Being a Buddhist & Still Eating Meat?

In the Buddhist faith, practitioners are usually brought up as vegetarians. But it's not surprising to see practitioners of Buddhism go up a notch and live the vegan lifestyle. Luckily, most Buddhists do not make up the small percentage of vegans with radical viewpoints that attack vegetarians and people that consume meat.

When people are brought up to be monks and nuns, they mainly eat fruits, vegetables, and grains. They live mainly a vegan lifestyle but it is flexible to dairy as well as long as it's available. The nuns and monks will drink either soy milk or rice milk (sweet flavored milk that is extracted from cooked rice) as a substitute for dairy. But mainly they drink tea, water, and juice.

Both my mother and my grandmother are Buddhist and life a vegetarian lifestyle. Interestingly enough, my grandmother converted into a Buddhist nun-in-training during the spring of 2001. It pretty much caught me off guard when she came home with a shaved head. They don't consume any actual meat but will instead eat the meat substitute made from soy protein.

But, there are plenty of Buddhists with myself included that do consume meat. The life of a vegetarian or vegan are merely guidelines to the Buddhist faith. You don't have to be a vegetarian or a vegan to be a good Buddhist. When the guidelines about not consuming meat are not followed, the dietary practice is actually more flexible than the dietary practices of the Muslim and Jewish faiths.

When eating meat, there are still certain things Buddhists do not recognize. The most recognized would be dog. Though dog meat is consumed in Vietnam, China, and other parts of Asia, it's not recognized within the Buddhist faith. Dogs are considered to be filthy animals in Islam and Judaism meaning practitioners aren't permitted to eat them.