Originally Posted by DreamBliss
You will also discover that America is against the norm, as most people in the world in other countries are vegetarian.
I don't think this is quite true, except insofar as historically many people could not afford to eat meat on a regular basis. But the countries where people are predominantly vegetarian—by choice—are actually quite rare. At the other end of the spectrum, there are plenty of cultures whose people have traditionally survived on a diet that consisted primarily of meat and animal products, like the Mongolians, the Maasai, and the Inuit.
A lot of people have the impression that Buddhists must be vegetarian, which is understandable given that one of the main precepts of Buddhism forbids killing. However, while vegetarianism became a popular option among Chinese Buddhists, intriguingly, it was not required (or practiced!) by the Buddha himself or his early followers in India, and is not even practiced today by most Buddhists outside of China (and maybe America). People ascribe all kinds of spiritual attainments to Tibetan Buddhists, but many of them eat meat! Even in those countries of Southeast Asia that practice Theravada, the school of Buddhism that adheres to the earliest set of texts (i.e., closest to what the Buddha taught), vegetarianism is rare among both laypeople and monastics.
In part this derives from the fact that monks and nuns traditionally relied on donations for their food items, and you know what they say, "beggars can't be choosers." A monk is not allowed to instruct a layperson what to put in his almsbowl, and is moreover discouraged from having any food preferences at all— serious practitioners are supposed to mix all the food they've received, no matter what it is, and eat the mixture without discrimination. But it is also a consequence of the nature of Buddhist ethical prescriptions, which are heavily dependent on intention: if someone was not personally involved in butchering an animal, they are not considered culpable for its death. Thus it was forbidden for a monk to eat an animal that was killed specifically to feed him, and of course he may not kill the animal himself, but if some meat is put in his bowl, he's pretty much obliged to eat it. The Buddha himself is said to have died from eating a bad bit of pork, because that's what someone gave him!
Curiously, there actually are foods that the early Buddhist monks were not supposed to eat—garlic and onions being on the list, if I remember correctly, though I would want to doublecheck my sources. I don't have the book at hand that goes into this, but there is a whole chapter on food rules for monks in Mohan Wijayaratna's Buddhist Monastic Life (1990).
Sorry to go all geekrant here! I'm fascinated by this topic and couldn't resist. I'm certainly not trying to discourage your vegetarianism, as I think it is an admirable form of ethical self-discipline. However, I did feel compelled to correct what I perceived as a slight misapprehension about the eating habits of the rest of the world. We have a common tendency to try to locate spirituality somewhere "out there," whether in another country or person, but years of scrutiny have convinced me that this is very rarely justified, and by no means necessary for the pursuit of our own spiritual path.
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