In my *About Me* post, I wrote about where my questions began. This time, I want to explain how those questions eventually became connected with Buddhism.

In Japan, there is a cultural practice called *itadakimasu*. It is something we say before eating a meal.

The word *itadakimasu* is a polite form of “to receive.” Originally, it is an expression of gratitude toward the people who prepared or provided the food.

But *itadakimasu* also carries another important meaning.

It is often explained as an expression of gratitude toward the food itself. In other words, it expresses gratitude toward the lives that are consumed to nourish us: *I receive your life.*

Alongside this idea of *itadakimasu*, there is another value commonly expressed in Japan: **animals and plants are equally precious.**

Plants are alive too. Therefore, when it comes to life, animals and plants are equally valuable. We should eat both with gratitude.

As a beautiful moral value, this understanding of *itadakimasu* is very important to many Japanese people.

But when I began speaking publicly as a vegan, I repeatedly saw meat eaters use *itadakimasu* and the idea that “animals and plants are equally precious” as arguments against veganism.

To readers in the English-speaking world, the claim that animals and plants are equally precious may sound rather strange.

There is even a joke along these lines:

> “I can’t stand vegans. They keep saying that cutting meat is better for the planet, but they completely ignore the silent screams of the lettuce.”

But in Japan, this is not merely an absurd joke.

It is seriously presented as a moral argument.

If eating animals is wrong, why is eating plants acceptable?

Aren’t animals and plants equally precious?

Why is killing an animal wrong while killing a plant is not?

Arguments like these appear frequently in Japanese discussions about veganism.

But do Japanese people actually believe that the lives of animals and plants are equal?

The answer is clearly **no**.

Japan has a law concerning the welfare and management of animals. There is no equivalent law protecting plants.

If Japanese people truly believed that animal and plant lives were equally precious, there should be plant-rights activists demanding:

**“If we have laws protecting animals, we should have laws protecting plants too!”**

At the very least, we should expect such activists to exist on a scale comparable to vegan activists.

As far as I know, they do not exist in Japan.

In other words, Japanese people do not actually treat animal and plant lives as equally precious.

So I began asking myself why the ideas of *itadakimasu* and “animals and plants are equally precious” exist in Japan in the first place.

It did not take me long to find what seemed to me to be the answer.

There is an image often associated with the Japanese virtue of *itadakimasu*: people sitting before a meal with their palms pressed together.

You can see that they are putting their hands together.

This is a Buddhist gesture.

Japan has a long Mahayana Buddhist tradition, and many Japanese Buddhists eat meat in their everyday lives. But, as you probably know, Buddhism includes a precept against killing.

This led me to a provocative conclusion.

The values expressed through *itadakimasu* and the idea that “animals and plants are equally precious” function as a way for Buddhists to justify eating meat despite the Buddhist precept against killing.

The same way of thinking then spread more broadly among Japanese people who needed to resolve the tension involved in eating meat.

That was why I began studying Buddhism.

At first, my purpose was to criticize Buddhist priests who justified their own meat eating despite the precept against killing.

When their values were challenged, I often saw them respond by introducing difficult Buddhist concepts and using them to obscure the issue.

I thought that if I wanted to challenge those arguments, I needed to understand Buddhism myself.

So I began studying it.

But as I learned more about Buddhism, I began to experience a strange feeling.

The problem I had been thinking about and the problem the Buddha had been thinking about seemed to overlap.

That realization changed the direction of my work.

From that point on, I threw myself into the study of Buddhism.

The results of that research eventually became my book, *Buddhism: 2,500 Years of Misunderstanding*, so I will not repeat the argument here.