But that was eaten afterwards, so it’s not like it was excess.
Meat consumption tends to rise as we get richer. One of the strongest determinants of how much meat people eat is how rich they are. This is at least true when we make cross-country comparisons. […]
As a global average, per capita meat consumption has increased approximately 20 kilograms since 1961; the average person consumed around 43 kilograms of meat in 2014 . This increase in per capita meat trends means total meat production has been growing at a much faster than the rate of population growth.
The direction and rate of change across countries has highly variable. Growth in per capita meat consumption has been most marked in countries who have underwent a strong economic transition – per capita consumption in China has grown approximately 15-fold since 1961; rates in Brazil have nearly quadrupled.
As I said before, these are not small numbers. The world’s per capita consumption basically doubled in half a century. And that’s because of industrialization only. The world is not big enough to grow enough animals the traditional way.
Of course, these data don’t go back to India in the Buddha’s time. So we could suppose India in the Buddha’s time was some sort of exception to the general patterns we see. Perhaps it was exceptionally well suited to growing animals? Doesn’t seem so to me, though. It was more a crop growing kind of environment with all the rice fields and all.
So I don’t suppose India at that time came close to the amount of per capita meat many people eat now.
Technically you can say I don’t eat vegetables. But only if it’s not with the intention to get meat as an alternative, because then it’s looking for specific foods, which is not allowable. So in your example actually it would be a problem.
If he really doesn’t like vegetables, or is allergic to them or whatever, and doesn’t mind if he gets nothing extra as alternative, then I suppose it’s not a problem.
But as I said, generally it isn’t a problem because people ask. Or, otherwise you don’t have the possibility to let them know anyway! When you go on alms round for example.
Yeah sure. That’s my point. Consumption of meat per capita may be very different from amount of meat eaten per capita. Wastage in the supply chain and in meat eaters fridges is incredibly high. Dealing with that is something everyone (apart from the meat producers) could get on board with I imagine.
I don’t know if the figures are correct (the site obviously has an agenda, but I’ve seen other stats on wastage that also make my toes curl). So the headline from the article that I linked to:
Around 380,000 tonnes of meat is discarded each year in the UK, the equivalent of over 1 million cattle, 4.4 million pigs or an incredible 165 million chickens.
Hey stu,
Wastage is another big problem. But it’s part of the modern system too, including government subsidies. Farmers often still get paid for what they can’t sell to the market. That’s another thing that wouldn’t have happened in the Buddha’s time. But the main point I’m making, perhaps too many times, is, farmers can now produce and waste so much in the first place because of industrialization. It wouldn’t be possible even a hundred years ago. I would be very surprised if in the Buddha’s India they’d have an excess of livestock running around and then decided to kill 'em all and throw them away. Although nothing is impossible, perhaps.
Yes, and meat with fine rice is considered the best of foods (aggaṃ bhojanānaṃ). The Buddha’s contemporaries seemed to have few qualms about eating animals, and that includes Brahmins, possibly Ājīvikas, and, according to a growing scholarly consensus, the early followers of Mahāvīra.
As I read them, the EBTs present vegetarianism as a fringe ascetic practice, unheard of among the laity. Indian society does change!
After some hesitation I would like to address a little some of the off-topic discussion of industrial meat production.
Firstly I would like to reiterate that the question about the likely diet of ancient India as evidenced in the EBT’s and other legitimate sources is NOT directly related to the broader question of the ethics of contemporary meat production and consumption, it is NOT the case that those who believe on the balance of evidence that followers in the EBTs where most likely omnivores do so because they wish to justify contemporary practices. I suspect that the same cannot be said for the OP.
However I would like to make a few points about the tacit and sometimes explicit arguments I hear for veganism and vegetarianism as a response to contemporary modes of production.
The idea often implied or presented, that there is a moral responsibility for an individual to refrain from meat because their consumption makes them responsible for the production is in my opinion deeply problematic for several reasons.
It shifts the responsibility from the very rich and powerful owners of the productive capital onto the very poor and powerless consumers. The idea that if I eat a sausage at a bbq then I am responsible for Don Meats abattoir is directing moral outrage at the wrong end of the stick.
It creates a situation where very privileged people who benefit enormously from industrial capitalism can morally absolve themselves from responsibility by becoming vegans while many many people who are much too poor to exert that amount of control over their diet get labeled as Immoral just for doing what they can to eat.
