[Advaita-l] Animal Sacrifice

Rajaram Venkataramani rajaramvenk at gmail.com
Wed Jul 6 02:22:30 CDT 2011


 Saraswati! please make my words clear to all!!

Let me reword. My question is whether kalpa sutras describe animal
killing and eating in srauddha karma. I did not ask how vegetarianism
evolved.

On 06/07/2011, Ramesh Krishnamurthy <rkmurthy at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6 July 2011 02:33, Rajaram Venkataramani <rajaramvenk at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> << Did we become vegetarians due to the influence of buddhists and
>> bhagavatas?>>
>>
>
> To which the counter question would be "Under whose influence did the
> bauddha-s and bhAgavata-s become vegetarian?"
>
> For that matter, who said that the bauddha-s were/are vegetarian? In fact,
> the bauddha bhikShu-s are allowed to eat meat as long as they know that the
> animal has not been specifically killed for them.
>
> A careful look suggests that vegetarianism evolved first as a temporary
> spiritual discipline (i.e. people observed it as a vrata for a certain
> duration), and over time, some people adopted it as a permanent lifestyle.
> Even today, it is common among non-vegetarian Hindus to observe
> vegetarianism as a vrata for a specific period.
>
> This was of course aided by the fact that the ecology of the Indian
> subcontinent permits a vegetarian diet, and even for non-vegetarians meat is
> a relatively small portion of their overall diet. Even so, in areas where
> fish is abundant (coastal areas + Bengal), only a small portion of the
> population practises complete vegetarianism.
>
> So it is not that vegetarianism spread under the influence of any particular
> group. Rather, it was the more general idea of temporary abstinence from
> certain activities as a ritual discipline that gradually gave rise to
> complete vegetarianism. Such ritual discipline involved (as it still
> involves today) abstinence from one or more of the following: mAMsa,
> maithuna, madya, "tAmasika foods" such as onion/garlic, etc
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