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1 Keywords in South Asian Studies, Ed. Rachel M. Dwyer Author: Parama Roy Vegetarianism Though It Is Commonplace to Regard Hindu

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1 Keywords in South Asian Studies, Ed. Rachel M. Dwyer Author: Parama Roy Vegetarianism Though It Is Commonplace to Regard Hindu Keywords in South Asian Studies, ed. Rachel M. Dwyer Author: Parama Roy Vegetarianism Though it is commonplace to regard Hindus as vegetarian and India as the land of vegetarianism from time immemorial, scholarship and social fact call both these axioms into question; moreover, they demonstrate that the very meaning of vegetarianism has historically been, and continues to be, a matter of considerable contestation and of historical and regional variation. The historical record demonstrates that members of the Harappan civilization, like the Vedic Aryans who succeeded them in northern India, were carnivorous, as were the Dravidian civilizations of southern India. The Vedas (1700-800 B.C.E.) and the Brahmanas (1500-800 B.C.E.), which are the earliest of the Sanskrit sacred texts, list dozens of animals, including bulls, barren cows, buffaloes, rams, and goats that were deemed fit for divine sacrifice, hospitality, and human consumption. Other texts, including the great religious epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata (committed to writing around 400 B.C.E.), the Arthashastra (a manual of statecraft dating from the reign of Chandragupta Maurya, around 300 B.C.E.), Panini=s Sanskrit grammar (800-350 B.C.E.), and the medical treatises of Susruta and Caraka (cast in their present form at the commencement of the Christian era) also provide considerable evidence of the widespread consumption of animal foods by members of all castes in the Hindu social order. In his detailed analysis of the materia medica of the Ayurvedic medical tradition, Francis Zimmermann has underlined the importance of therapeutic remediesBincluding raw blood and the flesh of predatory animalsBthat depend very materially upon the hunting, slaughter, and consumption of animals, and that are considered efficacious in direct proportion to the violence they entail. Zimmerman qualifies these observations in two important respects. He notes, first, the 1 2 importance of princely medicine and royal treatment in the texts of Caraka, Susruta, and their eleventh- and twelfth-century commentators; the emphasis on hunting and the consumption of game in the Ayurvedic catalogue of healing foods is thus produced for a social context in which violence is inseparable from the dharma (religious/social duty) of warriors or kings. He also draws attention to the equivocal character of Ayurvedic prescription, committed as it is to a violence that is impure and immoral even as it is necessary and therapeutic. This tension is sought to be reconciled by consecrating the meat that is to be consumed. Nonetheless Ayurveda is always classed as one of the lesser or more impure sciences by virtue of its association with violence, pragmatism, and materiality. The ambivalence about the violence of meat-eating that Zimmermann notes in the Ayurvedic texts is registered in a marked way in the dharmasastras (the later Hindu lawbooks), particularly in the Manusmriti (first century CE). The thirty verses of the Manusmriti devoted to meat-eating situate it quite explicitly with respect to jati/varna (caste) norms. Brahmans, Manu says, may eat the meat that is consecrated in sacrifice, an act that is morally distinct from killing. He also outlines the doctrine of apaddharma (deftly translated by A.K. Ramanujan as Aemergency ethics@), which permits Brahmans to subsist even on the abominable ox-flesh and dog-flesh diet of Candalas and Svapakas (outcastes to the Hindu caste hierarchy; the latter term translates as Adog-cooker@) if it is necessary to preserve life. But, at the same time as it lists the permissible occasions and modes for the consumption of meat, the Manusmriti also extols the practice of ahimsa (non-injury, non-killing). The emergence of some prohibitions on meat-eating for caste Hindus, is, however, of earlier date, and tied to the cultivation of a renunciatory and ascetic ethic among Brahmans in 3 particular in the wake of a period of great social transformations in northern India. It was the combined influence of the heretical sects, Buddhism and Jainism, that led to the eventual demise of Vedic animal sacrifice and to the dissemination of a vegetarian diet to significant sectors of the population. Buddhist rationalism, combined with its stringent critique of Brahmanical ritual, especially animal sacrifice, prompted a significant re-evaluation of Brahmanical codes of proper conduct. While the Buddha was strongly opposed to animal sacrifice, he rejected a suggestion by his cousin Devadatta that vegetarianism be imposed upon all monks, urging them instead to accept without complaint the food offered them by householders rather than fetishizing any form of dietary purity. While monks undertook a vow of nonviolence, poverty, and virtuous conduct, they, along with other followers of the Buddha, were permitted animal flesh provided