On a similar note, as of 2000, no Buddhist country prohibited the sale or consumption of alcohol, though in Sri Lanka Buddhist revivalists unsuccessfully attempted to get a full prohibition passed in 1956.
In his field studies in Thailand in the 1960s, Terwiel found that villagers did tend to kill insects, but were reluctant and self-conflicted with regard to killing larger animals.
In some traditional communities, such as in Kandal Province in pre-war Cambodia, as well as Burma in the 1980s, it was uncommon for Buddhists to slaughter animals, to the extent that meat had to be bought from non-Buddhists.
For example, in Cambodia in the 1990s and 2000s, standards with regard to sexual restraint were greatly relaxed.
More recently, in a 1997 survey in Thailand, only 13.8% of the respondents indicated they adhered to the five precepts in their daily lives, with the fourth and fifth precept least likely to be adhered to.
Psychologist Vanchai Ariyabuddhiphongs did studies in the 2000s and 2010s in Thailand and discovered that people who did not adhere to the five precepts more often tended to believe that money was the most important goal in life, and would more often pay bribes than people who did adhere to the precepts.
On a similar note, as of 2000, no Buddhist country prohibited the sale or consumption of alcohol, though in Sri Lanka Buddhist revivalists unsuccessfully attempted to get a full prohibition passed in 1956.
For example, in Cambodia in the 1990s and 2000s, standards with regard to sexual restraint were greatly relaxed.
Teachers like the Dalai Lama and Shengyan have rejected forms of protest like self-immolation, as well as other acts of self-harming or fasting as forms of protest. Although capital punishment goes against the first precept, as of 2001, many countries in Asia still maintained the death penalty, including Sri Lanka, Thailand, China and Taiwan.
Psychologist Vanchai Ariyabuddhiphongs did studies in the 2000s and 2010s in Thailand and discovered that people who did not adhere to the five precepts more often tended to believe that money was the most important goal in life, and would more often pay bribes than people who did adhere to the precepts.
And in the 2010s, the Supreme Sangha Council in Thailand ran a nationwide program called "The Villages Practicing the Five Precepts", aiming to encourage keeping the precepts, with an extensive classification and reward system. In many Western Buddhist organizations, the five precepts play a major role in developing ethical guidelines.
As of 2015, several training programs made explicit use of the five precepts as secular, ethical guidelines.
The precepts have been connected with utilitarianist, deontological and virtue approaches to ethics, though by 2017, such categorization by western terminology had mostly been abandoned by scholars.
As of 2017, many scholars of Buddhism no longer think it is useful to try to fit Buddhist ethics into a Western philosophical category. === Comparison with human rights === Keown has argued that the five precepts are very similar to human rights, with regard to subject matter and with regard to their universal nature.
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