They eat some meat, not necessarily tons of it. They need to eat meat to
survive the harsh environment. Since they are buddhists they are not
supposed to kill. In some place there are Muslim butchers, but there
aren't a lot of Muslims in Tibet, so in many places the local lama will
give special permission to one family to do slaughtering for the benefit
of the neighborhood. They eat a lot of yogurt and butter. They also eat
a lot of barley and have a lot of health problems, probably because of
it. There's a fair amount of diabetes, heart disease, high blood
pressure, bad teeth, and tons of other problems that go untreated and
keep them from living very long, in general. They've had relatively
little time to adapt to grain diets. The Tibetans living in India eat a
lot of rice and have even worse health problems, although better health
care than the ones still living in Tibet. They eat big bowls of white
rice at every meal. As far as tantric buddhism is concerned, the ritual
meat consumption is symbolic, as is the alcohol. These are sometimes
represented by token amounts, or larger amounts, but are not needed at
all since they can just be visualized or represented symbolically. There
is no actual animal sacrifice.

Dean Pistilli wrote:
>
> Actually, Tibets did and still do eat a lot of meat. They love their
> meat in fact.. and why not, since in the Himalayas you won't last long
> on sprouts and plants. They take advantage of hanging up a yak carcass,
> drying the meat out etc. Especially since meat rarely goes off there.
>
> The Tantric form of Buddhism that Tibet took up also involves a lot of
> meat eating in its rituals and other "non buddhist" elements such as
> appeasing God forms, wrathful dieties etc. (though modern influences are
> forcing Tibetan Buddhists to abandon many of these elements- the Dalai
> Lama is also more geared to the new "vegetarian" thing and aims at
> taking out many of the older tantric meat practices).
> Its no co-incidence Vajrayana took off in Tibet and died out everywhere
> else. The indigenous religion of Tibet- Bon also cntains much appeasing
> of spirits with meat sacrafice.
>
> The media popularized "Buddhism" of bean sprouts and flowers is more
> common in South East Asia where a vegetarian diet is POSSIBLE due to
> climate, but still not followed 100%.. in fact many communities believe
> in eating whatever is offered into the begging bowl.
> The only form of Buddhism which strives fanatically not to eat meat is
> the Chinese form which started around 1000 years ago only, and
> incorporates the use of soy and wheat gluten into it.. going as far as
> making "meat lookalike" foods such as 'mock chicken' and fake 'BBQ
> pork'. Japanese temples which I visited often serve fish. Again, this
> form of Buddhism is very recent.
>
> reg.,
> Dean, Oz.
>
> >>
> Wonder if he practices NeanderZen :-) I read somewhere also that
> even though many Buddhists are vegetarians he over many years
> has regularly eaten some meat on advice from doctors.
> >>