Thanks! That’s a clear example, I’ll add it to the list. Do we know if this episode is in the parallels?
Yeah it seems completely unrealistic. Still, if it is in the parallels, that would indicate presumably that at least it was being taught around… 70 years after the Buddha died is it? Maybe it was just a trend of Vinaya authors trying to fill out all the case law and making it up where they couldn’t find a reason from a real situation that arose? In this case the story behind the rule for monks having to ask what kind of meat it is if they are not already sure what kind.
Maybe, but I could offer an alternative hypothesis. It could have been that animals were only murdered for eating that day. So maybe a house would murder a chicken and cook the whole thing that day. Or for a pig or goat, maybe take what they want for the day and sell the rest to a meat seller. And suppose this were late in the evening, maybe the sellers were sold out. But perhaps when they’d sold all they had, they’d go home, and maybe this was after this time. Still seems unlikely since she was expecting them to have some (she sent her servant to go buy some).
[Edit: Just seen @Dhammanando’s explanation of it being a special ‘no slaughter’ day. I see that in the text now. Though what remains suspicious to me is that she was unaware it was such a day, and of course that she cut flesh from her own leg. Both of these I find unlikely, and I would er on considering this as a fictional story, perhaps composed to fill the need to explain that rule.]
Still, regarding your point, even in India today the meat consumption is nothing like in places like the US. Though, few places are. But yeah in Asian countries (that I have been to at least), the meat consumption seems way less than even Europe.
To be fair, it was exactly what I was asking for. A lay Buddhist offering meat to a member of the Sangha.
I also think it’s about the basic Sramana ethic of ‘beggars can’t be choosers’. Murdering animals to eat, or encouraging others to do so, if one ethical problem. But being a choosy beggar is another problem. I assume that the forbidden meats (human, elephant etc.) were a taboo shared with the Brahmins. So rejecting them was I expect pan-cultural. But if you go to beg off a random family, maybe Brahminical or of some Sramana religion, and they are offering you meat they accept in their culture, and it’s just a few spoons of it (they’d go to several houses before having acquired their full meal, right), then you are not causing an increase in murder. They will murdering extra animals because of you, it’s just from their already prepared food. Whereas rejecting it could give a bad image for the Sangha, cause complaints and so on, which could be very serious - the whole future of Buddhism depended on the Sangha having a good reputation, hence so many rules relating to reputation (not washing out left over food in streams, etc.) A bad reputation could lead to insufficient income which means death by starvation.
Cool, thanks! I see you give
- Sīha
- Ugga
- Vinaya III,208 [the criminal offering, the nun receiving and her passing it on to the Buddha
- Vinaya I, 239
They are all covered here except for the last. I will look into it soon to see about adding it, thanks! And, excellent list of non-meat foods, thanks so much for sharing! Indeed many references to that.
Regarding one thing there…
Later it is reported that the "pure stainless eye of the Teaching appeared to the general Siha seated there itself; Whatever arisen thing has the nature of ceasing " (Anguttara Nikaya 8.12 / AN IV.185) which implies that he attained stream entry (sotapanna). This suggests that lay people can purchase meat without violating the First Precept since it is an indirect connection and no specific animal ordered to be killed.
I’m not sure I follow. Unless this stream entry happened before he ordered meat, it should have nothing to do with whether he could attain stream entry. You can kill a thousand people and still attain stream entry! And I also really do not think people who have attained stream entry automatically follow the 5 precepts without fault. I feel I have known many people with that attainment who break them! So I do not see a connection either way. And he had anyway only encountered Buddhism the day before so it would be reasonable to assume he was quite ignorant of Buddhist ethics/culture.
(For other readers - on that page @DhammaWiki gives their own counterargument also)
I would hope any lover of the dhamma would like your list!
I would hope a vegan would make the same argument! It is simply factual. However, consciously sponsoring torture murder, is quite another matter.
It seems so far as I can tell, to be a standard Sramana rule, and where it causes no torture or murder, I see nothing wrong with it. That lies in contrast to the Hindu idea of the physical substance actually being ‘polluting’, which we could consider mere superstition. However that by itself does not address the critical point of allowing lay Buddhists to pre-plan a meat offering.
No, the Buddha was not omniscient, and even ridiculed the idea of omniscience.
Good points, although I had formed a question, not a conclusion.
