nirvanablue@my-deja.com wrote:
>The two religious groups who influenced vegetarianism in India were the
>Buddhists and the Jains...who both spoke out against animal slaughter
>and meat eating and its practice by the Vedic followers who before that
>time consumed meat and sacrificed animals.

Exactly. The vegetarian issue was presumably first brought up by the
Jains, who taught "ahimsa paramo dharmah", the nonviolence as the
highest dharma.
Also, the theory of reincarnation, in the form taught by Prabhupada,
is not Vedic; actually, if one reads Mahabharata, one will get a
completely different picture: Vyasa believed that one goes to either
some sort of heaven or some sort of hell, determined by one's deeds in
life, and that reincarnation is a very peripheral issue - if one is
reborn, it is maybe twice, certainly not all the time. The idea of
perpetual rebirth (samsara), as painted on he HK pictures, is
completely Buddhist, the only modification to the Buddhist theory is
the form of salvation. The Buddhist theory is even more coherent than
Prabhupada's. Buddha taught that there is no self (atman) and that the
perception of self is the results of samskaras (impressions), vasanas
(subtle desires) and karmasayas (karmic seedlings). Once the illusion
is broken by the right conduct, one perceives only nirvana, as the
supreme reality that is beyond the definitions of existence and
nonexistence. It makes far more sense than the heaven with cows and
bhaktas - Buddha would say that such a heaven is merely a temporary
illusion, and a part of samsara.
In Buddhism, there is reincarnation, but not reincarnation of self,
but reincarnation of karman, the past deeds. The results of the deeds
are reincarnated, and the person is what is created when the illusion
of samskaras, vasanas and other trash is projected upon the reality.

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