Читать книгу The Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India - Tristram Stuart - Страница 12

Clown: What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild fowl?

Malvolio: That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird.

Clown: What think’st thou of his opinion?

Malvolio: I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve his opinion.

Clown: Fare thee well. Remain thou still in darkness: thou shalt hold th’ opinion of Pythagoras ere I will allow of thy wits; and fear to kill a woodcock, lest thou dispossess the soul of thy grandam. Fare thee well.

William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, IV. ii

While meat-eating Christians fended off the vegetarian schism at home, another force was gathering strength that would assail them with even greater intensity. Having accustomed themselves to thinking of Europe as the pinnacle of humanity, travellers were shocked to find in India a thriving religion which had been sustained in a pristine form since well before – and virtually oblivious to – the invention of Christianity. The discovery of a people following an unbroken tradition of vegetarianism and exercising an extreme moral responsibility towards animals radically challenged European ideas about the relationship between man and nature. The stories of Indians living at peace with the animal kingdom were imaginatively merged with Christian traditions of prelapsarianism and Puritanism, and were a catalyst of Europe’s seventeenth-century vegetarian renaissance. This neglected movement in European history profoundly affected some of the period’s best-known figures and has had a lasting influence on Western concepts of nature.

On arrival in India, European travellers were astonished when they noticed that the modern ‘Brahmins’ – the Hindu priest caste, custodians of the Sanskrit scriptures – were the direct descendants of the ancient ‘Brachmanes’ encountered by Alexander the Great 2,000 years earlier. When the erudite Italian aristocrat, Pietro della Valle, encountered naked, dreadlocked, ash-smothered ‘Yogis’ with painted foreheads on his travels to India in the 1620s, he affirmed with confidence that ‘There is no doubt but these are the ancient Gymnosophists so famous in the world … to whom Alexander the Great sent Onesicritus to consult with them’.¹ For travellers and readers alike – brought up on the primordial antiquity of the Bible – this was a disorientating realisation.

Merchants were excited by the trade in Indian diamonds, cotton and spices but thinkers all over Europe became obsessed with unlocking the jealously guarded secrets of India’s strange and wonderful religions.² Missionaries were having a tough time getting Indians interested in Christianity, but Europeans at home were fascinated by Hinduism. Inevitably, Christian writing about India was distorted by religious bigotry and underwritten by Europe’s nascent political agenda, but some seventeenth-century travellers examined Indian culture with remarkably open minds and even downright admiration. Enthusiastic descriptions were full of fantasies and projections too, but some aspects of Indian culture managed to penetrate the barriers of inter-cultural communication.³ Readers at home developed such an insatiable craving for genuine Eastern knowledge that ideas taken from Indian philosophy were incorporated into debates about religion, science, history, human nature and ethics. At times, Hindu culture appeared so awesome that it shook Europe’s self-centredness to its core.

The seventeenth-century ‘discovery’ of Indian vegetarianism was an astoundingly fertile cross-cultural encounter, but it was built upon an ancient history of passionate curiosity. Even before Alexander the Great reached India in 327 BC, its vegetarian philosophers were renowned in the ancient Greek world.⁴ According to the historians whom Alexander took on his military expedition, the moment the Greek army arrived in the ancient university town of Taxila (now in Pakistan), Alexander despatched his messenger Onesicritus to find the famous ‘gymnosophists’, or ‘naked philosophers’. In a legendary episode, which came to epitomise the meeting of East and West, Onesicritus came across a group of Brahmins sunning themselves on the outskirts of town. They burst into laughter at the sight of his hat and extravagant clothing, and derided his attempts to understand a translator’s rendition of their transcendent wisdom with the caustic comment that it was like ‘expecting water to flow through mud’.⁵ Eventually one of them was prevailed upon to deliver a potted summary of Indian philosophy. Onesicritus was immediately struck by the similarities between Indian and Greek thought. In amazement, he told the Brahmins that like them Plato had taught the immortality of the soul and that their key doctrine of vegetarianism had been advocated in Greece by Pythagoras, Socrates, and even Onesicritus’ own teacher, Diogenes.⁶

