Such foods are invented by ingenious processors who knead soybean powder and flour and shape them into something that looks like cooked ham, chicken or shredded pork to cater to an increasingly large vegetarian clientele. Some suppliers add beef or pork to their products to make them smell and taste like real meat. These taste-like-meat vegetarian foods are enjoying very brisk sales.

Police are threatening to have vegetarian food fakers prosecuted, while cheated customers are up in arms against “black-hearted merchants” who purposely make them violate their cardinal Buddhist commandment of ahimsa. Buddhists are taught not to kill any sentient being, or anything which lives. Meat is made available by killing animals. To eat meat therefore is to encourage the killing. As a result, very pious Buddhists become strict vegetarians. Not so pious Buddhists are vegetarians at breakfast every day or only on the first and fifteenth days of every moon on the Chinese lunar calendar, while most self-proclaimed Buddhists do not mind partaking of meat.

Buddhists, pious and not so pious alike, are rightfully indignant. Cheating shouldn't be condoned, but they have to be reminded that Muslims, even the most pious of them, do not think they have committed any sin even if they eat religiously tabooed pork unwittingly. The followers of Allah believe those who give them pork to eat either purposely or by mistake are sinful. Many Japanese Buddhist priests have no compunction about enjoying meat and wine offered as alms.

On the other hand, meat teetotalers must know they may be considered hypocrites by other people. If they are not, they should forgive the fakers who know they still crave real meat and turn out foods looking and tasting like meat. Don't the partakers violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the teachings of the Buddha by eating foods shaped to look like chicken or pork?

At any rate, the cheated customers should feel no sense of sin, though black-hearted merchants have to be prosecuted for fraud.