“Ultimately the case for shunning animal flesh does not rest on what the Buddha allegedly said or didn't say. What it does rest on is our innate moral goodness, compassion, and pity which, when liberated, lead us to value all forms of life. It is obvious, then, that wilfully to take life, or through the eating of meat indirectly to cause others to kill, runs counter to the deepest instincts of human beings.”
Source: To Cherish All Life (1981), p. 71
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Philip Kapleau 6
American Zen Buddhist monk 1912–2004Related quotes

Mailer's Introduction to the 50th Anniversary Edition (1998)
The Naked and the Dead (1948)
Context: For that is the genius of the old man — Tolstoy teaches us that compassion is of value and enriches our life only when compassion is severe, which is to say when we can perceive everything that is good and bad about a character but are still able to feel that the sum of us as human beings is probably a little more good than awful … That fine edge in Tolstoy, the knowledge that compassion is valueless without severity (for otherwise it cannot defend itself against sentimentality), gave The Naked and the Dead whatever enduring virtue it may possess and catapulted the amateur who wrote it into the grim ranks of those successful literary men and women who are obliged to become professional in order to survive …

Quoted in Will Tuttle, The World Peace Diet, [//books.google.it/books?id=H_clxwd27CgC&pg=PT107 ch. 5]
Buddha Nature http://www.unfetteredmind.org/buddha-nature. Unfettered Mind http://www.unfetteredmind.org. (Topic: Awareness)
Steve Sapontzis, " Article Review of Animal Liberation: A Triangular Affair https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1244&context=ethicsandanimals", Ethics and Animals, Vol. 5, Iss. 4 (1984), p. 120

The crisis in the humanities and in the mainstream of philosophy (1964), reprinted in The Devil in Modern Philosophy (1974)
Context: The way forward does not lie in amateur and comically timeless linguistic sociology which takes ‘forms of life’ for granted (and this is what philosophy has been recently), but in the systematic study of forms of life which does not take them for granted at all. It hardly matters whether such an inquiry is called philosophy or sociology.

“I will never eat animals or dairy for the rest of my life.”
On veganism
Source: https://plantbasednews.org/culture/sport/world-champion-lethwei-fighter-dave-leduc-says-being-vegan-is-a-philosophy-not-a-diet
2nd February, 2021

Source: Evolution (2002), Chapter 17 “A Long Shadow” section II (p. 539)

Source: Mazdaznan Dietetics and Cookery Book (1913), p. 199