Interesting, so in these 3 versions we have:
- Sīha being accused of personally killing the animal
- Sīha going to a shop
- Sīha sending someone else to a shop.
That’s interesting in itself, and leaves open the possibility that none are the truth! But, the relative agreement does indicate earliness of the overall narrative.
Ok so this does imply that there really was meat served, in the pre-sectarian version of the story, since the Pāli agrees on that point. Though it still leaves open the question as to whether this story comes from the time of the earliest layer of the suttas, or from a later vinaya period, but before these vinaya lineages split.
Yes. And/or that Sīha was trusted. It still is rather curious that a man who had converted from Jainism only the day before, was all of a sudden offering meat! That seems quite strange.
If I may offer a counterargument - there is a difference between quantity and frequency. One might consume far less meat but still some meat even every day. In Japan for example, a great many people consume meat every day. But far far less by quantity than in many (or all?) Western countries.
Not if a family went to buy meat, for which the animal was murdered, and then they made their meal, and then a monk randomly turned up at their door begging, and was offered a few spoonfuls of their meal. And my impression is that that was the standard practice, at least for the early years before they had established settlements on land gifted to the Sangha.
One would think so if they had taken the teachings on loving kindness, compassion, and non-violence to heart! Although this post is really trying to examine the evidence of what they actually did, rather than what we might expect from the very clear teachings against killing and harming other beings.
Interesting story. At first glance it would seem he might be breaking the vinaya rules there. Do you know who the ‘they’ were, ordering the Karen people about?
It does make a lot of sense to me for monastics to refuse meat. When people are being ordered about to make food for monastics, that’s so very different to the wandering Sramana habit of begging at random houses. So, accepting meat under such circumstances actually teaches those lay people to kill for you, or pay others to kill for you. And that is I think quite clearly directly against the Buddha’s teaching of caring for other beings, protecting them, never encouraging others to kill, and so on. Accepting gifts in such a way as to encourage murder, must be considered.
Yes often so I think. Plus vegetarian food is considerably cheaper! And healthier!
I did a retreat in one Theravada monastery in Thailand, where there was not even a vegetarian option! I was quite horrified. How could a monastic kitchen operate like that!? But let’s rejoice in the vegetarian and vegan monasteries, for the sake of the reduction of suffering among sentient beings.
To some extent maybe, but in a hot country without refrigeration, options are necessarily limited. There is a severe limit on how long you can safely keep meat.
Pretty sure they were not slaughtering cows in the Buddha’s time and place, no? But when you have communities of for example 100 people (common from many millennia!) let alone the cities of the Buddha’s India, the large animal might not be killed for you specifically, but it will be killed for a collection of people. And that also relieves the need for preservation - all can potentially be sold the day of the slaughter, and eaten that day or over the coming days. With modern refrigeration and sterilisation, it becomes rather different.
I find that rather strange. This post is a rigorous evidence-gathering exercise. I find it odd that some of you are opposed to it. Why is it that people often take evidence-gathering as some kind of threat or fight?
It is merely an hypothesis, along with the hypothesis that lay Buddhists regularly ate and offered meat. What better way to explore either or both hypotheses, than trying to accumulate an extensive list of the evidence?
I just did a search of this whole discussion for the words ‘hostile’ and ‘sad’ which you gave as quotations, and could find no occurrence of them whatsoever before your mentioning them. Have I made an error in my search?
Indeed. Though in case it interests you, it seems he may have gone further than just no meat. From note 42 of @sujato’s ’ WHY DEVADATTA WAS NO SAINT - A CRITIQUE OF REGINALD RAY’S THESIS OF THE ‘CONDEMNED SAINT’:
Refraining from milk is one of Devadatta’s five points according to the (Mūla)sarvāstivāda
Really? Could you give any Vinaya backing for that? I had thought that they were not allowed to reject food they were offered, unless for example the meat was of banned animals or was suspected of being killed for them, etc. Were they actually allowed to pick and chose as you suggest?
I will give you specific examples to counter your position:
- An animal has died by some natural occurrence, and the meat is offered. Even Mahavira, leader of the Jains, is recorded to have accepted such meat!
- Accepting 2 spoons from a meal about to be eaten by a stranger of another religion.
