I’ve been a vegetarian for over 30 years now, ever since I visited a slaughterhouse as part of my veterinary studies and saw an animal being slaughtered. I didn’t consciously decide to become vegetarian. It was as if the decision was made for me, deep down, and I just had to go along with it. And in 30 years I’ve never once been tempted to lapse.

And I’ve tried being vegan several times, sometimes lasting for a few years. It’s a natural and logical extension of vegetarianism. Really, there isn’t a lot of different between eating eggs and eating a chicken. In both cases a chicken dies, but in one case the chicken …

The Buddha ate meat. This is a fairly well attested fact. The issue of vegetarianism is addressed a few times in the Suttas, notably the Jivaka Sutta of the Majjhima Nikaya. The Buddha consistently affirmed that monastics were permitted to eat meat, as long as it was not killed intentionally for them. There are numerous passages in the Vinaya that refer to the Buddha or the monastics eating meat, and meat is regularly mentioned as one of the standard foods.
For these reasons, the standard position in Theravada Buddhism is that there is no ethical problem with eating meat. If you want to be vegetarian, that is a purely optional choice. Most Theravadins, whether lay …

The UK’s Daily Mail has a collection of photographs of this meditating lemur, taken by Belgian-born amateur photographer Sebastian Degardin, who lives in Finchley, north London.

The photographs were taken on a forest path in a nature park in Mons, Belgium.

Check out the rest of the pics here.

New Scientist magazine relates that scientists have trained marmoset monkeys to meditate. The study was designed to investigate whether the placebo effect is involved in neurofeedback training, where the electrical activity of the brains of epilepsy sufferers is recorded and displayed back to them, in order to encourage them to generate “helpful brainwaves.”

Since monkeys aren’t aware of the potential helpful effects of being hooked up to a neurofeedback display, they’re not susceptible to the placebo effect, where the expectation of improvement brings improvement about.

The researchers, at the Biomedical Primate Research Centre in Rijswijk in the Netherlands,

attached electrodes to the brains of marmoset monkeys to pick up electroencephalogram (EEG) signals from

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