Why Do Buddhists Release Animals? (Fangsheng)

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 23 September 2026

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Why do Buddhists release animals? To spare a life that was about to end, and to make merit by doing it — merit usually dedicated to a sick relative, to the dead, or to one’s own future. The practice is fàngshēng in Chinese, hōjō-e in Japanese, tshe thar in Tibetan. It is old, devotional, and now genuinely contested, including by Buddhists.

That dedication is itself a point of difference. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Japanese Pure Land philosophy notes that “in the earlier Buddhism, it was generally assumed that only one’s own thoughts and acts could exert their influence on one’s future conditions, although the evidence of inscriptions suggests that sharing merit with one’s parents or teacher was also recognized”, while a bodhisattva’s merit “is always freely and selflessly given to beings in samsaric existence” — so how far merit reaches is a question the traditions answer differently.

It is not one practice

“Buddhist animal release” names at least four customs that look alike and work differently. It is a devotional custom rather than a universal obligation: strongest in East Asian Mahayana, common in Theravada Southeast Asia. Tim Campbell’s research team made about 440 contacts at nearly 400 American Buddhist temples, campus clubs and study programmes; of the 43 people who replied, twenty-one “were not familiar with the practice”.

The Tibetan row matters most. Almost all the ecological criticism bites on the forms that put a wild-caught animal into an environment; it barely touches tshe thar, which Holly Gayley describes as liberating yaks and other livestock “by paying the purchase price in order to forever spare them from slaughter”. A red thread through the ear marks the animal, which may still be milked or carry loads, and dies of old age at home. Collapsing that into fàngshēng flattens Tibetan and Chinese Buddhism into one thing.

The story behind it is a rescue, not a purchase

The narrative charter is chapter 17 of the Sūtra of the Sublime Golden Light, an Indian Mahayana text: “The Story of the Fish Guided by Jalavāhana”. The head merchant’s son Jalavāhana finds ten thousand fish dying in a wilderness lake, whose feeder river a wicked being has sent over a cliff in order to catch the fish himself. He goes to the king:

He gets them, fills a hundred ox-leather bags at the river, refills the lake, and sends his son home for all the food in the house. Then he wades in up to his knees, recites the name of the buddha Ratnaśikhin over the fish and teaches them dependent origination. Dying at the end of their natural lives they are reborn as gods, and say why: he gave them water, food and the Dharma.

Worth noticing what the charter story does not contain: no market, no purchase, no captive freed. Its merit comes from hauling water, feeding the starving and reciting over them. Later practice added the transaction, and that is where the modern argument sits.

The precept that turned compassion into a duty

What makes release an obligation rather than a kindness is a different text: the Brahma’s Net Sutra (Fanwang jing), whose twentieth minor precept is titled “Failure to Liberate Sentient Beings”. Its argument runs through rebirth across the six realms — “all male sentient beings have been my father, all female sentient beings my mother” — and concludes, in the Young Men’s Buddhist Association of America’s edition: “If a Bodhisattva sees an animal on the verge of being killed, he must devise a way to rescue and protect it… If instead, a disciple fails to do so, he commits a secondary offense.”

Note who is addressed: not monastics, but “a disciple of the Buddha” and “a Bodhisattva”. BDK America, which publishes the scholarly translation by A. Charles Muller and Kenneth K. Tanaka, describes the text as intended for bodhisattva practitioners, “primarily householders, rather than renunciant monks or nuns”. That is one reason release became overwhelmingly a lay practice in East Asia, organised by temples but paid for by householders. The Pali Vinaya knows no such ceremony at all.

And here is the distinction devotional sources skip. BDK states that the text is “now seen within modern scholarship as composed in China around 420”, and that the old attribution of its translation to Kumārajīva is not accepted; the YMBA edition’s own notes say the reverse. The consensus is the first, so the duty is an East Asian inheritance specifically. Theravada has no equivalent rule, and Tibetan Buddhists take their bodhisattva vows from another lineage — which, as the Larung campaigns below show, is not the same as having no call to liberate lives.

Nor does the precept explain everything, because Theravada Southeast Asia makes merit releases too, and the Brahma’s Net Sutra has no standing there. What travels is not the precept but the merit: the duty is Mahayana, the merit-making shared.

What the earliest canon says instead

The Pali Vinaya does discuss freeing trapped animals, and its treatment could hardly be less ritual. It sits inside the analysis of theft:

The same pair repeats for a deer in a snare and fish in a net. The act is identical; the motive decides everything. No ceremony, no merit accounting — and no purchase, because the trapped animal belongs to somebody, which is the legal problem.

