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Animal Rights History Timeline » [BCE-CE] Antiquity » Buddha, Sakyamuni, Siddhartha Gautama

Buddha, Sakyamuni, Siddhartha Gautama

[c599-510 BCE] Siddhartha Guatama (Buddha, Sakyamuni), "On Meat Eating" chap. 8 in The Lankavatara Sutra, translated by Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki (London: 1932; Online at do1@yandex.ru, 2005).

Buddha, Siddhartha Guatama, Sakyamuni, "the great Hindu profit…proclaims [abstinence from animal food] as a great moral truth, based upon…universal justice and compassion." Siddhartha is the personal; Sakya-Muni the tribal (conjoined with the distinguishing epithet, "the wise"); Gotama or Gautama the family name; Buddha, the religious or prophetic title, meaning "the Enlightened "—the noblest of distinguishing epithets that can be applied to the religious revolutionist."¹

In The Lankavatara Sutra, "a distinctive and influential philosophical discourse,"² Buddha preaches to "cherish the thought of kinship with [living beings] and refrain from meat-eating:…for the sake of love and purity…and for the fear of causing terror to living beings." He denounces not those who eat flesh, but those who pay for or profit from the destruction of "sentient beings" as "evil minded, evil-doers…[condemned] to the most horrifying hell." "Thus," he concludes, "meat-eating I have not permitted to anyone, I do not permit, I will not permit.'

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¹ Howard Williams, "Sakya-Muni," in Ethics of Diet (London & Manchester, 1883; 1896; Online at Animal Rights History, 2003).

²A distinctive and influential philosophical discourse…that is said to have been preached by the Buddha" himself (EncyclopÆdia Britannica Online, s.v. "Lankavatara Sutra").

³Siddhartha Guatama (Buddha, Sakyamuni), "On Meat Eating" chap. 8 in The Lankavatara Sutra, translated by Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki (London: 1932; Online at do1@yandex.ru, 2005).