Although there are significant differences in their respective moral systems, it is nevertheless an extraordinary coincidence that roughly contemporaneous seminal Indian and Greek philosophers, the Buddha and Pythagoras, both taught that a soul’s reincarnations depended on behaviour in previous lives, and that it was wrong for people to eat animals. Faced with this enthralling correlation, European matchmakers fantasised about possible explanations for centuries; even today it remains one of the unsolved mysteries of world religion.⁷ It was well known in ancient Greece and Rome that Pythagoras had travelled to Egypt and Persia in search of philosophical knowledge, and many, then and later, found it irresistible to imagine that he must have reached India.⁸ Lucius Apuleius (AD 124–c.170), author of The Golden Ass, announced that the ‘pre-eminent race called Gymnosophists’ had indeed taught Pythagoras ‘the greater part of his philosophy’.⁹

Pythagoras was believed to have launched Hellenistic philosophy, introducing the interlinked seminal concepts of the immortality of the soul through reincarnation or ‘metempsychosis’, the notion that all living things are kindred, and the corollary that it was wrong to cause suffering to animals.¹⁰ Pythagoras wrote nothing down, but his doctrines became the basis of Plato’s philosophy. It became a staple belief among Platonists that the Greek philosophical tradition owed its origins to India. Even those who thought the Egyptians were the first to invent philosophy could agree, since Egypt was widely believed to be an ancient Indian colony.¹¹

Tracing Greek philosophy back to the Brahmins was a theory of inestimable significance. Despite cavils from Aristotle, it put the ideal of vegetarianism near the heart of ancient philosophy and enticed generations of travelling philosophers to drink at the original fountain of knowledge in India. Philostratus (AD 170–245) wrote a semi-fictional biography of Christ’s first-century neo-Pythagorean rival, the legendary magical man-god and abolisher of sacrifices, Apollonius of Tyana.¹² Following in Alexander’s footsteps to visit the Brahmins of Taxila, Apollonius defended vegetarianism, saying that the earth ‘grows everything for mankind; and those who are pleased to live at peace with the brute creation want nothing’, while carnivorous men, ‘deaf to the cries of mother-earth, whet their knife against her children’. ‘Here then,’ explained Apollonius, ‘is something which the Brahmins of India … taught the naked sages of Egypt also to condemn; and from them Pythagoras took his rule of life.’¹³ Joining the dots between similar ethical systems, Apollonius posited Indian vegetarianism as a mandate for re-establishing harmony with the natural world. He was unambiguous: the basis of Pythagorean vegetarianism was Indian and the Brahmins were the fount of all true philosophy.

Plotinus (AD 205–70), the founder of Neoplatonism and principal Western proponent of metempsychosis, tried and failed to get to India to meet the Brahmins,¹⁴ but his vegetarian star-pupil Porphyry (AD c.234–305) did the next best thing. Porphyry read the now lost account by the pagan convert to Christianity Bardesanes of Edessa (AD 154– c.222), who had interviewed a group of Indian ambassadors in Mesopotamia as they made their way to the court of the sun-worshipping homosexual-orgiast Emperor of Rome, Elagabalus.¹⁵ In his seminal vegetarian treatise, On Abstinence from Animal Food, Porphyry championed the Brahmins for living on the natural products of the earth. ‘To eat other food, or even to touch animate food,’ explained Porphyry, ‘is thought equivalent to the utmost impurity and impiety.’ Eating meat was not technically against the law in India, Porphyry explained, but the Brahmins believed that abstinence from flesh was the purest diet (mirroring the arguments being made by ascetic flesh-abstaining Christians).¹⁶

Porphyry’s vituperative detestation of the Christians, and Apollonius’ stalwart rivalry with them, did not help to ingratiate the Brahmins or vegetarianism to Jerusalem’s new religion. The Church fathers had much to say about abstinence from flesh, so the vegetarian Brahmins presented them with complex doctrinal questions. Was Indian vegetarianism a sign of prodigious spirituality, or was it blasphemous superstition? Worse still, could their diet give support to the contemporaneous vegetarian heresies breeding back home?

The Athenian pagan convert, St Clement of Alexandria (AD 150– c.215), was keen on flesh-free diets, which no doubt gave him a special interest in the Indian gymnosophists who, he said, ‘feed on nuts, and drink water’. But the extremity of their abstinence, he insisted, made them dangerously similar to the heretical Gnostic Encratites, whom he called ‘blockheads and atheists’.¹⁷ St Hippolytus (fl. AD 234) also damned the Brahmins by suggesting in his Refutation of all Heresies, that it was from them that the Encratites originally derived their doctrines. Yet he grudgingly admitted that the Brahmins themselves appeared to live in a sort of Paradise, in which their food literally grew on trees. That the Brahmins did not have to cultivate the earth to get their bread implied that they somehow lived outside the remit of God’s curse on Adam: ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.’¹⁸ The pagan Greeks thought of the Indians living like the inhabitants of the Golden Age, the earth yielding fruit and grain to them without any labour.¹⁹ Christians translated such fantasies into the belief that Eden had originally been situated in India.²⁰ On the other hand, lacking cultivation was sometimes construed as a sign of lack of ‘culture’, making the Indians uncivilised savages.²¹

