Before the Word ‘Vegan’ Existed
Nae Vegan ShoesThe word is younger than many of our grandparents. In November 1944, Donald Watson met with five other non-dairy vegetarians to found a society, and they needed a name for themselves. They turned down ‘dairyban’, ‘vitan’ and ‘benevore’ before settling on vegan — in Watson’s words, ‘the first three and last two letters of “vegetarian”’.
But the idea is neither as young as the word nor as English. A look at a few traditions outside the West is enough to show it. Long before 1944, poets, emperors, monks and cooks across Asia, the Middle East and Africa had argued for meals without animals, written laws about them and given them names of their own.
One honest note before we start. Not all of these were vegan in our sense: some were about compassion, some about purity, some about devotion. Sometimes the reason was a belief in metempsychosis, the passage of the soul from one body to another, as among the Orphics of ancient Greece. Claiming them all as ‘vegan before vegan’ would be its own kind of appropriation or, worse, a plain anachronism with no real link to what we mean by the word. What they share is the plate — and, surprisingly often, some of the reasoning.
A name for it, in other languages
English was late to the vocabulary. Several languages already had a word for a meal without animals, and some still put it on the menu.
| Word | Where | What it leaves out |
|---|---|---|
| 素 (sù), 齋 (zhāi) | China | Meat and fish — and, in Buddhist practice, the pungent alliums too: garlic, onions and their relatives |
| 精進 (shōjin) | Japan | Meat and fish as a rule, and onion, leek and garlic as well |
| เจ (jay) | Thailand | Meat, dairy, garlic and onions |
| chay | Vietnam | Meat, fish, eggs and dairy, in Buddhist cooking |
| ጾም (tsom) | Ethiopia | All animal foods, on fasting days |
None of these is an exact synonym for vegan, and the reasons behind them are religious as often as ethical. But several are many centuries older than the English word. Thai jay arrived with Chinese communities — it comes from the Chinese 齋 — and Vietnam’s chay is still eaten by many on the first and fifteenth days of the lunar month. Chinese even rewired an old word along the way: 葷 (hūn), which today means meat dishes, originally meant the pungent plants that Buddhist and Daoist rules listed alongside meat and wine as things to avoid.
India: the oldest arguments in verse
Some of the earliest surviving arguments for leaving animals alone are Indian. One of the oldest Jain scriptures, the Ācārāṅga Sūtra, makes the case in a sentence that has never needed updating: ‘All beings are fond of life, like pleasure, hate pain, shun destruction, like life, long to live. To all life is dear.’
Then there is the Tirukkuṛaḷ, the great Tamil book of ethics, which scholars date anywhere between the last centuries BCE and the fifth century CE. It gives a whole chapter of ten couplets to abstaining from meat, and every one of them argues against eating it. One ranks abstaining above religious ritual: ‘To abstain from the killing and eating of living things is better than to perform a thousand sacrifices in the sacrificial fire.’ Another answers a familiar excuse, that somebody else did the killing, by pointing out that nobody would sell meat if nobody wanted to eat it. And one goes straight to the point:
“If a man can only realise to himself the agony and pain suffered by other living beings, he would not desire to eat flesh-meat.”
Tirukkuṛaḷ 257, translated by V. V. S. Aiyar
China: a sutra, an emperor and a cuisine
Chinese Buddhist vegetarianism rests on a single line of the Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra, translated into Chinese in the early fifth century: 夫食肉者，斷大慈種 — ‘eating meat cuts off the seed of great compassion’.
Even so, it took an emperor to make it the rule. Early Buddhist monastic discipline never banned meat outright: monks lived on alms, and they could eat meat they were given as long as they had not seen, heard or suspected that the animal was killed for them — a rule that many monks in Sri Lanka, South-East Asia and Tibet still follow. In the late 510s, Emperor Wu of Liang gathered well over a thousand Buddhist monastics and told them to give up meat and wine. They objected, with some justice, that the monastic code did not forbid meat. He answered with the sutras, called further assemblies and won. Chinese monasteries have been vegetarian ever since.
Daoism had rules of its own. A scripture probably written in the fourth century already forbids cooking the six domestic animals, and by the eighth century Daoist rule books banned wine, meat and the five pungent vegetables. The monastic Quanzhen order, whose White Cloud Temple in Beijing is now the seat of the Chinese Taoist Association, keeps its monastics vegetarian to this day.
