I'm a vegetarian, and fond of Chinese vegetarian cuisine, so I was interested in the history. Here is a brief account, with some Wikipedia links for further reading.
Food at a Chinese Buddhist temple is 斋素 (zhāi sù) — no meat, fish, eggs, or even garlic and onions. But at a Theravāda monastery in Thailand, the monks may serve whatever was offered that morning, including potentially meat. Both are Buddhist. Both trace their practice back to the same founder. So what happened?
The short version: the Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama) himself ate meat, and explicitly rejected a proposal to make vegetarianism mandatory for monks. The vegetarian Buddhism familiar in East Asia is the result of a doctrinal shift in Mahāyāna sūtras six to ten centuries after his death, plus a single imperial decree in 511 CE that turned the shift into law.
What the Buddha actually said
In the Pali canon — the earliest layer of Buddhist scripture — the Buddha articulates the rule of 三淨肉 (sānjìngròu), the "three pure meats": a monk may eat meat as long as he has not seen, not heard, and not suspected that the animal was killed specifically for him.¹ The principle is non-complicity, not abstention.
The episode that makes this most stark involves Devadatta, the Buddha's cousin and would-be reformer. Devadatta proposed five stricter rules for the sangha, including mandatory vegetarianism. The Buddha refused.² Vegetarianism wasn't just absent from early Buddhism; it had been considered and rejected, according to the early texts.
The Mahāyāna turn
Beginning around the 2nd to 5th centuries CE, a different set of scriptures began to circulate. The *Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra* devotes an entire chapter to an explicit attack on meat-eating: in the long cycle of rebirth, every being has at some point been your mother; meat-eating creates the demand that drives killing; flesh coarsens the body and clouds the mind.³ The *Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra* goes further and depicts the Buddha explicitly withdrawing the three-pure-meats allowance, calling it a provisional teaching for an earlier audience.⁴
These texts shifted the doctrinal frame. The Theravāda position is about non-complicity: don't participate in killing. The Mahāyāna position is about 慈悲 (cíbēi), compassion: a bodhisattva, vowing to save all beings, cannot bear that any being suffer on their account.
Emperor Wu's decree
The doctrinal shift wouldn't have produced the Chinese Buddhism we know today without political weight behind it. Liáng Wǔdì (梁武帝, r. 502–549) — Emperor Wu of Liang — was a devout lay Buddhist, a sometime monk, and a prolific author of religious texts. In 511 CE he issued the *Duàn jiǔ ròu wén* (斷酒肉文, "Treatise on Abstaining from Wine and Meat") and made vegetarianism mandatory for monks and nuns across his empire.
The decree didn't invent Chinese Buddhist vegetarianism — pockets of the practice already existed — but it standardized it. From that point onward, monastic vegetarianism is the assumed baseline in Chinese, and later Korean and Vietnamese, Buddhism. Without Emperor Wu, Chinese Buddhism might look different.
Two living traditions
Today both frameworks are alive. Theravāda monks eat what's offered. Chinese Mahāyāna monks keep a strict vegetarian diet, and many also avoid the 五辛 (wǔxīn) — onion, garlic, leek, chive, and shallot — believed to inflame the passions. Lay practice ranges from full-time 持素 (chí sù) to vegetarian only on the 1st and 15th of the lunar month. Tibetan teachers in the West have increasingly adopted vegetarianism even where the older communities did not.
Both positions inherit the same root rule. The first precept of the *pañcasīla* — and Right Action on the Eightfold Path — is 不殺生 (bù shā shēng), do not kill living beings. Theravāda and Mahāyāna agree on this. What they differ on is what counts as participating in the killing.
A modern reading
In an alms culture the line was easier to draw. A monk didn't choose, didn't pay, didn't drive demand; he ate what was offered. The closest modern analogue is freeganism — eating only what would otherwise go to waste, on the principle that consumption you didn't pay for creates no demand. The "three pure meats" rule was a calibration of that posture for hard cases: even within an alms culture, you should refuse food you have reason to think was killed for you.
A grocery shopper does not stand outside the supply chain. Modern animal agriculture is well documented, even where popular imagination still pictures a red barn and pasture; the pressures of industrial capitalism are not the pressures of a village. A purchase is a vote for the next round of production. The non-complicity reading, applied honestly to those conditions, is hard to hold.
Read this way, the Mahāyāna shift isn't really a departure from early Buddhism. It's an honest application of "do not kill" once the eater has stopped being a recipient of leftovers and become a participant in the system that produces them.
Further reading
Notes
1. *Jīvaka Sutta*, Majjhima Nikāya 55. The same allowance appears in the Pali Vinaya at *Mahāvagga* 6.31 (the Sīha episode).
2. Pali Vinaya, *Cullavagga* VII.3 (PTS Vin ii 196–197). Devadatta's "five points" were forest-dwelling for life, alms-only, rag-robes, dwelling at the foot of trees, and total abstention from fish and flesh. The Buddha permitted any monk to follow these voluntarily but refused to make them mandatory.
3. *Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra*, ch. 8 ("On Meat-Eating," *Māṃsabhakṣaṇa-parivarta*).
4. *Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra* (Dharmakṣema's Chinese translation, Taishō no. 374). Note: a different text from the Pali *Mahāparinibbāna Sutta* (Dīgha Nikāya 16), which contains the account of the Buddha's death and his last meal.
