The Role of Compassion in Early Buddhist Arguments for Vegetarianism

ABSTRACT This article examines the role of compassion for animals in the earliest Buddhist texts to proscribe meat eating. I argue that compassion features prominently as a justification for vegetarianism in these texts but that it is typically framed as benefiting the practitioner as much as—if not more than—the animals themselves. To clarify how compassion operates in these texts, I propose a new typology: subject-oriented compassion, which emphasizes karmic consequences and the personal benefits of cultivating compassion, and object-oriented compassion, which centers animal suffering and enjoins audiences to have empathy for animals. This approach encourages us to understand Buddhist compassion not as a monolithic concept but as a capacious category encompassing multiple orientations toward sentient life.