Alongside meat, the tradition excludes five pungent, strong smelling vegetables of the allium family and their relatives, usually enumerated as garlic, onion, leek, chive and a resin sometimes translated as asafoetida. The stated reasoning is that eaten raw they provoke anger and eaten cooked they provoke desire, so that either way they disturb the calm the precepts are meant to protect, and the exclusion appears alongside the meat prohibition in the same body of monastic regulation.
Denied the flavor base that meat, garlic and onion would ordinarily supply, Chinese Buddhist temple kitchens developed an elaborate cuisine built from soy products, wheat gluten, mushrooms and vegetables, frequently shaped, textured and named to resemble the meat, poultry or fish dishes it replaces, a tradition usually called zhaicai. This mock meat cookery is not a modern novelty aimed at outsiders; it is documented within Chinese Buddhist monastic culture for centuries, prized as a demonstration that a meal can be visually and gastronomically satisfying while remaining entirely within the precepts, and it has since spread well beyond temple walls into ordinary restaurants across East Asia and its diaspora.