Korea Journal of Buddhist Studies ISSN:1598-0642(Print) 불교학연구

Whether or not the Buddha really died from eating a rotten pork dish, it appears certain that, during the earliest period of the Buddhist tradition in India, meat was not comprehensively prohibited for ordained monks and nuns. Certain restrictions were applied in their partaking of meat, but the Buddhist canon unambiguously records that the Buddha refused to adopt vegetarianism when it was proposed by his cousin, or the saṅgha-splitter, Devadatta. The most commonly cited permission for meat-eating for the ordained is epitomized in the concept of “pure in three aspects” (trikoṭiśuddha) according to which a Buddhist monk or nun can eat donated meat unless she or he has directly seen, heard, or suspected that an animal was killed specifically for his or her own sake. This conditional allowance of a meat diet came to be completely banned, however, in several Mahāyāna sūtras that appeared in the first half of the first millennium, including most famously, the Laṅkāvatāra.

Nearly all of the Indic materials that record discussions of meat-eating are canonical, that is, believed to have been spoken by the Buddha himself and therefore of a prescriptive nature. The one exception is the anti-vegetarian polemic that consists of seven verses accompanied by auto-commentary in the ninth Mīmāṃsā chapter of the Madhyamakahṛdayakārikā composed by the sixth-century Madhyamaka scholar, Bhāviveka (500-570 CE). This text is noteworthy because it documents an active defense of a Buddhist meat diet against others’ censure. However, while he refutes his non-Buddhist opponent’s claims, Bhāviveka eventually contradicts a pro-vegetarian Mahāyāna sūtra, the Laṅkāvatāra. This paper argues that Bhāviveka’s anti-vegetarian discourse cannot avoid being read as a critique, even though he did not intend for it to be so.