Buddhist Temple Vegetarianism

The Brahmajala Sutra, a Mahayana text setting out the bodhisattva precepts, states directly that a bodhisattva must not eat the flesh of any sentient being, reasoning that all beings have at some point in the endless cycle of rebirth been one's own parent or child and that eating flesh is therefore a kind of cannibalism across lifetimes. This textual basis existed before it became binding practice, and for a long stretch of early Chinese Buddhist history monastics, like their Theravada counterparts elsewhere, ate whatever was placed in the alms bowl, meat included.

The turning point was political as much as doctrinal. Emperor Wu of Liang, a devout Buddhist ruler, issued an edict in 511 CE requiring monks and nuns within his realm to abstain from meat and alcohol, citing the Brahmajala precepts as authority and backing the requirement with the power of the state rather than leaving it to individual conscience. The edict took hold and became normative for Chinese Buddhist monasticism from that point forward, and Vietnamese and Korean Mahayana Buddhism inherited the same standard through Chinese transmission.

This produced a durable divide within world Buddhism: Mahayana monastics in East Asia are strictly vegetarian by institutional rule, while Theravada monastics in Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka eat whatever is offered as alms, including meat, so long as the monk has no reason to believe the animal was killed specifically to feed him, the so called rule of the three kinds of purity.

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.