[gymnAnemoe]

The thing about the Buddha's teaching on karma (and intention) is this: karma is the action that results from intention -- there's good karma, bad karma, mixed or neutral karma, and the karma that ends karma -- that last one is the intention to study and practice in order to go all the way to the point where everything that needs to be understood has been seen and understood first hand.

The process is one of seeing in detail how karma works, and seeing enough of its workings that it makes us sick of that sort of behavior so we just stop doing it. Bit by bit. Keep examining our lives in terms of what we're taught; see through the nonsense; sick of the nonsense... stop doing it. Over and over until we've removed all the nonsense from every aspect of our lives -- and don't ever stop looking at our behavior so it doesn't creep back in.

But the main point here is that the idea is to end karma. karma is a bad thing; even good karma is bad for you. But we can't just learn a bunch of rules and stop karma that way. karma gets produced by the less-than-ideal intention that is created from our ignorance of why we do what we do.

Once you've stopped karma, then whether you're a vegetarian or not isn't the question. (actually by that point there won't be questions but I'll pretend there are) The question will be: do you see what you are doing? are you aware of why you are doing it? The actions that result from well examined intentions will continue to be non-karma-producing actions. (That's the theory anyway.)

Over the course of examining our lives and recognizing a lot of normally unquestioned behavior that comes from normally unnoticed assumptions about who and what we are, we change; the intention behind our behavior changes. Not because we force ourselves to Do The Right Things, but just because we are seeing things more clearly. If we are persistent and have long enough to apply ourselves to that practice, eventually we replace all the old imperfectly functioning intentions with *new* and *improved* versions.

The great thing is that because it is a process -- I suspect there will have been very few cases of instant enlightenment followed immediately by totally clear intention -- it is something we can all benefit from every step of the way. We don't even have to set a goal of Total Enlightenment or Complete Escape From Rebirth to achieve the goal (it's probably actually helpful to avoid setting such goals)... just keep practicing and see if life doesn't get a lot less confusing over the course of time.