PhronesisWe apply the Displacement Framework to veganism understood not as a single movement but as a cross-cultural process — a recurring pattern in human civilization by which communities construct plant-based or harm-minimizing food practices grounded in cosmological, ethical, or health principles. The analysis traces this pattern across four major traditions: Ital (Rastafari) — natural, living food as daily resistance to Babylon's colonial food system; Jain ahimsa — Mahavira's most rigorous formalization of non-harm across all living beings, with a monk-layperson gradient from maximal to practical minimization; Buddhist vegetarianism — the Mahayana doctrine of Buddha-nature universalizing moral status, the Lankavatara Sutra's explicit compassion argument, versus the Theravada three-purities permissive rule; and Western veganism as process — Donald Watson's 1944 founding language ('seeks to exclude') acknowledging direction rather than perfection.
The process paradox is formalized as a theorem: S0_ahimsa (universal non-harm) is asymptotically approachable but never reached in a non-vegan world; this is not a failure but the defining feature of process ethics. The ahimsa ground state S0_ahimsa is defined as non-harm as the organizing consumption principle across traditions. Nine propositions cover: cross-cultural convergence on S0_ahimsa (P1), Ital as displacement resistance against Babylon food systems (P2), Jain ahimsa as maximal non-displacement formalization (P3), Buddhist vegetarianism as compassion process across Mahayana and Theravada (P4), Western vegan process and the harm-reduction framing (P5), cross-cultural convergences and divergences (P6), the process paradox as asymptotic theorem (P7), cumulative Phi_process across spiritual, bodily, political, and relational domains (P8), and return paths through living tradition transmission (P9).