What followed was a cuisine, and two of its staples were Chinese inventions. Tofu, dòufu (豆腐), ‘curdled beans’, is credited by legend to Liu An, a Han-dynasty prince of Huainan, in today’s Anhui province, in the second century BCE. It first appears in writing in the tenth century and became popular under the Song dynasty (960–1279). Wheat gluten — miànjīn (麵筋) in Chinese, seitan to Western shoppers, a name coined in Japan in 1961 — has been documented in China since the sixth century: the earliest mention usually cited is in the Qimin Yaoshu, a farming encyclopedia by Jia Sixie, an official from Shandong. Buddhists took to it as a substitute for meat.
By the Song dynasty, a thousand years ago, Chinese cities had vegetarian restaurants, and their kitchens served imitation roast goose and other mock meats made from plants — among the earliest meat substitutes on record.
Japan: an emperor, a cook and a storyteller
In 675 the emperor Tenmu banned the eating of beef, horse, dog, chicken and monkey during the farming months, from April to September. It was not vegetarianism — it covered certain animals in certain months — but it began a retreat from meat in Japanese public life that lasted, unevenly, until 1872, when the emperor ate meat at New Year and the custom began to fall away.
Buddhist temples went much further. Their cooking, shōjin ryōri, is vegetarian as a rule and leaves out onion, leek and garlic as well. Its classic text is a cookery manual: in 1237 the Zen master Dōgen wrote Tenzo Kyōkun, ‘Instructions for the Cook’, which treats cooking with attention as part of the practice.
Kenji Miyazawa (1896–1933) — poet, Buddhist and vegetarian — wrote a comic story, ‘The Vegetarian Festival’, set at an international vegetarian congress. The delegates divide into a ‘sympathy’ faction, who abstain out of compassion, and a ‘prevention’ faction, who do it for their health, while their opponents attack with arguments from population theory, animal psychology and comparative anatomy. In the final twist, the opponents turn out to have been hired actors. The arguments will sound familiar to anyone who has eaten a vegan meal at a family dinner.
The Middle East: a poet, a lawsuit and an ending
Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī (973–1057), the blind Syrian poet, gave up meat, fish, milk, eggs and honey from around the age of thirty — vegan in everything but the word. He put it into verse: ‘Do not unjustly eat what the water has given up, and do not desire as food the flesh of slaughtered animals.’ The same poem goes on to spare the milk that mothers meant for their young, the eggs of unsuspecting birds and the honey that bees gathered for themselves rather than for us.
When a Fatimid official in Cairo challenged him by letter to justify himself, al-Maʿarrī wrote back. The exchange survives, and was published in English by the scholar D. S. Margoliouth in 1902.
Earlier still, in tenth-century Basra, the anonymous scholars known as the Brethren of Purity wrote a fable in which the animals take humankind to court before the King of the Jinn. The ass, the horse and the ram testify to loads, beatings and slaughtered young. The humans win, narrowly — on the grounds that their species can produce saints — and the book makes clear that this is no licence for cruelty.
Ethiopia: the fast that happens to be vegan
For more than 200 days a year, devout members of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church — which counts over 40 per cent of Ethiopians — fast: no meat, no dairy, no eggs. The fasting table of lentils, chickpea stew and greens, all served on injera, is plant-based by definition.
Here the honest note matters most. As a recent study puts it, ‘veganism names what food is while tsom names what food does’. Tsom (ጾም) is a spiritual fast, a discipline of the self, not an ethical position on animals. It is a tradition to learn from, not to claim.
What the old words tell us
Put side by side, these traditions disagree about almost everything: gods, rebirth, purity, kings. They reached the same plate by different roads — non-harm in India, compassion in Chinese Buddhism, pity in a Syrian poet, discipline in an Ethiopian fast and, in other traditions, a belief in the transmigration of souls.
Our own name, NAE, stands for No Animal Exploitation — a modern way of saying what Tamil couplets, a Chinese sutra and a blind Syrian poet said long before us. In the coming weeks we will go back to Greece and Rome (the Orphics, the Pythagoreans, Lucretius, Seneca and others), and then forward to what modern literature did with the question.