they had not seen, heard, or suspected the slaughter. Thus, while vegetarianism was not necessarily enjoined upon Buddhists, meat-eating was hedged with cautions. Vegetarianism became a source of some controversy at a later period in the Buddhist monastic community, with the Mahayana school (of the first century CE) laying considerable stress upon the abjuration of the flesh of animals; this school was to enjoy some popularity in India and Sri Lanka before taking hold decisively in Tibet, China, Japan, and Mongolia. The Lankavatara Sutra (a text that exists in several versions and was most likely compiled in 350-400 CE), which records the Buddha=s teachings in Sri Lanka, has a chapter that is severely deprecatory of meat-eating. The Theravadin Buddhism that is currently followed in Sri Lanka does not impose dietary restrictions upon its followers, though there are monks and lay people who are practising vegetarians. In India, it was in the emperor Asoka=s reign (269-232 B.C.E.) that the doctrines of ahimsa popularized by Buddhism found their greatest efflorescence. Asoka is commonly 4 depicted in Buddhist chronicles as having undergone a sudden conversion to Buddhism (and to the doctrine of ahimsa) after the tremendous carnage of the battle of Kalinga (260 B.C.E.), by means of which he consolidated his reign over the subcontinent, though Romila Thapar suggests that his turn to ahimsa and to what he called Dhamma was slower, more politically expedient, and more ethically complex than the conversion narrative would suggest, and that these orientations were not reducible to Buddhist doctrine alone. In any event, Buddhism was for Asoka a social and intellectual movement in addition to being a religious belief. His principles, as defined in his Major and Minor Rock Edicts and the Pillar Edicts, expressed themselves in a concern for all living things and a turn away from the taking of life. Though he did not renounce either war or capital punishment entirely, some of his edicts were critical of war, conquest, and rule by force. He abandoned the royal hunt, criticized blood sacrifices, and stringently curtailed the cooking of meat in the royal kitchen, permitting only the daily slaughter of Atwo peacocks and a deer, and the deer not invariably.@ He added to the list of protected birds and beasts, though he neither forbade hunting outright nor insisted upon the vegetarianism of his subjects. His example and his edicts were a powerful influence upon a Brahmanical Hinduism thrown into crisis and rapidly transforming itself in response to the challenges of a number of heterodox sects. K.T. Achaya notes that the ritual animal sacrifice was eventually cast aside or sublimated by the major schools of Brahmanical thought, with vegetable and flour substitutes taking the place of the sacrificial animal. Even more far-reaching than Buddhism in its impact upon the diet of caste Hindus was Jainism, which came into its own at around the same time (the sixth century B.C.E.) that the 5 Buddha formulated his critique of Brahmanical Hinduism and instituted another path to salvation. Like other religious renunciants (including the Buddhists and the Ajivikas) of the sixth century CE, the Jains rebelled against the morality of Vedic animal sacrifice and against the Brahmanical establishment that enforced it, simultaneously sympathizing with the suffering of the sacrificial beast and guarding against the possibility of being eaten in turn in another life. (Gail Hinich Sutherland urges us to remember though that such a critique must be read not only in terms of a revolution in values but also in terms of sectarian strife and competition for royal patronage in ancient India.) While there is historical evidence of the consumption of meat, whether in the form of alms or in times of famine or sickness, by early Jain ascetics, the turn to vegetarianism was absolute by the early medieval period. Ahimsa, or the renunciation of violence, became central to Jainism. This took a predominantly dietary formBwar was not prohibited for Jain believers--and was stringently interpreted by renunciants and the lay community alike. The range of dietary prohibitions instituted by Jainism to minimise the destruction of any living beings was greater than that of any other religion of the subcontinent. Not only were meat, fish, and eggs forbidden, but also those vegetables and fruits whose consumption involved any potential violence; thus roots, bulbs, and tubers (which had to be wrenched forcibly out of the earth, causing injury to worms and insects), fruits and vegetables with numerous small seeds, unboiled or unfiltered water (which was teeming with countless minute life-forms), and honey were on the catalogue of forbidden foods. Onions and garlic, conventionally considered Ahot@ and passion-inducing foods in the Ayurvedic alimentary scheme, were also prohibited, as was eating after dark. The ascetic community, whether of the Digambara or the Shvetambara sect of Jainism, had to observe even stricter rules, fasting at 6 regular intervals, and covering the mouth and sweeping roadways to avoid ingesting or crushing tiny organisms by mistake.
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