In both cases, accepting doesn’t ‘help’ prevent killing. Neither does folding your monastic robe in a specific way! But the point is not about helping to prevent. Rather, I see it as being about not helping to cause. (And that lies in contrast to allowing regular lay Buddhists to habitually offer meat).
I cannot see the intricate workings of karma. And I can agree that 1 death caused is 1 death caused, regardless of when. However, whereas in the Buddha’s time, buying meat means financing murder, now it also means financing the current mass extinction event, so we are talking about suffering and death on a far, far greater scale, as well as the financing of lifelong torture for the animals we are paying to have murdered.
But another important issue is dairy. Many vegans cannot understand how the Buddha could have been ok with dairy products. Personally I think it may have a lot to do with the treatment of cows. In traditional rural India, cows can have a relatively good life, and relatively little suffering comes from the milking of such cows. And it was against tradition to murder them. No however, lifelong torture, and murder, are standard practice for dairy production in the West, and it seems even in industrialised India. And this kind of change is worth considering when we study the Buddha’s teachings, because it means dairy products that he was speaking about are not the same as ours, in terms of the ethics of non-violence.
Interesting. I was curious who this Venerable Udāyī is. I see in the Pāli, ‘Venerable Udāyī’ translates ‘āyasmā udāyī’, so he was a monk. Why did he have a bow? Wouldn’t that in itself be against the Vinaya, to own such a thing?
He seems quite a disreputable person. I see in SuttaCentral that he even sewed a for a nun, and stitched a picture in it! Causing people to complain “How indecent these nuns are, what shameless scoundrels, seeing as they draw pictures on their robes.”
And I see in AN 6.29 he is referred to as a ‘silly man’ (or in the words of the lookup tool, ‘a stupid or useless person’:
Then the Buddha said to Venerable Ānanda:Atha kho bhagavā āyasmantaṁ ānandaṁ āmantesi:3.2“Ānanda, I know that“aññāsiṁ kho ahaṁ, ānanda:3.3this silly man Udāyī is not committed to the higher mind.‘nevāyaṁ udāyī moghapuriso adhicittaṁ anuyutto viharatī’ti.
So it’s interesting to see that on the one hand, there is a wealth of examples of vegetarian food offerings to the Sangha and yet very few of meat offerings; and that even some monastics were blatantly going against the very clear and consistent teachings of non-violence given by the Buddha.
Well with regard to ‘higher training’, hopefully my quotes above show some context as to how this monk was regarded. I didn’t go further than that but those only examples of him I looked at, show him as being quite lowly!
But, I would wonder what you mean might be implied by your conclusion. That he should have been kicked out rather than reformed from within the Sangha? I can’t say the judgement was necessarily unfair. And also, due to my lack of familiarity with the Vinaya, I also can’t say whether from that point onwards, such killing was made into an expellable offence. If the story really was true, presumably it was so blindingly obvious that monastics should not kill, that it didn’t need to be made into a rule like that, until then!
The sutta doesn’t tell us there was no meat for the whole day. It just says there was no meat at the time it was trying to be acquired by one specific individual. Which was potentially late in the day.
Not necessarily merely by the logic you have written there. If both the quantity of animals and the quantity of humans are less, that does not necessarily mean they are eating less meat. (Though I think anyway they were - even in the UK, more meat is eaten today than in past times).
Ironically, the only real life examine I know of a food in India that has proven useful in famines, is kala chana (black chickpea), a crop that is grown so far as I know mainly for feeding animals! I’ve eaten it myself, it’s nice. It’s more resistant than the fancier (regular) chickpea. I think there are other examples of animal-feed crops being eaten by humans in hard times. Now in a famine, a large mammal might act as a kind of ‘larder’, storing food for a while. But it will also get thin quickly, so killing animals might not be much of a foolproof way to get through hard times for long. It takes far more vegetarian food to be grown to feed a meat eater (vegetation→mammal→human) than it takes to feed directly to a human!
All of your examples aside from the ‘blessing’ were not cases of ‘not wanting’. Rejecting food that is banned; when one is already committed to accepting from someone else; and rejecting food one does not need because one has already eaten, make perfect sense. The ‘blessing’ thing is more complex but seems to have nothing to do with the food itself, rather the blessing. But do you have any examples (sutta or vinaya) of rejecting food ‘they simply didn’t want’? I had thought (albeit with uncertainty) that that was forbidden.