But Bardesanes’ enthusiasm for India was infectious. Bishop Euse-bius of Caesarea, who wrote the Ecclesiastical History during the fourth-century Roman persecution, repeated Bardesanes’ comment that the Brahmins ‘neither commit murder, nor worship images, nor taste animal food, nor are ever intoxicated … but devote themselves to God’.²² That they did not worship idols (which was true of some Hindus) suggested that they were Christians in spirit, even though they had not heard of Christ. The even more enthusiastic hermit St Jerome (AD c.347–420), in his defence of abstinence from flesh, declared that the Brahmins exemplified the spiritual benefits of fasting and were worthy of imitation by any Christian. He cited them alongside Diogenes and the Essenes, and even the unimpeachable biblical examples of Daniel the Prophet, Moses, John the Baptist and all the antediluvians including Adam and Eve. The Brahmins, said Jerome with admiration, ‘are so rigidly self-restrained that they support themselves either with the fruit of trees which grow on the banks of the Ganges, or with common food of rice or flour’.²³ This ringing endorsement by one of the most revered Church fathers inspired Christian vegetarians for centuries.

Such willingness to identify points of contact between Hinduism and Christianity found its apotheosis in the monastic Bishop of Helenopolis, Palladius (AD c.363–431), who dramatised a dialogue between Alexander and Dandamis the Brahmin. Dandamis shuns Alexander’s splendid gifts, outsmarting the ‘conqueror of many nations’ with the rebuttal that, ‘The earth supplies me with everything, even as a mother her child with milk,’ and quips that it is better to be fed to beasts than to make oneself ‘a grave for other creatures’.²⁴ Paraphrasing arguments from Palladius’ own teacher, St John Chrysostom (AD 347–407), the Archbishop of Constantinople, and echoing Cynic philosophy, Dandamis says that even wolves were better than humans for at least they only ate meat because their nature compelled them to.

Palladius’ account was incorporated into later versions of the hugely popular medieval Alexander Romance which spread throughout Europe, and possibly reached India in time to influence the sacred Buddhist text, the Milindapanha, a dialogue in which the vegetarian sage Nagasena converts Menander, the Greek King of Alexander’s Bactrian kingdom. In the Alexander Romance the Brahmins claim to live in blissful harmony: ‘When we are hungry, we go to the trees whose branches hang down here and eat the fruit they produce.’ These Brahmins explicitly combine their vegetarianism with anti-monarchical sentiments; their role as entrenched critics of Western consumerism, tyranny and carnivorousness was growing apace.²⁵

The extent to which medieval Christendom was ready for a new encounter with India was illustrated by Marco Polo’s literary success on his arrival in Europe in the 1290s. After growing up at the court of Kublai Khan at Shang-tu (Xanadu) and travelling in Asia for more than twenty years, Marco Polo was captured by the Genoese and clapped in jail. Fortuitously, he was made to share a cell with the romance writer Rustichello. Polo whiled away the hours of imprisonment by dictating what he had seen in the East, and, between them, the two prisoners produced one of the most extraordinary travel adventures of all time, written like a medieval romance – except that this time nearly everything they said was true.²⁶

Rather than simply ridiculing the outlandish cultures he had encountered, Polo made a striking leap towards cultural relativism. He recognised that by their own standards and even his own, the Brahmins were exceedingly virtuous. They were scrupulously honest, they bathed regularly (unlike Europeans), and they lived extraordinarily long and healthy lives during which, Polo explained, they would not eat or ‘kill any creature or any living thing in the world, neither fly nor flea nor louse nor any other vermin, because they say that they have souls’.²⁷ With such eye-witness reports, Europeans were quick to hold up the Brahmins as a quintessential embodiment of the ‘virtuous pagan’.

