If someone says they have any reason to be a vegetarian, whether it’s love and care for animals, or anything else, this person is not enlightened, not yet.

Enlightenment is the absolute freedom. It is beyond morality, love or caring. The freedom of an enlightened person is absolute. If he wants to kill and eat an animal, he will do so, without any feelings of guilt.

Now, historically, all enlightened masters became almost strictly vegan, even though they have no moral issue eating meat and they have no problem with people eating meat. Why is that?

It’s simple. It becomes disgusting, offputting. It becomes unpalatable. Very hard to eat. Not food. Nauseating.

Speaking from my own experience, first beaf became nasty, then fish, after some time chicken started smelling like flesh, milk went away around the same time as chicken, cheeses started smelling like rotten milk (which they are), the last thing from dairy that remained was mozzarella, and then the day came when mozarella started to taste nasty, too.

I would love to continue eating chicken and dairy, I just can’t. It’s not fun to find something to eat in the world where it’s considered food and it’s everywhere. The world’s taste is unpalatable to me - and that includes sauces, spices and all sorts of stuff that people use to make food taste exhuberant, mostly because they don’t know what food really tastes like. It’s plenty delicious on its own, without all this stuff. People just can’t taste it because all the attention is constantly in one’s head. So, most food in restaurants is just too much for me, even if it’s vegetarian. It’s like listening to heavy metal.

I can still occasionally enjoy one bite of blandly cooked chicken (but rarely), and sometimes put chicken pate on my bread. It’s not about morality, it’s strictly about taste and what your body wants and communicates to you through it.

Also, the same thing happened with sugar. Everything with lots of sugar in it tastes horrible. So I don’t eat cookies, cakes, granola bars, all that stuff. I can have a glass of coke maybe every couple of weeks, but generally the same goes down with all sugary drinks - bleh. I can have a bite or two, but anything sugary in any non-trivial quantity is just nasty. Need to wash it down with tons of water and can’t wait to get rid of the aftertaste. Processed food is nasty too, as a rule. So while I watched documentaries about the dangers of sugar, animal food or processed food before, all of it went away on its own relatively quickly. The body knows what it needs very well, much better than you, hehe.