[Buddha-l] nytimes review of pbs The Buddha

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Fri, 2010-04-09 at 09:40 -0700, Bob Woolery wrote:

> Recognizing the jests, but troubled.  As I get it, early Buddhists were not
> vegetarian, and monks were admonished to eat whatever landed in their bowl,
> in one hyperbolic version, the finger of a leper, should it land in the
> begging bowl.
> 
>   Or am I just terribly confused?

You may be confused, but not on this issue. Your account is exactly
correct. So let me try to confuse you. 

There are several Mahayana texts that teach that those who teach that
monks may eat anything given to them will go to hell for many an aeon.
The vegetarian sutras originated in Mahayana and represent one of the
many triumphalist and sanctimonious moves of the Mahayana movement.
There have been numerous theories about why vegetarianism came to play
such a prominent role in Mahayana. David Seyfort Ruegg dedicated a lot
of research to this topic and associated vegetarianism with the dogma
that all sentient beings have Buddha-nature and so are, in effect,
buddhas. Eating a buddha, he argues, was seen as decidedly gauche.
Others have argued that vegetarianism grew naturally out of the move
from monks depending on alms to a monastic culture in which monks raised
their own food. Eating a chicken beheaded by a pious layman is one
thing, but beheading a chicken oneself is unseemly for a monk, and
especially for a bodhisattva whose has taken a vow to cherish all life.

Bhimrao Ambedkar had the fascinating theory that the social class known
as "outcastes" originated Buddhist farmers who raised cattle. His
argument, if I may give a highly simplified version, is that Brahmans
and Buddhists got into a "holier-than-thou" war in which each side took
the moral high road by adopting more and more restrictive diets. The
Buddhist vegetarian sutras were part of this trend. And yet many
Buddhists were farmers and livestock dealers. They held a low rank among
Buddhists. Ambedkar's claim is that when Buddhism died out in India,
most Buddhists were either easily reintegrated into Hindu society or
converted to Islam and enjoyed a high status as Muslims. Those low-class
Buddhists who had raised animals, however, were despised by high-caste
Hindus and were never allowed back into the caste system. Ambedkar's
hypothesis is highly questionable, nut it does capture some of the
implications of the high level of emotional entanglement in this issue.

-- 
Richard P. Hayes
Department of Philosophy
Tel: 277-8232
Fax: 277-6362