untouchables, are pretty much allowed to do whatever they want.
Diet is determined almost entirely by caste.Vegetarianism and Ayurvedic Medicine
At around the same time as they are codifying all of these food
regulations, a young man named Siddhartha Gautama (later
Buddha), noticed all the suffering in the world and decided to go
wandering on a spiritual quest to fi nd the truth—something not
uncommon in these days. It involved yogic concentration and
severe asceticism, trying presumably to recognize the atman, or
world soul.
During his travels, it occurred to him that the fact that everyone
is always trying so hard to be successful—so vehemently attached
to the self and their own prosperity—only creates more suffering
because you never really get what you want. Instead, why not
just stop caring about what you eat? Don’t starve yourself, and
don’t stuff yourself. Eating enough to live is a concept called the
Middle Way. Most importantly, the key to relieving yourself and others from
suffering is by agreeing not to engage in any violence whatsoever.
The truly enlightened will “break the chain of causation”—
in other words, break the chain of reincarnation. They will
achieve nothingness, or nirvana. Therefore, Buddhists become
strict vegetarians. Another vegetarian religion that appears about the same time as
Buddhism, Jainism, has survived in India. The Jains are people who
avoid even the accidental killing of bugs. The Hindu Brahmans also
adopted vegetarianism and later introduced it through missionaries
to southern India, which is still for the most part vegetarian to
this day. Ayurvedic medicine, which is the science or knowledge of
longevity, arose probably sometime A.D. but claims to be based
on much older traditions, such as the Caraka-samhita medical text.