It takes one part of industrial capitalism and makes of it a scapegoat that obscures many of the other harms to living beings that different aspects of production produce. If the rice you are eating is sourced from fields that where clear felled and destroyed whole species are you really doing anything more morally upright than the meat eater?
And this is sort of related to several of the above points, but if you make your morality contingent on knowledge of other peoples actions you can never really know what’s right or wrong. If the screws I buy to make my bookshelf are made from ore that comes from a mine where workers are allowed to die from silicosis, and so on with every choice of consumption, then I need to have practically infinite knowledge of every product and service to determine if it is more or less morally reprehensible and I simply don’t have the time.
Shifting responsibility away from capital and governments and onto individual consumers is the morality of the capitalist class. It renders people almost completely powerless by replacing collective political action with individual consumption choices that have almost NO EFFECT on production as guess what, that chicken you didn’t buy from the fridge will just get sold to the next person, or just thrown in a bin. The weird monstrous deontological utilitarian hybrid of “if you do it and then everyone does it then the system will change “ only works if everyone does it, in the meantime meat producers are happily funding seaweed based alternatives and plastic producers are happily funding recycling projects because they know that if they can diverts the minority with moral qualms into ineffectual individual actions they can continue to profit of the majority who don’t.
All this is to say that I agree that industrial agriculture and capitalism more broadly wreaks terrible harms on living beings (including human beings) but as for someone making the personal choice to be vegetarian being somehow an effective response to that issue we’ll I have a LOT of doubts.
Apparently, this kind of dilemma has been arisen even in Pipphali manvaka (lay name of Venerable Mahakassapa) and seems like natural.
Bhante,
I guess, There might have been some meritorious monks who could attain magga-phalas, only if they were given the opportunity to eat Panita Bhojanas like meat.
I hadn’t really thought about this before, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it were the case.
In the Visuddhimagga, both the guarding of the nimitta in samatha-bhāvanā and the sharpening of the five faculties in vipassanā-bhāvanā have “suitable food” as one of their seven prerequisites. And what constitutes suitable food is said to vary from one person to another.
To bring this closer to the EBTs, since it is seen, heard and suspected that the meat industry kills living beings for consumers – to be bought, packed in plastic, at stores and supermarkets – couldn’t it well be blamable for consumers to buy animal products?
When choosing between chickpeas and chicken at the store, the first choice is a clear win in terms of harm reduction for animals, human health and the environment.
To get around this obvious point, you seem to adopt a philosophy that denies the efficacy of individual action. On the other hand, the morality found in the EBTs is clearly one where the onus is on intention and individual action.
If someone, out of concern and compassion for the well-being of animals who endure the most cruel conditions imaginable, chooses to abstain from animal products thinking “I don’t want to give my money to an industry that causes unimaginable suffering. I don’t want to support those who profit of the commodification of living beings” – surely this should be celebrated?
I don’t think you really address any of the points I made.
I also don’t think your interpretation of the ENT’s is correct.
I also happen to thin that industrial agriculture is profoundly problematic and needs to change, I just don’t think that the “individual actions” of the privileged are going to get it done, and I think that, as I mentioned in my post, a lot of the people who absolve themselves from their complicity in capitalism by personal choices like vegetarianism are actually just as drenched in the blood of the innocent as the rest of us, and often, again for reasons I outline, moreso.
Although any consumers may or may not have the chance or possibilty of buying any part of it but the precept only hold us responsible if it is specifically meant for us individually .
Vegans don’t think they are absolved from complicity in capitalism. They generally think something like “oof, it’s messed up how animals are treated and that we kill them when we could reduce so much suffering by eating plant foods” and then the align their actions with this ethical insight where possible.
Many people dislike vegetarianism and veganism because it makes them feel inferior. But the simple fact is, those who give up significant sense-pleasures like meat and cheese simply because they view harming living beings as bad, are making a morally superior choice.
Edit: To clarify, I am talking about ordinary people here.
Edit2: When I am saying morally superior, I don’t mean it’s the most superior choice possible. Rather, within consumer capitalism, it is relatively more moral to consistently buy plant products than animal products.
Why not delight in the ethical behavior of others? It’s much better to be honest and say “I’m not able to give up meat and cheese right now, but I probably should one day” IMO
Say there was a slaughter house called “Meat for Monks”. They didn’t kill animals for any individual monastic. Instead, they kill animals for the sangha of monks and nuns in general.
Do you think it would be acceptable for monastics to accept that meat?