Marco Polo in Tartar attire

Among the many other wonders Polo described was Adam’s Peak on Ceylon (Sri Lanka) which was said by local Muslims to contain Adam’s grave, and by ‘idolaters’ to hold a footprint of the Buddha.²⁸ Decades later, in 1338 the Pope’s ambassador, John of Marignolli, was sent off to the East to examine the new Christian missions. He visited Ceylon to check up on Polo’s fantastic reports about Adam’s grave and was utterly astonished to discover that, as Polo had suggested, ‘Paradise is a place that (really) exists upon the earth’.²⁹

Back home, Marignolli wrote up his experiences for Emperor Charles IV whom he served as chaplain. He described how he had strolled through the garden that was once Adam’s home, tasting mangoes, jackfruit, coconuts and bananas which, like the local spices, Marignolli surmised, were descended from the luscious trees of Paradise. On this mountain he found the remains of Adam’s marble house, an imprint of Adam’s foot, and – most amazing of all – a monastery populated by holy men (clearly Buddhists) who, he said, ‘never eat flesh, because Adam and his successors till the flood did not do so’. These extremely holy, half-naked monks were as virtuous as any people on earth – despite not being Christians. They confounded Marignolli by arguing ‘that they are not descended either from Cain or from Seth, but from other sons of Adam’. They claimed that the hill they lived on had protected them – and the original artefacts of Paradise – from the ravages of Noah’s Flood. ‘But as this is contrary to Holy Scripture’, Marignolli added nervously, ‘I will say no more, about it.’ He could not resist the temptation of saying more, however, for he had found something that fulfilled Christians’ wildest dreams: ‘Our first parents,’ he concluded, ‘lived in Seyllan upon the fruits I have mentioned, and for drink had the milk of animals. They used no meat till after the deluge, nor to this day do those men use it who call themselves the children of Adam.’

Marignolli – perhaps with the misleading assistance of Muslim interpreters – readily incorporated vegetarian Buddhism into the biblical tradition. He claimed that the ‘skins’ Adam and Eve were given to wear after the Fall were actually coconut-fibre clothes (as modelled by the inhabitants of Ceylon). The vegetarian Buddhists and Brahmins of India, according to this dazed Christian, were continuing the prelapsarian vegetable diet. Having abandoned his initial caution, Marignolli doffed his European clothes, donned a coconut-fibre sarong, and joined the Buddhist fraternity until it was time for him to return. The Franciscan who set out to check up on the progress of the Eastern Catholic mission ended up using vegetarianism as a bridge between his religion and Buddhism.³⁰

The Renaissance travellers who followed the missionaries to India reinforced expectations of finding remnants of Paradise. When the Venetian merchant Nicolò Conti returned from his Indian travels in 1448, the Pope sent his secretary, Poggio Bracciolini, to record what he had seen. The ancient Greek accounts of India – principally Strabo’s Geography (AD 23) – had just been rediscovered, and Conti’s new stories caused huge excitement. He spoke of ‘Bachali’ – presumably the descendants of the converts Bacchus had made on his mythical trip to India – who ‘abstain from all animal food, in particular the ox’.³¹ The Brahmins (whom Poggio differentiated from the Bachali) were great astrologers and prophets, living free from diseases to the age of 300, and their asceticism competed with anything practised in Europe.³²

In 1520 the German cleric Joannes Boemus published his Omnium gentium mores, leges & ritus, a massive comparative ethnology which went through innumerable editions in French, Italian, Spanish and in English as The Fardle of Facions (1555). Boemus filled out what the classical sources did not provide with utopian fantasy: the ‘unchristened Brahmanes’, he said, put Europeans to shame by living a ‘pure and simple life … content with suche foode as commeth to hande’.³³ This was hardly less fantastic than the part-fictional, part-plagiarised Travels of Sir John Mandeville written in the mid-1300s, which had imagined the ‘Isle of Bragman’ inhabited by pagans ‘full of all virtue’ living chaste and sober lives in ‘perpetual peace’.³⁴ Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) was inspired by similar idealistic reports; More’s Utopians, like the Indians, exercise temperance, are kind to animals and live in political harmony; there is even a cryptic suggestion that they are gymnosophists.³⁵

