Blessed Are the Meat Eaters: Christian Antivegetarianism and the Missionary Encounter with Chinese Buddhism

Buddhists in China have traditionally held that not eating meat is a religiously meritorious form of fasting. The association of Buddhism and a nonmeat diet was so strong that many Christian missionaries have felt the need to attack vegetarianism, not in any abstract or generic form but adapted specifically to counter Buddhist rationalizations. As part of their effort to convert the Chinese "heathen" to Christianity, they marshaled their own resources against vegetarianism. It is not that "the West" or "Christendom" was ever unanimous in endorsing meat eating, nor that Chinese Buddhists were all strict vegetarians. It may be that if the vegetarian diet had been religiously neutral (as it is for many today who avoid meat strictly for health reasons), missionaries would have had nothing much to say about it. However, missionaries in China who opposed vegetarianism did so with reference to a series of religious associations. In addition to this religious aspect, there are complex cultural associations based on a basic difference in diet: most of the Westerners in China during the last four centuries simply ate more meat than most of the Chinese until recently. Antivegetarianism can in some cases also be seen as an attack on the native Chinese diet, which was historically high in vegetable and carbohydrate content but low in protein. Missionaries, especially Victorian Protestants, frequently expressed disdain for the customs of China.

During the formative nineteenth century, when the Manchu government resisted efforts to assimilate Western culture, missionaries were the primary communicators of "the West," and they articulated this aspect of diet in specifically religious terms. The popular representation of the Christian life in China inevitably took on the association of meat eating and antivegetarianism. Generally, religion was edible. Indeed, one phrase used by Chinese to taunt converts was "eat the foreign religion" (chi yangjiao or chijiao).¹ Foreign religion was described as sustenance, though not primarily meat. In a culture where rice was the definitive food, the epithet "rice Christian" was commonly used. Conversely, one finds deriving income from non-Christian temple activities referred to as "eating the idol's rice."²

This essay examines the confluence of antivegetarianism and anti-Buddhism in Christian missionary discourses on Chinese religion, focusing on three cases: the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci, nineteenth- and twentieth-century British Protestant reportage, and recent attacks on the vegetarian diet by the Chinese Protestant Timothy Kung (Gong Tianmin). My questions are: What were the arguments made to support eating meat and to attack the vegetarian diet? What continuity or change is there in these arguments in the course of four centuries? What were the religious and cultural consequences of the Westerners' meat eating and this "Christian" dietary assertion? What might be learned from this about missionary enculturation? How did missionaries interpret the dietary practice of potential converts? How did this dietary issue play into Western perceptions of the Chinese and Chinese perceptions of Westerners and/or Christians? Over the historical course of these cases, is there a discernable trend in the nature and intensity of the attacks on meat avoidance? These questions will be discussed and, in some cases, answered below. Arguments against meat tended to be articulated with reference to fundamental doctrines such as creation and the nature of souls, but as time went on the arguments ranged more widely into perceptions of cultural difference, science and medicine, and the entire history of "East-West" interactions. Exploring the relations of a dietary practice and these civilizational narratives is the goal of this article.

Before Western comment on the issue, there were already diverse opinions and sectarian differences in China, though a full exploration of these is outside the scope of this article. Buddhists had inveighed against meat for many centuries. Fasting and the vegetarian feasts at the ends of fasts became merit-making techniques strongly associated with Buddhists. Buddhists campaigned...