Where the canon supplies the merit logic, it attaches it to abstention rather than rescue. AN 8.39 lists five “great gifts”, of which the first is simply not killing:

The gift of fearlessness is canonical, and it is given by keeping the first precept; the ceremony is a later East Asian development.

How a parable became state policy

Release ponds (fàngshēng chí) are waters set aside for the practice — some dug for the purpose, some adapted from natural lakes — inside which fishing was banned. Haoran Zhang and Lu Guo trace them from the Southern and Northern Dynasties (420–589) to their peak under the Song. In 759 the Tang emperor Suzong mandated 81 across the empire; Zhenzong in 1017 ordered lapsed ponds in four circuits restored and fishing banned five li up- and downstream of prefectural cities on the Huai and the Yangtze; Renzong in 1024 ordered prefectures without a pond to dig one. West Lake in Hangzhou was one of the release waters.

What made it a household practice came later. Dharma Drum Mountain names Master Lianchi (1535–1615) of the late Ming as the monk “most active” in promoting release, and credits him with two manuals written “to serve as the basis for fangsheng rituals” — the point where release stops being something emperors decree and becomes something families do.

The cost that fell on fishermen

A fishing ban is also a livelihood ban, and the devotional literature leaves that out. In 1178 the Prefect of Nankang asked to convert leased fish ponds into release ponds; Emperor Xiaozong refused, because “the people along the river rely on fishing for their livelihood. If it is now prohibited, it may harm the common folk.” Gaozong had scaled back a nationwide mandate in 1143 for the same reason. Compassion for animals weighed against the survival of poor families is not an objection invented by conservationists; it is more than eight centuries old, and it belongs in Buddhist ethics and in right livelihood.

Japan and Tibet went their own ways

Japan’s hōjō-e runs on two tracks. At Iwashimizu Hachimangū it is a shrine festival, dated by the shrine to 863, when live fish and birds were released by the Hōjō River with prayers for the peace and happiness of all living things; it became an imperial festival in 948. At Kōfuku-ji in Nara it is a Buddhist temple ceremony, where a memorial service is followed by monks chanting the sutra at Sarusawa-ike Pond while native minnows and striped goby are released — both surviving traces of the fusion described on Buddhism in Japan.

Tibetan tshe thar was revived in the 1990s and 2000s as a mass reform campaign by clerics of Larung Buddhist Academy. Khenpo Jigme Phuntsok’s appeal, circulated on VCD under the plea “Please liberate and ransom lives”, argued against selling livestock for slaughter, likening the mechanised slaughterhouses of Lanzhou and Chengdu to torture chambers. As Gayley shows, it was bound up with cultural preservation as much as with compassion.

The modern critique, and the evidence behind it

That buying animals in order to free them can fund the next capture is the summary Buddhism and animals already gives. Here is the evidence underneath it.

• Supply, scale and mortality. Dharma Drum Mountain concedes that released fish “could be caught or netted again”. Hong Kong’s Legislative Council Secretariat describes a “highly commercialized animal release trade” inflicting suffering on “hundreds of millions of wild animals” caught to be released every year, and puts mortality at up to 90 per cent within a day, from the injuries of capture and from wrong habitats — “dumping freshwater species at sea” is its example. Its verdict: release “is arguably not as merciful as publicized and perceived by the participants”.
• Disease. The best-evidenced harm comes from a Theravada country. A Cambodian study of Eurasian tree sparrows, the classic merit-release bird, “kissed and released during Buddhist rituals”, found them highly susceptible to H5N1: up to 100 per cent of the chickens exposed to them died, and infectious virus sat on the birds’ feathers.
• Invasion. Non-native lobsters (Homarus americanus) and Dungeness crabs were released off the Sussex coast during a Buddhist ceremony. Cefas, naming both species, warned in a notice published in June 2015 that once captured the animals “cannot be released back into the sea”; the Marine Management Organisation, writing in December 2017 about a prosecution brought “earlier in the year”, says the release “was contrary to the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981” and “resulted in those involved receiving penalties of £28,000”. Neither source dates the release itself.

The problem is structural: the IUCN/SSC guidelines define a conservation translocation as one whose primary objective is conservation benefit, and a merit release has a different primary objective — see Buddhism and the environment.

