On a dusty street in Lhasa during the early nineteenth century, a wandering yogi stopped in his tracks. He was walking the circumambulation path around the sacred Jokhang temple, a place where pilgrims normally sought peace and spiritual elevation. Instead, he encountered a scene of raw, bloody violence. Butchers were slaughtering sheep and goats directly along the holy route, their cries filling the air while blood stained the earth. The young monk did not view this as a minor disturbance. To him, the sight represented a profound spiritual crisis that would rewrite the course of his life and send ripples through the history of Tibetan Buddhism.
This yogi was Shabkar Tsokdruk Rangdröl, a meditation master and singer who lived from 1781 to 1851. Born in the rugged Amdo province of northeastern Tibet, Shabkar was ordained as a monk by the prominent Geluk teacher Arik Geshé at the age of twenty. He went on to study under the Nyingma master Chögyel Ngakyi Wangpo and eventually mastered the tantric practices of both the Nyingma and Kagyü traditions. Such a feat was incredibly rare for a single practitioner. Throughout his life, he championed an impartial, or ris med, attitude toward different sectarian affiliations, viewing all paths with deep respect. He spent nearly two decades as an itinerant yogi, sleeping in mountain caves, meditating, and composing spiritual songs.
Yet, his most passionate legacy remains his uncompromising defense of animals, sparked by that fateful day in Lhasa. At the age of thirty, facing the butchered animals on the temple route, Shabkar wept. In the Buddhist tradition, practitioners believe that through countless cycles of rebirth, every living being has at some point been our mother or father. To eat meat was to consume the flesh of one’s own family. Deeply shaken, Shabkar stood before the famous Jowo statue, the most sacred image of the Buddha in Tibet, and made a solemn promise. He vowed that he would never again eat the sinful food that is the flesh of his parents.
With that single vow, Shabkar embarked on a lifelong mission to transform how his society viewed meat. At the time, the high altitude and harsh climate of the Tibetan plateau made vegetarianism a rare and difficult path, and many monastics relied heavily on meat. Shabkar sought to change this, bypassing dry academic debates in favor of emotional, raw, and highly poetic appeals. He joined a growing movement of contemporary scholar-monks, including Jigmé Lingpa, Patrül Rinpoché, and Nyala Pema Dündul, who were shifting Buddhist discourse away from scholastic language and toward emotional, affective rhetoric.
Shabkar wrote in a style that forced his readers to feel the pain of the animals. In his songs, he described the terrifying reality of the slaughterhouse, where goats and yaks had their mouths tightly bound to suffocate them before they were disemboweled and beheaded. He refused to shield his audience from the horror, wanting them to feel the weight of their choices. He even lamented seeing temple storerooms where slaughterers hung carcasses like holy paintings, displaying offerings of lungs, hearts, and entrails. His tears flowed for the suffering of the animals, and they flowed equally for the meat-eaters, whose negative karma would drag them into the fiery depths of hell.
His arguments were deeply grounded in Buddhist psychology. He maintained that craving meat was the single greatest barrier to developing genuine compassion. Without compassion, one could never cultivate bodhicitta, the selfless desire to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings. To Shabkar, a diet built on slaughter was a dead end on the spiritual path, blocking the doors to positive action and hindering the teachings of the Buddha.
While his ideals were absolute, Shabkar was also a realist who understood human weakness. For the general public, he offered a graded approach. If a layperson could not give up meat entirely, Shabkar urged them to adopt the rule of the threefold purity, consuming meat only if they had not seen, heard, or suspected the animal was killed specifically for them. He advised them to recite powerful purification mantras, blow on the meat to bless the deceased animal, and pray for its future rebirth in a joyful realm. He encouraged people to subsist instead on the three whites and three sweets, which refers to vegetarian staples like milk, yogurt, butter, honey, sugar, and molasses.
Though he was gentle with laypeople, he held his fellow monastics to a much higher standard. On a visit to the great Drepung Monastery, which housed some seven thousand monks, Shabkar was horrified to see monastics purchasing large piles of meat within the sacred grounds. He immediately burst into song, fiercely criticizing their behavior. He pointed out the hypocrisy of monks who wore robes of peace while fueling a market of death. In his eyes, if there were no eaters, there would be no killers.
Shabkar did not stop at personal appeals. In a remarkably modern move, he lobbied Tibetan political and religious leaders, including the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama, to enact systemic change. He pointed out that Lhasa already had laws prohibiting the hunting of wild animals in the hills. He begged the authorities to expand these laws, calling for a total ban on the slaughter of domestic animals by butchers and the consumption of meat by monks. He wanted the protection of animals to be woven directly into the legal fabric of the land, shifting vegetarianism from an individual moral choice to an externally supported restriction.
Shabkar passed away in 1851, leaving behind fourteen volumes of writings and songs that continue to inspire. His life was a testament to the idea that true spiritual mastery cannot be separated from active, everyday compassion. For Shabkar, every tear shed for a slaughtered sheep was a step closer to the heart of the Buddha. He showed his world that a diet of compassion was a profound act of love rather than a simple dietary choice, demonstrating that the truest songs of realization are those sung on behalf of the voiceless.
Bibliographic Information
- Title: The Faults of Meat
- Subtitle: Tibetan Buddhist Writings on Vegetarianism
- Editor/Compiler: Geoffrey Barstow
- Translators: Geoffrey Barstow, Catherine Hardie, Jörg Heimbel, Anna Wolcott Johnson, Rachel H. Pang, Adam Pearcey, Michael Sheehy, Sangseraima Ujeed
- Publisher: Wisdom Publications
- Publication Year: 2019
- Edition: First Edition
- ISBN: 978-1-61429-481-8 (paperback), 978-1-61429-505-1 (ebook)
- Historical Period Covered: 11th century to the 21st century (with canonical roots tracing back to early first-millennium India)
- Main Subject Areas: Tibetan Buddhism, Bön Religion, Animal Ethics, Buddhist Vegetarianism, Three Vows Theory (sdom gsum), Monastic Vinaya, Tantric Hermeneutics, Tibetan History, Eastern Tibetan (Kham) History, Contemplative Philosophy.
(Chapter 8)