Compassion Should Extend To All Forms of Life

By Mesha Oh

“Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace.”

(Albert Schweitzer [1875-1965], doctor, missionary, philosopher and musician, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize [1952])

I am a vegetarian, and, what is more, I think I might now be in the process of becoming a vegan. My vegetarianism is something innate in me. I was a vegetarian much before I came across scientific, health, religious and ecological arguments in favour of vegetarianism. My vegetarianism is something that comes from within. It is not the result of having read or heard things in its support. Even if I had not come across various arguments for vegetarianism, I think I would still have been vegetarian. My vegetarianism stems from an innate compassion for animals.

I understand compassion to mean feeling for the other, being able to empathise with them, to suffer when witnessing their suffering. We talk a great deal about compassion, and many of us are indeed compassionate. But often, such compassion is very narrowly circumscribed, being limited to just one life-form among the millions of life-forms that inhabit planet Earth—human beings.

Why is that so?

Compassion for fellow human beings is a great virtue, of course, but why stop there? Why not let our compassion encompass all beings—plants, trees, animals, birds and the like? Many of us talk about love for and service of humanity—and that is a really good thing. But extending our love and service to all beings is, I think, an even better thing.

Some years ago, I was living in a hostel. The hostel manager was a middle-aged woman. She was very particular about attending prayer services and maybe other things like that.

One day, I spotted a kitten wandering around in the hostel. It was really tiny—maybe it was just a few days or weeks old. It might have lost its mother. Although at that time I wasn’t a really great lover of cats (I was for long more of a dog person), my heart melted at the sight of that little child. I decided to keep it with me and tend to it. Not doing so might have meant that it would die very soon.

I cannot clearly remember now, but an incident took place not long after, when the hostel warden mocked my concern for the kitten. I think she seemed to think that a ‘mere animal’ did not deserve such attention from me, and maybe she thought I was being silly. She may have believed that only human beings deserved love and care. Her religiosity or worldview didn’t seem to have much room for life-forms other than humans.

This lady was not alone in thinking this way. This attitude is actually fairly widespread. Even among people who see themselves as deeply committed to justice, peace and well-being for others, there are several whose concern for justice, peace and well-being being is limited only to their fellow human beings. Their compassion stops there. It does not go beyond that.

But what about justice, peace and well-being of the millions upon millions of forms of life other than human beings that the Creator has brought into this world? Shouldn’t our compassion embrace them too?

In many cases, indifference, if not hostility, to non-human life-forms is a result of years of ideological conditioning. For instance, some people are made to believe that only human beings have souls and that, therefore, only they have rights. Some might even be made to believe that God has given human beings the right to rule over all other life forms and do with them as they please—to trap them, to stuff them into cages, to eat them—and yes, even to turn a blind eye to hapless abandoned kitten. Such wrong notions are probably at the root of widespread violations of the rights of myriad non-human life-forms, which often goes completely unnoticed, sometimes even by pious votaries of compassion for human beings.

The idea that the life-force—call it the ‘soul’ or what you will—that inhabits the human body is the same that inhabits all forms of life—including animals, birds, plants and so on—is something that really appeals to me. I don’t know if it is true, but I do wish it is. The idea that the soul inhabits all sentient beings or the idea that all sentient beings have a soul is something that I resonate with. If the soul is present in all living beings (humans as well as others) or if all living beings have a soul, then our compassion, I think, ought to extend to all forms of life, not being confined to just one.