Nowadays, many people advocate vegetarianism because it is a healthy eating pattern, but the meaning of "vegetarianism" in ancient China does not mean "no meat".
The original meaning of the word "vegetarian" means white, clean and simple, while the vegetarian diet in ancient China has three or two meanings: one refers to eating vegetables, and the other refers to eating all kinds of fruits and plants raw. According to China's traditional health preserving theory, people should not pursue a strong and fatty diet, and "blandness and tranquility" is the last word of health preserving. With the introduction of Buddhism, Liang Wudi, known as the "Bodhisattva Emperor" in the Northern and Southern Dynasties, made vegetarianism a prominent feature of Mahayana Buddhism in China. Liang Wudi is an important figure in the history of Buddhism in China. Former Buddhists, even in India where Buddha Sakyamuni was alive, allowed practitioners to eat "five clean meats". Since Liang Wudi, vegetarianism has become a major symbol of Han Buddhism in China.
Chinese medicine has always advocated a light vegetarian diet and less fat and thick taste. Sun Simiao, the drug king, said in "Prepare a Thousand Daughters and Wings": "If you eat it endlessly, people will suffer. So eating the freshest dishes should be kept simple. Diet should be frugal, too much greed will hurt the health, and the old man's stomach will lose weight, and if it is too much, it will not be needed. "When I say' keep the dishes fresh and simple', I mean that we must eat less meat, and don't hurt our health because we are greedy for delicious food, especially the elderly, who have weak digestion and absorption functions. Think twice before eating.
The Song Dynasty was an era of highly developed culture in China. According to Tokyo Dream of China and Liang Dream, there were vegetarian restaurants specializing in vegetarian dishes in Bianjing in the Northern Song Dynasty and Lin 'an in the Southern Song Dynasty. There are more than 100 kinds of foods recorded in Lin Hong's "Shan Ju Qing Gong", most of which are vegetarian, including flowers, medicines, fruits and bean products. It is also the first time to record the imitation meat at that time, such as "fake fried fish", "winning meat buns" and "vegetarian steamed chicken".
During the Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties, the development of vegetarianism became more and more prosperous, and the records about vegetarianism in various documents were also very rich. According to the Traffic History of China written by Japanese scholar Takehiko Jin Gong, Yuan Yin, a monk, brought China's vegetarian cooking skills when he visited Japan in the late Ming Dynasty, and named it "vegetarian cooking", which integrated the superb spiritual cultivation of Buddhism into daily life. In the late Qing Dynasty, Xue had a vegetarian monograph "An Introduction to Vegetarianism", which described more than 200 kinds of vegetarians, and vegetarians had many choices.