What the law now says

• Taiwan, which the Hong Kong brief studies as its model case, lets no animal, wild or domestic, be released without permission, and religious release is expressly covered. A permit must be applied for 15 days ahead, with officials and experts assessing species and site. The maximum fine is NT$250,000 for a normal offence and NT$2.5 million for a severe one — meaning, in the brief’s words, a release that “resulted in damage to the ecosystem”. A proposal to unify both levels at NT$500,000–2,500,000 is reportedly being prepared; it is not law.
• Mainland China’s Wildlife Protection Law (art. 41) requires a locally suitable species and no harm to the ecosystem; art. 59 fines releasing wildlife brought in from outside the mainland 10,000–100,000 RMB and orders recapture at the releaser’s cost.
• Hong Kong does not prohibit release but does not encourage it, and has said since 2022 that it means to make releasing an animal into an unsuitable environment an act of cruelty; by its February 2025 answer to the Legislative Council the bill was still not introduced.
• The United States has no religious exemption: “the release of nonnative species into the environment without a permit is illegal throughout the United States”, as Campbell’s team puts it. They interviewed eleven American practitioners; without being asked, six said they knew releasing animals was illegal, and one of those said their group had checked with wildlife professionals and obtained a permit before releasing into a river.

The objection from the other side deserves reporting rather than dismissal. In Hong Kong’s 2019 consultation, 86 per cent of respondents backed treating improper release as cruelty; 3 per cent objected that release is essential to certain religions and protected under the Bill of Rights. An attempt to tighten Taiwan’s Wildlife Conservation Act in 2016 failed partly on religious opposition.

What Buddhists say back — and what they changed

The most interesting responses come from inside the practice, and none of them is “stop”.

Dharma Drum Mountain, a Taiwanese Chan organisation, grounds release in the Brahma’s Net reasoning that all beings have been our parents, and states the payoff plainly: if one stops killing and goes further and frees captive animals, “naturally, one’s charitable deeds, as well as their good retributions, will be manifold”. It warns in the same breath that commercially bred animals “lack the skills to survive in the wild”, and urges “research, deliberation and stewardship” — but it does not conclude that the practice should stop. To the charge that a failed release cannot be meritorious, its answer is that the merit was never in the outcome: “The goal is to inspire and increase our compassion and to relieve the suffering of all beings”, and “if we cannot do this with 100% certainty, 50% is still not bad”. What it never addresses is whether buying the animal funds the next capture.

Taiwan’s regulator and its religious groups built an alternative together. Hong Kong’s Legislative Council Secretariat, reviewing that model, reports that between 2011 and 2019 more than 1,700 applications were approved to release over 100 million native sea fish, more than half of which reportedly survived longer term.

In New York, as Audubon reported in its January–February 2014 issue, Venerable Benkong Shi of the Grace Gratitude Buddhist Temple in Manhattan’s Chinatown had organised “compassionate release” since 2008 — about a dozen turtle ceremonies by then, with the rehabilitators Patricia Johnson and Lorri Cramer, and latterly birds with the Wild Bird Fund, directed by Rita McMahon. Certified rehabilitators release animals that were going free anyway, while the Buddhists give the blessing. Nothing is bought and nothing trapped, and on the tradition’s own logic the merit stands.

So should you do it?

Two questions hide inside that one, and the evidence above answers them differently. Buying a captive animal in order to free it: no — that is the form Buddhist organisations themselves warn about, the form Taiwan licenses and Hong Kong proposes to treat as cruelty. Blessing a release that was going to happen anyway, as Benkong Shi’s temple did with certified rehabilitators, adds no capture to the world and takes nothing from the practice’s own logic.

That is roughly where the practitioners went. Campbell’s interviewees said they would rather not practise life release at all than cause environmental harm; one stopped, and most “continued to research options until they found an animal or way to practice that they believed had little impact on the environment”. Three of the eleven suggested promoting vegetarianism instead and three named financial support for animal sanctuaries and no-kill shelters, and all of them gave at least some support to the alternatives put to them, including working with wildlife rehabilitation centres. Hong Kong’s government points people to tree planting, donations to rescue organisations, habitat protection and volunteering.

Which leaves a disagreement the traditions have not settled, and this page will not settle for them. On the Pali reading, the great gift of freedom from fear is given by not killing at all, and no ceremony adds to it. On the East Asian reading, abstention is passive and rescue is the active form of the same precept, which is why the Brahma’s Net Sutra makes it a duty. Someone who holds one is not a lax version of someone who holds the other. What follows from either is weighed in karma, are Buddhists vegetarian?, Buddhism and animals and can Buddhists kill insects?