When an English sailor named Robert Knox found himself marooned in the highlands of Sri Lanka in 1659, he expected savagery. Instead, during two decades of captivity in the Kingdom of Kandy, he discovered a complex civilization caught in an eternal negotiation between compassion and appetite. Knox lived among the villagers, walked their jungle tracks, and documented a culinary landscape where morality was weighed on every plate.
His seventeenth-century account offers one of the most vivid historical windows into early modern Sinhala food culture. What Knox encountered was a society living out a profound paradox. On one side stood the martial pride of a culture tracing its mythic ancestry to a predatory lion. On the other stood the gentle Buddhist reverence for the cow and the ancient doctrine of non-violence.
To the Kandyan villager, virtue was inextricably bound up with diet. Knox observed that local people considered refraining from shedding blood as one of the highest spiritual virtues, ranking right alongside generous offerings to the Buddhist sangha. Plants and herbs were regarded as innocent sustenance, untouched by sin. Yet human nature frequently collided with religious ideals.
Knox watched as Kandyan hunters pursued wild boar with pit traps and blinded deer with fiery torches before shooting them down. Fish from rushing mountain rivers filled local cooking pots. Locals savored land monitor lizards as rare delicacies and occasionally hunted monkeys, even while recognizing that the act of killing left a heavy moral stain. Monks followed the classic monastic discipline, refusing to harm a creature themselves while quietly consuming whatever meat the lay community placed into their alms bowls.
Amid this varied diet, one line remained entirely uncrossable. Beef was abhorred. Knox recorded that eating cattle was viewed as an absolute abomination. Cows were seen as maternal creatures whose gift of milk sustained human life, making their slaughter an act of unforgivable cruelty. The Kandyans looked upon meat-loving European newcomers with open contempt, branding them beef-eating slaves.
This disgust toward bovine slaughter revealed a deep gulf between European and South Asian views on animal life. Portuguese and British arrivals viewed domestic animals primarily as resources for the table, whereas the Kandyan worldview tied animals directly into the cosmic wheel of karma and rebirth. When forest leeches latched onto travelers along muddy jungle paths, Knox noted with astonishment that villagers often let them drink their fill. The journey was troublesome enough without stopping every minute, and people believed that enduring the bite was an act of mercy that fostered good merit.
This delicate balance between piety and survival also echoed through the island’s ritual life. Kandyan society recognized that blood and flesh belonged to dark, unpredictable forces. In exorcism ceremonies and black magic rites, demons and fierce deities were thought to crave flesh, while elevated, benevolent gods accepted only pure fruit, milk, and grain. When villagers needed to appease wrathful spirits without violating Buddhist commandments, they turned to ingenious substitutions, offering crushed limes, mustard seed, and fiery red peppers in place of living flesh.
A groom preparing to wear the aristocratic regalia of the Kandyan court was expected to observe a strict vegetarian diet for a full week before his wedding. Embodying royal dignity meant embodying Buddhist restraint. Purity had a taste, and that taste was plant-based.
Centuries later, the observations left by Robert Knox remain strikingly modern. The Kingdom of Kandy was not a paradise of uniform vegetarian asceticism, nor was it an indifferent carnivore society. It was a culture wrestling honestly with the moral weight of what it ate, balancing the reality of the daily hunt against a timeless aspiration to do no harm.
BIBLIOGRAPHIC INFORMATION
- Title: Vegetarianism and Animal Ethics in Contemporary Buddhism
- Series: Routledge Studies in Asian Religion and Philosophy (Volume 16)
- Author: James John Stewart (Research Associate, University of Tasmania, Australia)
- Publisher: Routledge (Taylor & Francis Group)
- Publication Locations: 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN; 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
- Publication Year: 2016 (First published 2016; Library of Congress cataloging-in-publication date 2015)
- Edition: First Edition (Hardback and eBook)
- ISBN: 978-1-138-80216-2 (hbk); 978-1-315-75439-0 (ebk)
- Library of Congress Classification: BQ4570.V43S85 2015 | Dewey Decimal: 294.3’5693–dc23
- Historical Period Covered: c. 5th Century BCE (Early Vedic & Canonical Pāli Buddhism), Medieval/Colonial Sri Lanka (Portuguese 1505–1658, Dutch, British periods 1796–1948), Buddhist Revivalist era (1870s–1890s), to Contemporary Post-War Sri Lanka (specifically post-2009 to 2015).
- Main Subject Areas: Buddhist Ethics, Theravāda Buddhism, Ethnography of Sri Lanka, Animal Ethics & Liberation, Sociology of Religion, Dietary Ethics & Vegetarianism, Traditional Āyurvedic Medicine, Ethno-Religious Nationalism, Halāl Abolitionism, Protestant Buddhism.
(Ch. 1, pp. 41–50)