As more Indian Buddhist texts were translated into Chinese, some believers took a more hard-line stance against meat-eating. Some scriptures argued that Buddha himself had espoused total abstention from meat on the grounds that it was tainted by the ‘smell of murder’; others claimed that if you ate the flesh of a slaughtered animal, it might turn out to have been your reincarnated relative.8 Stirred up by such scriptures and scary folk tales about the risks of eating flesh, zealous lay Buddhists in China started to insist that acolytes should adopt a strictly meat-free diet.