Why not? As long as the meat is blameless, there is no different between a vegetable and any blameless meat.
Both are use to support the holy life.
As Buddha said:
“And how does a bhikkhu observe moderation in eating? Here, reflecting carefully, a bhikkhu consumes food neither for amusement nor for intoxication nor for the sake of physical beauty and attractiveness, but only for the support and maintenance of this body, for avoiding harm, and for assisting the holy life, considering: ‘Thus I shall terminate the old feeling and not arouse a new feeling, and I shall be healthy and blameless and dwell at ease.’ It is in this way that a bhikkhu observes moderation in eating.
Also as Buddha explained in MN 36 and can be proven by everyone that eating different type of food doesn’t make one to become holy /purified.
… I thought: ‘Suppose I take very little food, a handful each time, whether of bean soup or lentil soup or vetch soup or pea soup.’ So I took very little food, a handful each time, whether of bean soup or lentil soup or vetch soup or pea soup. While I did so, my body reached a state of extreme emaciation.
…
But by this racking practice of austerities I have not attained any superhuman states, any distinction in knowledge and vision worthy of the noble ones.
Hence the purification can only be done by practicing N8FP, not by choosing type of food to eat.
For the record, I don’t think it’s obvious what the implications are of doing something with an abstraction in mind (e.g., consumers, the sangha, etc.) vs. a specific individual.
Though there is the sutta where the Buddha gets a personal gift but says there is more merit in giving to the entire sangha (can’t remember which sutta).
On one hand, you could argue that the causal closeness of the act is what matters. Hence, it is worse to kill, slightly less worse to pay someone else to kill, not so bad to buy meat in the store.
On the other hand, you could argue that the ‘field of merit’ also matters. Maybe the animal agriculture business is a field of demerit and supporting it with money is bad kamma? It is a business dedicated to killing, an industry that brutalizes both animals and the workers whose job it is to kill 9-4, five days a week.
There is in fact something rather like this in real life, namely, occasions of mass gatherings of monks. In Thailand the commonest sorts would be when a living forest ajahn is celebrating his birthday, or a dead forest ajahn is being cremated, or when an outfit like Wat Dharmakaya is holding one of its extravagant jamborees.
Now there are some monks (I’m one of them) who always decline invitations to attend such mass gatherings. Then there are others who will attend but abstain from meat while they’re there, even if they don’t usually practise vegetarianism. Our reason, of course, is that we know it’s inevitable that large numbers of animals are going to be killed just to feed the hundreds or thousands of monks who are expected to show up, and so we believe that any meat offered is unlikely to be “pure in three respects”.
Nevertheless, it seems that ours is a minority opinion. The commoner view would be more like: “Even though the animals are being killed to offer to the assembled monks, they’re not being killed for me in particular, and therefore their meat fulfills the threefold purity criteria.”
And so I suppose that for monks of this persuasion, a “Meat for Monks” abattoir would be unproblematic. Or at least it would be logically inconsistent of them to have a problem with it and yet be quite happy to show up for a forest ajahn’s cremation or a Wat Dharmakaya jamboree.
I dont think this hypothetical scenario apply . Normally slaughterhouse kill animals not really targetting any particular monk or nun or individual . The main theme of Buddha’s teachings are to end each individual suffering stopping the process of cycle of birth and death . It doesnt really (should i say) designed to end all suffering in the world , of course it does sounds unfortunately .
Ah great, now we are starting to accumulate some evidence!
Well I just brought that up because the presence of parallels is perhaps the strongest evidence we have of a text being an EBT. I know we have certain other signs that can help us establish what is not an EBT, like, if it has no parallels and uses some later language, or mentions a city or King from a later period and so on. But regarding this text, apart from the lack of parallels, I don’t know if we have any other indicators as to whether it’s an EBT or not. So any input on that for this specific text would be interesting.
Actually it would be awesome if there were a comprehensive list of what texts are and aren’t EBTs. Even a colour coded ‘map’ of the suttapitaka (and vinayapitaka!) with chunks shaded in different colours, that would be awesome. Like we could have green for EBT, red for non-EBT, and blue for ‘unconfirmed’, for example. I am not aware of any such list - do we have any?
It would even be cool to have tags at the top of each sutta on this site. Currently my only way of getting some idea is to check if it has any parallels, although even with that, I on occasion (as you can see above) click on the parallels and checking which portion of the sutta the parallel covers, which generally means running it through google translation (if I can’t find a translation in my library) which is at least enough to tell roughly which sections are included in the parallel.
