Vegetarian Diet.
Vegetarian diet is a practice of living solely upon vegetables, fruits, grains, and nuts. Vegetarian diet is based on sound ethical, ascetic, and nutritional reasons.
Meat, fowl, and fish are excluded from all vegetarian diets.
Those in the modern West usually eat eggs. India excludes eggs, as did those in the classical Mediterranean lands.
Though the Hindus and Buddhists never required so strict an observance of ahimsa as the Jains, vegetarian diet and tolerance toward all forms of life became widespread in India.
King Asoka in his inscriptions of the 3rd century BC stressed the sanctity of animal life. Ahimsa is one of the first disciplines learned by the student of yoga and is required to be mastered in the preparatory stage, the first of the eight stages that lead to perfect concentration.
In the early 20th century Gandhi extended ahimsa into the political sphere as Satyagraha, nonviolent resistance to killing the dumb animals.
Mahavira taught that a man can save his soul from the contamination of matter by living a life of extreme asceticism and by practicing nonviolence toward all living creatures.
This advocacy of nonviolence encouraged his followers to become strong advocates of vegetarian diet, which in the course of time helped to bring about a virtual end to sacrificial killing in Indian rituals.
His followers were aided in their quest for salvation by accepting the five maha-vrata that have been attributed to Mahavira: renunciation of killing, of speaking untruths, of greed, of sexual pleasure, and of all attachments to living beings and nonliving things.
Avoiding of flesh eating first appeared, in ritual connections, either as a temporary purification or as qualification for a priestly function.
Advocacy of a fleshless diet for normal use began around the middle of the 1st millennium BC and probably independently, in India and in eastern Mediterranean lands as part of the philosophical awakening of the time.
In the Mediterranean lands, avoidance of flesh eating is first recorded as a teaching of Pythagoras of Samos and his followers. The Pythagoreans generalized certain Orphic ritual restrictions--they rejected not only flesh but beans and mallows--and may have been influenced by Egyptian priestly customs or even by individual thinkers in the Fertile Crescent.
The Pythagoreans alleged the kinship of all animals as one basis for human benevolence toward other creatures, which should not be killed for food. From Plato onward many pagan philosophers and particularly the Neo-Platonists recommended a fleshless diet; the idea carried with it condemnation of bloody sacrifices in worship and was often associated with belief in reincarnation of soul, and, more generally, with a search for principles of cosmic harmony in accord with which human beings could live.
In India the Buddhists and Jains refused to kill animals for food, on ethical and ascetic grounds: the human being should not inflict harm on any sentient creature.
The idea was soon taken up also in Brahman circles, and was applied especially to the cow; as in Mediterranean thought, the idea carried with it condemnation of bloody sacrifices and was often associated with a sense of cosmic harmonies.
In later centuries vegetarian diet had a differing fate in the Indic and the Mediterranean spheres. In India itself, though Buddhism gradually declined the ideal of ahimsa, with its corollary of a fleshless diet, spread steadily in the 1st millennium AD until many of the upper castes especially of Vaisnava faith, and even some of the lower, had adopted it.
Beyond India it was carried, with Buddhism, widely northward and eastward, as far as China and Japan; but less conscientious Buddhists limited themselves to avoiding the killing of animals and would eat of a carcass if someone else supplied it.
In some countries, fish were included in an otherwise fleshless diet.
West of the Indus, the monotheistic traditions that came to power were less favourable to vegetarian diet.
In the Hebrew Bible, however, is recorded the belief that in Paradise the earliest human beings had not eaten flesh: that it was permitted only after Noah's flood and even then the blood in it, as being the life of it, was not to be consumed.
Ascetic Jewish groups and some early Christian leaders disapproved of flesh eating as a luxury, gluttonous, cruel, and expensive. Some Christian monastic orders ruled out flesh eating, and its avoidance has been a penance even for lay persons.
Many Muslims have been hostile to vegetarian diet, yet some Muslim Sufi mystics who became the chief guides of Muslim spiritual life, recommended a meatless diet for spiritual seekers. Akbar, in the 16th-century, recommended a fleshless diet as a Sufi custom.
