Why do religions forbid pork? (video)

I'm smart and full of feeling. Who would eat me?

Most Buddhists, being Chinese, are vegetarian. They abstain from killing or causing others (ranchers and butchers) to kill pigs or any animal to follow the Five Precepts.

But legend has it that the Buddha's last meal was a dish called sukara maddava or "pig's delight," interpreted to be the flesh of pigs when it was in fact truffles (tuber fungi) which pigs delight in eating. Many Buddhists do eat animals even pigs under the excuse that they're buying flesh that's already slaughtered and on sale so they are not killing. Of course, they're encouraging others to kill and approving of it by paying butchers and those in the flesh trade.

• The Last Meal of the Buddha (Dr. Sunil Jayasinghe, dhammikaweb.com)

Neither kill nor cause others to kill.

The Buddha ate poisonous mushrooms gathered, prepared, and offered by the blacksmith Cunda (DN 16). In those days no one would have thought to offer a slaughtered animal to a sadhu, a spiritual wander (shramana), a renunciate, an ascetic -- how much the less to a great spiritual teacher, a mendicant monk?

The Buddhist Monastic Disciplinary Code forbids the eating of meat for monks and nuns if they have seen, heard, or so much as suspect that someone has killed an animal to offer it to them as a meal.

The reason for this is that doing so would be to tacitly approve or sanction the killing of animals. The Buddha is sometimes thought to have contracted deadly dysentery, but he knowingly accepted what Cunda offered and directed him to throw the rest away by burying it so no one else would be harmed by it.

He later pointed out to Ananda that no one should be upset with Cunda since two offering are of the greatest merit, namely, the meal given just before the great enlightenment of someone into buddhahood and the last meal leading to the passing into final nirvana (parinirvana) of a buddha.

• VIDEO: Monkey gangs square off in Thailand, block traffic

Why is pork forbidden in religions?

(Religion for Breakfast, July 29, 2021)

CREDITS: Executive Producers: Daniel Cuevas, Maritza Co-Writers: Bailey Benson and Andrew Henry. Editor: Mark Henry.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Hesse, B. and Wapnish, P. 1997. Can Pig Remains Be Used for Ethnic Diagnosis in the Ancient Near East? In The Archaeology of Israel: Constructing the Past, Interpreting the Present, edited by N.A. Silberman and D.B. Small, pp. 238-270.
• Hesse, B. and Wapnish, P. 1998. Pig Use and Abuse in the Ancient Levant: Ethnoreligious Boundary-Building and Swine. In Ancestors for the Pigs, edited by S. Nelson, pp. 123-135.
• Price, M.D. 2021. Evolution of a Taboo: Pigs and People in the Ancient Near East. Oxford. Sapir-Hen, L., Bar-Oz, G., Gadot, Y., and Finkelstein, I. 2013.
• Pig Husbandry in Iron Age Israel and Judah: New Insights Regarding the Origin of the “Taboo.” Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palastina-Vereins 129 (1): 1-20.
• Zeder, M.A. 2009. The Neolithic Macro-(R)evolution: Macroevolutionary Theory and the Study of Culture change. Journal of Archaeological Research 17:1-63.
• Zeder, M.A. 2012. The Broad Spectrum Revolution at 40: Resource Diversity, Intensification, and an Alternative to Optimal Foraging Explanations. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 31: 241-264.
• Zeder, M.A. 2015. Core Questions in Domestication Research. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112: 3191-3198.

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