But yeah basically when you say “I don’t know how you could come to that conclusion.”, just remember that my ‘conclusion’ was in fact a question, so my only conclusion was that I had no evidence that it was an EBT, so I remained unsure if it was an EBT.
Yeah I am also relatively unfamiliar with the vinaya. But your example is interesting. The monk received a sandalwood bowl and the result was that receiving sandalwood bowls was banned. But if what you say is correct, that the monks themselves made sandalwood ointment, then the Buddha receiving the sandalwood would make more sense to me.
Ok cool. That furniture, I assume that is a modern practice, rather than something from the suttas? Although even if it is, yeah that would imply if they are monks who follow the vinaya, then the vinaya presumably allows receiving such items…
Well it didn’t qualify for offering meat to the Sangha because they didn’t eat meat. Though yeah my list was also meant to be for lay people eating meat themselves, so if this family were Buddhist, that would qualify. But I have not seen any evidence that they were Buddhist. I’m not sure it’s really a ‘flimsy criterion’ to only include people as being Buddhist, if there is evidence they were Buddhist. They could be on a ‘possibly’ list but not on a ‘definitely’ list without evidence. Isn’t that how the evidence-based method works?
Ok thanks. I don’t actually know what the difference is between a wiki post and a regular post. If I have time I’ll try to look into it after going through all the new comments.
Really, better sources than the suttapitaka and vinayapitaka? I can only think of 2 possibilities that would be in the same ballpark, and that would be
Oral sources from the time of the Buddha from other sources, such as Jain of Brahmanical sources. I am not aware of any evidence in those on what Buddhists ate, but I would certainly be interested if anyone knows of any!
Archaeological evidence. But this excludes inscriptions, since inscriptions only started at a later time, and I cannot imagine any archaeological evidence even possible regarding what food Buddhist lay people offered, and for what they ate, well you’d have to establish that the remains of a house was a Buddhist house with only Buddhists living in it and that the identifiable food remains were left there from within that 45 year period the Buddha was alive and teaching, and narrower still, the period of time the Buddhist inhabitants were living there. That’s a lot to ask of archeology, and I think way beyond its limits, especially since they cannot go by inscriptions in that oral period.
If you look carefully, so far as I remember there was only one person I said bandit wasn’t Buddhist. I never said that if the text doesn’t report that they declared refuge, we therefore know they weren’t Buddhist! For me it’s simple. We have many lay people whom we know to be lay Buddhists, either because we see them take refuge, or because they are referred to as lay disciples, something we seem to see often. Or, they are specified of being of another religion. Or, they are unspecified. And what I have said is that if they are unspecified and we have nothing to clearly indicate they are Buddhist, then I say we don’t know. I do think this is a sound method.
Thanks for the details! I’m not sure if I’m following - perhaps you can help me out? So this is referring to:
“fine khādanīya and bhojanīya .”
Which translates:
“paṇītena khādanīyena bhojanīyena”
Out of interest, in that context, can we be sure that this adjective is qualifying both nouns, not just the first, or even for example, if the meal included fine staple or non-staple but not both, would it still be languaged in that way? I would guess maybe yes, but I am very ignorant of Pāli.
The Vibhaṅga defines finer staple foods as any of the nine foods mentioned in the rule, either on their own or mixed with other foods. Thus milk and milk-mixed-with-cereal would both be finer staple foods.
And yes some of them can be used as tonics but that doesn’t mean they are not bhojanīya, right? That presumably depends on their usage, no? Tis source is explicitly saying milk mixed with cereal = finer bhojaniya.
And this seems to be the actual vinaya quote?
There are these finer staple foods: ghee, fresh butter, oil, honey, sugar/molasses, fish, meat, milk, and curds.
Also the texts themselves seem to be confused as to whether to define these as bhojaniya or khādaniya:
For example:
Milk and curds are classed as “finer staple foods” under Pc 39, but in other contexts they fit under the definition of non-staple food. All other dairy products—except for fresh butter and ghee when used as tonics (see NP 23)—are non-staple foods.
So this seems to be saying that for example, rice with curd would be finer bhojaniya, and spinach with either ghee or paneer added, would be finer khādaniya. Isn’t that the case?
So we could suppose India in the Buddha’s time was some sort of exception to the general patterns we see. Perhaps it was exceptionally well suited to growing animals? Doesn’t seem so to me, though. It was more a crop growing kind of environment with all the rice fields and all.