Jain law made vegetarianism an empire-wide ban under Kumarapala
Long before Manchester founded a Vegetarian Society in 1847, Jain teachers treated refusing meat as non-negotiable for monks and laypeople alike. In the twelfth century, scholar Hemachandra persuaded Gujarat's King Kumarapala to outlaw animal slaughter across his realm. Akbar later issued seasonal farmans after debating a Jain monk.
Vegetarianism drops the flesh of animals; lacto, ovo, and lacto-ovo variants keep dairy, eggs, or both, while vegan diets exclude all animal products. Motives range from ahimsa and animal rights to health, environment, economy, and taste. Vitamin B12 needs care when eggs and dairy disappear. Rishikesh banned meat, fish, and eggs in 1956. The English word rose around 1839—Fanny Kemble used it—and spread with the 1847 Manchester society that gave the movement an institutional home.
Jain sources push the ethic deep: records from the ninth century BCE urge tolerance toward living beings; the fifth-century BCE Ācārāṅga Sūtra tells monks not even to walk on grass lest insects die. Tradition says prince Neminatha left his wedding after hearing animals queued for the feast. Greek Orphics and the circle linked to Pythagoras practiced related abstention from the sixth century BCE for purification as much as ethics, tying diet to ritual cleanliness.
Political enforcement resurfaced often. Hemachandra's amari-ghoshana decrees blanketed Chaulukya lands; sixteenth-century Hiravijaya Suri won temporary Mughal slaughter bans and lake fishing limits from Akbar. Japan's Emperor Tenmu in 675 barred killing meat animals in the busy April–September farm season, wild game excepted, bans later undone in the Meiji era. Song-dynasty China popularised Buddhist vegetarian cuisine. The modern label is Victorian; the practice is far older and repeatedly tied to law, ritual, and power. In 1893 Virchand Gandhi carried the Jain case to the first World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago, one of the earliest defences of the diet before a Western crowd, and a 2025 study in Science used nitrogen isotopes in fossil teeth to argue that Australopithecus ate almost no meat at all.
Source: Vegetarianism
