The precept is held throughout the Buddhist world (Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana alike), as the foundation of moral conduct (sila), the first stage of the path. Its emphasis on intention distinguishes the Buddhist formulation from a bare prohibition: harm done knowingly and willingly carries the heaviest karmic weight. The value connects to Buddhist attitudes toward vegetarianism, warfare, and the treatment of animals, and it parallels the non-violence (ahimsa) central to the neighbouring Indian traditions of Hinduism and, most rigorously, Jainism, while Buddhism frames it as a voluntary training in compassion. Whether the precept requires vegetarianism has divided the tradition since its early centuries.
The Pali Canon records the Buddha permitting monks to eat meat under the threefold purity rule, so long as they had not seen, heard, or suspected that the animal was killed specifically for them, and he is said to have declined a proposal by his cousin Devadatta to make vegetarianism obligatory for the order. Several Mahayana texts, notably the Lankavatara Sutra, argue instead that eating any meat implicates the eater in killing and contradicts the compassion the precept requires, a position that shaped the strict vegetarianism common in Chinese and Vietnamese monastic Buddhism, while Theravada and Tibetan monastics have more often continued to eat meat obtained without direct participation in the killing.