[Buddha-l] Re: on eating meat

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Wed, 2005-10-19 at 07:44 +0100, Mike Austin wrote:

> Maybe there will be a day when vegans harangue vegetarian Buddhists for 
> causing suffering to animals by eating their produce.  

That day has already come. Read the last chapter of the Lankavatara
Sutra and the Shurangama Sutra for relentless denunciations of meat-
eating and honey-licking Buddhists. Here we can find pronouncements that
those who teach that the Buddha allowed eating meat under certain
circumstances are thieves who are stealing from their disciples the
possibility of attaining enlightenment and that these teachers will
surely go to hell.

We could also mention Ambedkar's imaginative thesis that meat-eating
Buddhists were so despised by both Buddhists and Brahmans that they
evolved into the untouchables.

> Then maybe there will be a day when people who do not eat root
> vegetables harangue those who do because of the suffering it causes to
> creatures in the earth.

The argument against eating root vegetables (which are also banned in
the Lankavatara and Shurangama Sutras, by the way) is that the root
contains the life force of a plant. To eat a fruit or a leaf from a
plant leaves the plant alive, while eating a root kills the whole plant.

Harangues and denunciations are pretty ugly in any religious tradition.
The grotesque harangues in parts of the Lankavatara, the Shurangama and
the Lotus Sutra are as ugly to me as some of the ghastly material in the
books of Samuel, Judges and Kings and the book of revelations in the
Bible. That's why I incessantly denounce Mahayana Buddhists and predict
they will all burn in hell for several aeons.

-- 
Richard