Date

Venue

Presenter

Topic

7/5

USYD

John Kieschnick, Stanford University

By the end of the sixth century, in China the great doctrinal and philosophical debates over vegetarianism had settled into a consensus: Buddhist monastics were now expected to be vegetarians and lay Buddhists were encouraged to do the same. But diet is rarely simply an individual choice based on a philosophical position. Just as important as ethics and doctrine, food choices carry broad social associations. Are vegetarians pious or pretentious, healthy or sickly, obedient or obstinate? In this talk, I discuss the social implications of vegetarianism through the lens of four ideal types: saints who promoted vegetarianism; scoundrels who, though pretending to be pious, in fact ate meat; misfits who struggled to maintain a vegetarian diet in a meat-eating world; and rebels whose radical diet the state associated with sedition.