The Buddha and the Butcher: Early Buddhist Arguments for Vegetarianism

Previous scholarship on the emergence of Buddhist vegetarianism has focused on the historical and contextual factors behind its rise. My dissertation, The Buddha and the Butcher: Early Buddhist Arguments for Vegetarianism, builds on this scholarship but asks: What does meat eating signify within the earliest texts to proscribe it? In particular, my project tracks three key concerns that emerge in these texts—smell, addiction, and cannibalism—and explicates how each of these offers a window into prevailing anxieties around the spiritual identity and status of Buddhist practitioners on the bodhisattva path. In chapter one, I contend that a fundamental hallmark of bodhisattva identity was having a fragrant scent, and that the perceived malodor of meat eaters precluded them from being identified as beings on the path to buddhahood. In chapter two, I illustrate how the themes and associations made between meat eating and cannibalism were meant to destabilize the ontological status of "human" for those who engaged in meat consumption. I show that, within these sūtras, eating animals amounts to cannibalization in three different ways: through the potential substitution of animal meat with flesh from human corpses in markets, through the notion that eating animals amounts to eating past and future acquaintances through the cycle of rebirth, and through the idea that an animal's flesh is materially and gustatorily equivalent to human flesh. In chapter three, I focus on the how the materiality of meat—in particular its taste and addictive qualities—was portrayed as making its consumers physically and mentally vulnerable, and I discuss how the concept of "addiction" is a useful one for thinking through the substance of meat within these texts. In chapter four, I examine the notion of compassion for animals as the impetus for Buddhist vegetarian practice. By identifying and categorizing the different types of "compassion" referenced in these materials, I show how, contrary to modern misconceptions, it was not a major concern within these texts. Finally, in my fifth chapter, I take a step back to analyze the social contexts in which these discourses on meat and vulnerability may have found purchase. I review previous scholarship on the topic of Buddhist vegetarianism and argue against current assumptions that vegetarianism was a solely Chinese and Mahāyāna Buddhist phenomenon and that, despite numerous extant and influential South Asian Buddhist texts, the practice of vegetarianism was never seriously considered by Buddhists in the premodern Indian subcontinent.