Animal and Cannibal: Cannibalism and Identity in Early Buddhist Vegetarian Texts

It is likely not a controversial proposition that, in most cultures and for most of the historical record, the consumption of human flesh has been broadly stigmatized. This was, at least, most certainly the case for early Buddhists in the Indian subcontinent. And this is precisely why a few of the early Buddhist texts promoting vegetarianism mobilized the shocking image of the cannibal to argue against meat consumption. These texts employ multiple different examples of how cannibalism (intentional and unintentional) is a certain risk for those who dare to eat animal flesh. At the heart of these invocations of cannibalism is an ontological vulnerability exposed by the act of consuming humans and being consumed by humans. There are two transformations that form the focus of this paper—one of these is the threat of transforming into an animal or demon through meat consumption. The second, and perhaps less obvious, type of transformation is the process of becoming edible. Both of these, in their own way, threaten the Buddhist ontological status of “human,” but for the second, the signification is that one is _beyond_ human. In the case of humans eating other humans, cannibalism signifies a loss of humanity by engaging in a definitive marker of “otherness.” In cases of bodhisattvas purposefully offering their flesh for consumption, the act signifies going beyond the human by disregarding a fundamental fear and a marker of what it means to be human—being inedible. 

In order to establish the import of the cannibalism discourse within vegetarian texts and the incongruity of the popular motif of the bodhisattva’s bodily sacrifice, it is first necessary to establish the degree to which cannibalism was considered abhorrent within Buddhist tradition. In my first section, I provide a brief background on traditional Buddhist discourse around cannibalism—showing that, with few exceptions, early Buddhist tradition unequivocally condemned the consumption of human flesh.

In the next section, I delineate the three different ways in which cannibalism appears within some of the early South Asian Buddhist texts to argue for vegetarianism, focusing in particular on the _Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra_ and the _Aṅgulimālīya Sūtra_. In these texts, there are three primary ways in which cannibalism is evoked: 1). the fear of accidentally ingesting human meat; 2). the fear that one could be cannibalizing past or future family members when one eats animal flesh; and 3). the argument that the gustatory and olfactory qualities of animal and human meat are the same. By employing the model of identity through consumption, the cannibalism-talk within these texts attempts to persuade their audiences that the line between animal and human is easily blurred. In addition, I show that, undergirding all these invocations, there is the threat of potential social repercussions from there being even a suspicion among the laity that Buddhist monastics consume, or have consumed, human flesh.

Finally, in the last section of this paper, I explore what seems to be a fundamental tension between the widespread motif within Buddhist literature of Bodhisattvas giving all or parts of their body for the sake of other sentient beings (often so they can be eaten) and the general Buddhist disdain for any type of cannibalism. I argue that, like the cannibalism discourse in vegetarian sūtras, the cannibalism of bodhisattva bodies signifies a departure from humanness. However, in the case of a bodhisattva becoming edible, the signification is that a bodhisattva is _beyond_ human. Not only is the flesh of bodhisattvas described as materially different from other types of meat, but descriptions of bodhisattvas’ blithe attitudes toward the unthinkable—being eaten—indicate to the audiences of these texts that a bodhisattva, in the sacrifice of his body, has also sacrificed part of his humanity—the naturalized disgust, abhorrence, and fear that a human would normally feel at the prospect of being eaten.