I won’t say either way, but I do honestly think that monastics eating meat given regularly by donors, puts a lot of people off the dhamma, because by encouraging others to finance torture and murder, goes against their ethics, and comes across as highly hypocritical, if they are familiar with the Buddha’s teachings on compassion and non-violence; and if they are not familiar with the Buddha’s teachings, then they assume the Buddha’s teachings are fine with sponsoring torture and murder. Thus, these actions bring the dhamma and Sangha into disrepute among those people, and, so much of the Vinaya is supposed to be avoiding that very thing, of bringing disrepute. So, that’s worthy of deep consideration!
In some cases Theravada monasteries increase torture and murder. I was shocked to see a woman with caged birds in the first monastery I did a retreat in. She would take money to have a bird released, I think was her scheme. So, well-meaning Buddhist lay people (or those desirous of making ‘merit’ for themselves) would pay her. I had never heard of such things a the time but it was entirely and immediately obvious to me that the money was financing torture, and of course in the regular capture or breeding of such prison-animals, there will be some proportion that will die as a result. So, torture and murder.
Understanding the importance of non-violence in the dhamma, I felt sure the abbot had no idea this was happening, so I went to report it. Only to find that the hierarchy was fine with it. What a shock that was! And so the monastery, providing the client base, acted as facilitator of torture and murder, so far as I could tell. Very sad. Though on the bright side, they served vegetarian food.
A lot of it boils down to addiction to chasing sensual pleasure. As you point out, the Mahayana sutras very explicitly ban meat eating, and yet in most Tibetan monasteries (almost all I have been to anyway) serve meat, meat which the monks themselves buy and cook, by the way! I even met one Tibetan whose brother was vegetarian and became sick if he ate meat, and then became a monk, and there was even no possibility of eating vegetarian food, so from the meat, he became sick, and his brother had to come to rescue him, taking him away! And that was in South India, where there is no shortage of very healthy vegetarian food, which is considerably cheaper than meat.
It would be wonderful if they would give regular teachings on what the Buddha said about not killing, not trading in meat, having compassion for all beings, and also explain the very clear consequences to animals (and the environment!) from buying meat! That would probably help!
I had thought that the lay Jains were strict vegetarians. Your source states:
It seems clear that the early Jain ascetics were not totally strict vegetarians and that, like the Buddhists, they could accept meat as alms if an animal had not been specifically killed for them (Paul Dundas, The Jains )
This in no way implies that the lay Jains were not vegetarian. Also the only example I am aware of from the ancient texts, of a Jain eating meat, is from a Jain text (which modern Jains apparently don’t believe is authentic but does seem to be authentic), in which Mahavira accepts a dead… wild chicken I think… since he was sick and that was the required medicine. But that animal had not even been killed by any human. If I remember correctly, it had been killed by a cat. This example conforms to the Buddhist ideal of accepting meat whilst not causing any harm by that action. And this is also why I assume this to be a rule the Buddha adopted because he was following the standard Sramana model when he created his religion, or perhaps that he was specifically following/adapting the Jain model - after all the Buddha was a former Jain monk.
So for that I would have to ask:
- Do we not have any EBT evidence of vegetarianism among the Jain laity?
- Do the early Jain texts not give evidence of Jain vegetarianism?
Regarding the second point, and I do not know the age of this text, but Jains go so far to avoid killing that they even ban cooking in the dark:
And, how can one who eats food without the light of the sun, albeit a lamp may have been lighted, avoid hiṃsā of minute beings which get into food?
— Puruşārthasiddhyupāya (133)
And from the apparently Jain Tamil classic, Tirukkuṛaḷ, dated variously from 300 BCE to 5th century CE, we have:
If the world did not purchase and consume meat, no one would slaughter and offer meat for sale. (Kural 256)
I don’t have much access to Jain texts so I can’t go much further. But I also saw mention of a Jain ban on root vegetables, due to the potential of killing tiny animals (insects/worms I guess) when disturbing the soil. And that also reminds me of Buddhist vinaya rules of banning digging for the same reason (so far as I remember), and banning throwing water on dry ground (to settle dust) again because you may kill tiny beings in the water. This hardcore non-violence seems quite Jain-like, and quite different to a lot of contemporary Buddhist practice.
