commitments, they were one value at two scales. Albert Schweitzer, working from a completely different angle, coined "reverence for life" to describe the idea that all life carries some intrinsic will to live worth respecting, a wider net than most animal-rights philosophy even tries to cast. And in the twentieth century, Peter Singer gave the secular version of all this its modern vocabulary, “speciesism”, discrimination on the basis of species membership. Singer argues that what actually grounds moral concern is the capacity to suffer, not intelligence or species membership.
Borrowing a Line From a Different Fight
One more historical voice is worth including, even though it wasn't originally about animals at all. In 1791, arguing before the British House of Commons for the abolition of the slave trade, William Wilberforce told Parliament: "Having heard all of this, you may choose to look the other way, but you can never again say you did not know."
I should say plainly that he was talking about slavery, not livestock. The line gets borrowed a lot in animal-advocacy writing, often without the context attached, which is a bit of a shortcut. But the borrowing isn't redundant; it's a deliberate parallel that people from Peter Singer onward have drawn on purpose. Both arguments hinge on the same move: once you've actually been shown how something works, not knowing stops being available to you as an excuse.
Jane Goodall's Version of the Argument
Goodall's case comes less from doctrine and more from six decades spent watching what connects humans to everything else alive. "Here we are, arguably the most intelligent being that's ever walked planet Earth, with this extraordinary brain, yet we're destroying the only home we have," she's said. Her answer isn't to feel less. It's to let feeling and intellect actually work together: "I think empathy is really important, and I think only when our clever brain and our human heart work together in harmony can we achieve our full potential."
She's not naive about people, either. "We are, indeed, often cruel and evil. Nobody can deny this," she's said, "but we are also capable of the most noble, generous, and heroic behaviour." For Goodall, reconnecting with the natural world isn't a nice extra, it's close to the whole task: "To reconnect with nature is key if we want to save the planet." And she keeps coming back to the individual onus of it "you cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you," so the only real choice left is what kind of impact you want that to be.
Her plainest line might be the best one: "If we kill off the wild, then we are killing a part of our souls."
The Word Jim Mason Had to Invent
Jim Mason was a lawyer who grew up on a livestock farm, and in 1980 he co-wrote Animal Factories with Peter Singer, one of the earliest serious exposés of factory farming. His own book, An Unnatural Order, came out in 1993 and has been revised twice since, and it makes an argument that in some ways predates and sets up Tuttle's: that before agriculture, most human cultures were animist, living in what Mason describes as a world that was still alive and ensouled, where animals were treated as kin, sometimes as teachers, sometimes as spiritual powers in their own right. Domestication didn't just change what people ate. It broke that relationship on purpose, turning an animal from a fellow being into property, something bred and owned rather than related to.
For the attitude that shift produced, Mason had to invent a word: misothery, contempt for animals, built deliberately to echo misogyny, contempt for women. He didn't think the resemblance was a coincidence. His claim is that the practical and psychological machinery built to control animals as livestock got reused, not long after, on women, and then further outward onto colonized land and people. The book's chapters actually run in that order: misothery, then misogyny, then racism and colonialism, then a closing chapter on what he calls the rituals of dominionism that still show up in ordinary modern life.
The move of naming misothery and tying it directly to misogyny, rather than treating the animal question and the feminist question as unrelated, is part of what makes the next argument land as hard as it does.
What We Do to Animals, We Do to Women
Carol J. Adams picks up more or less where Mason leaves off, with a much closer reading of the language itself. Her 1990 book The Sexual Politics of Meat argues that the linguistic trick which makes eating animals feel normal. A cow disappearing into "beef," the actual living creature erased by the word itself, is the same trick patriarchal culture plays on women's bodies. Reduced to parts, made consumable. Adams calls the erased original "the absent referent" and points out how much vocabulary gets shared between the two: legs, breasts, rack, used more or less interchangeably for carcasses and for women in ordinary English.
Her bigger claim is structural rather than just linguistic: without compulsory pregnancy among human and nonhuman females alike, she argues, both patriarchy and animal agriculture as we know them would collapse. Dairy in particular depends on a female animal's reproductive cycle being controlled generation after generation, which complicates the idea that milk is some kind of incidental, harmless byproduct. It's not an argument every feminist or even every vegan fully signs onto, and some of her literary readings are more evocative than airtight. But the core observation is hard to un-notice once you've noticed it.
Where That Leaves Things
Matthew Scully, a conservative writer, and no one's idea of the typical animal-rights voice, put it as well as anyone in his book Dominion: "How we treat our fellow creatures is only one more way in which each one of us, every day, writes our own epitaph."
None of the historical and textual material above amounts to empirical proof. There's no controlled trial for whether ahimsa is genuinely the buried center of world religion, or whether Mason and Adams are right about the specific mechanism linking animal domestication, patriarchy, and colonialism. Those are interpretive arguments made by serious people out of real texts and real research, and they're worth taking seriously as arguments, but they're historical and anthropological claims, open to revision the way all historical claims are.
Whether it's ethically correct to avoid causing unnecessary suffering to a being that can suffer doesn't depend on any of this. It doesn't depend on whether the Essene Gospel of Peace is first-century or twentieth, on whether gaviṣṭi (the desire to have more cows) is really the oldest word for war, or on whether Mason's account of how misothery produced misogyny holds up against three thousand years of counter-evidence. The ethical argument is much simpler than any of its history, and it stands on its own: animals suffer, causing unnecessary suffering is wrong, and nothing about human dietary preference obviously overrides that. Singer makes that case with almost no history in it at all. So does a child who's never read a word of scripture and still doesn't want to hurt an animal.
What the material above adds isn't proof of the ethics. It's evidence that an enormous number of people, working independently, in incompatible traditions, across at least three thousand years, kept noticing the same thing and building it into their religions, their philosophy, and eventually their neuroscience labs. That's not why the argument is true. It's just a reason the argument keeps refusing to go away.