Being an Atheist at the Dinner Table

By: Lauren Hiller

April 9, 2016

As an atheist, I don’t typically go looking for spiritual satisfaction from any faith. Hong Kong, as it turned out, was a perfectly comfortable place for an atheist from the States. It feels inappropriate to divulge my godlessness in most social circles in the United States, and people politely—and carefully—don’t ask. But as I quickly learned from talking to local friends and relatives, it’s as easy to ask for a person’s faith here as it is to reply, “None at all.” While the Western conception of atheism isn’t necessarily the same in Hong Kong and China, where ancestor worship and superstition supersedes any one type of religion, my lack of faith in organized religion is still clearly understood and warmly tolerated in Hong Kong without a single strained look.

As I was finally an out and accepted atheist, I had no intention of searching out faith and the supernatural in Hong Kong. However, faith instead found me at street food stalls and teahouses.

Being vegan, or even vegetarian, in the States seems to be accompanied by a few perceptions of the type of person you are likely to be. You’re likely abstaining from meat as an objection to animal cruelty or to protest the environmental impact the livestock industry has. Or perhaps you’re even like former president Bill Clinton and have chosen to abstain from it for the benefit to your own health. However, I’ve never heard anyone in the United States tell me they’re abstaining from meat for reasons of faith.

In Hong Kong, my veganism takes a new dimension of faith that doesn’t exist in the West. After I mention I don’t eat meat, the first question I get is “Are you Buddhist?” What’s more, consuming vegetarian meals can often be a practice of faith.

I’ve had meals in Buddhist vegetarian restaurants, cramped next to an altar for Guanyin (the Buddhist goddess of mercy and compassion), incense smoldering at her feet and the fragrance fresh fruit offerings wafting over us. Even when I’m not looking at her, I feel the eyes of her statue on us, gauging us sagely and silently passing on her warmth. At the end of meals, my great aunt would scold us for leaving scraps of food on our plates until we had finished everything, or else face the possibility of having to eat all the leftovers in our afterlife.

This is not to say that all vegetarians in Hong Kong are so because of their faith. In fact, a survey done by a vegetarian friend showed that while a significant number of Hong Kongers identify as Buddhist, only a small percentage of them are vegetarian, and of that a majority of them are so for personal health reasons.

But for those who are vegetarian for reasons of faith, typically following the Buddhist prescription, they describe their vegetarianism in terms of morality. Not only is eating meat considered cruel, a notion similar to that often expressed by vegetarians in the United States, but here an animal’s soul is considered worth as much as a human’s. According to Buddhist teachings, souls are reincarnated into new bodies after they die, but depending on how you lead your current life, your soul could be reborn into a animal’s body. As the logic follows, by eating another animal, you’re hurting the soul of another being that’s just like yours.

In spite of my lack of faith and my inability to believe in the supernatural, the approach that Buddhists take in their vegetarianism has enriched my own understanding of what it means to be compassionate. Those that don’t need faith can still serve to deepen their own appreciation for life through the teachings of faith. And in Hong Kong, faith may even come looking for you at your dinner table.

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