This type of exotic idealism was elaborated by scores of other writers, such as Tommaso Campanella who wrote The City of the Sun in 1602, soon after being committed to twenty-five years’ imprisonment for attempting to establish a Hermetic solar utopia in Calabria. The narrator of Campanella’s story – a world-travelled sea captain – reports that the inhabitants of the City of the Sun rarely drink wine, never get the diseases of gluttonous Europe, live for up to 200 years, and derive their deistic^* religion from the Brahmins.³⁶ Campanella was so aware that vegetarianism would be expected of his ideal community that he wittily took the issue face on: ‘They were unwilling at first to slay animals, because it seemed cruel; but thinking afterward that it was also cruel to destroy herbs which have a share of sensitive feeling, they saw that they would perish from hunger … Nevertheless, they do not willingly kill useful animals, such as oxen and horses.’³⁷ More than a century later the theme was still very much alive, reappearing satirically in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) in which the barbarous flesh-eating Yahoos contrast with the idealised Houyhnhnms who only eat herbivorous food (as does Gulliver during most of his residence with them).³⁸ Like the travel literature they were based on, these utopian works critiqued European manners by setting them against other cultures. It is little wonder that puritanical enthusiasts in Europe sought to recreate the ideal communities at home which they read about in both travel and utopian literature.

As the voyages of discovery fuelled a new wave of interest in India, travel literature became a subject of serious intellectual study. Renaissance scholars started interpreting Indian religions along similar lines as classical Greek and Roman paganism, forging the path for the late eighteenth-century Orientalism of Sir William Jones.³⁹ Some travellers were even bold enough to legitimise Indian customs by pointing out similarities with their own culture. In 1515, a Florentine envoy wrote from Cochin to tell Giuliano de Medici that he had encountered vegetarians who ‘do not feed upon anything that contains blood, nor do they permit among them that any injury be done to any living thing, like our Leonardo da Vinci’.⁴⁰ Da Vinci – who was himself rumoured to have travelled in the Orient – had spent decades ranting against cruelty to animals and deploring how man had made himself their ‘sepulchre’, despite the plentiful vegetable food provided by nature. Like the Hindus, he even lamented that eating eggs deprived future beings of life. Contemporaries related how da Vinci used to buy caged birds to set them free – an act of charity long associated with Pythagoras, and a habit now being remarked upon by European travellers in India.⁴¹

Renaissance Neoplatonists had developed a method of syncretising the various pagan philosophies from Greece, Rome and Egypt and decoding them to find the hidden truths that lay behind their fantastic exterior. Some teachings of paganism were thus made compatible with Christianity. When new information became available on Indian ‘gentiles’ (or ‘Gentoos’ as they were often called), it was partially incorporated into this ready-made framework. But the Indians stood out, for unlike other bygone pagan peoples, they still existed. To some, this made them more threatening, but to anyone predisposed to learn from ancient Eastern sages, it made the Indians particularly sensational. Europeans were familiar with the vegetarian teachings of Pythagoras, and they had the biblical story of Eden engraved upon their hearts. But the Indian vegetarians stimulated an unparalleled renewal of interest, and the constant flow of varied reports about them encouraged a constant reappraisal of their significance. Europeans did project their own preconceptions onto Indian vegetarianism, but some tenets from Indian philosophy still managed to enter Europeans’ consciousness. Indian culture exerted a powerful influence which altered Western understanding of the religious and ethical issues raised by the practice of abstaining from meat.

At the tail end of the fifteenth century, after years of trying to open the sea route to India, the Portuguese sea-captain Vasco da Gama and his crew limped round the Cape of Good Hope, and flopped – bedraggled and empty-handed – onto the Western coast of India. Da Gama’s mission had a commercial goal: to find a means of importing Indian spices without using the expensive Muslim-dominated land route. But King Manuel of Portugal had also allegedly threatened da Gama that on pain of death he was not to return until he found the legendary Christian King of India, the perennial ‘Prester John’. Almost the first people da Gama’s men met on their arrival were dreadlocked Indians who seemed willing to worship the Portuguese images of the Virgin Mary, possibly seeing in the baby Christ a counterpart of their own baby Krishna. The Portuguese rejoiced at having linked up with their long-lost Christian brothers, and after an initial hesitation about the odd Indian ‘churches’, in a gush of enthusiasm, they knelt down and prayed in the Hindu temples.

The Portuguese soon realised that these ‘Christians’ were not entirely ordinary. They not only ‘ate no beef’, but when da Gama and his men arrived at the Calicut court for dinner they found that – in startling contrast to the lavish banquets of European royalty – the King ‘eats neither meat nor fish nor anything that has been killed, nor do his barons, courtiers, or other persons of quality, for they say that Jesus Christ said in his law that he who kills shall die’. While the Portuguese remained under the delusion that the Indians were Christian, they were more than willing to integrate local vegetarianism into the biblical commandment against killing, and noted with amazement that it was actually perfectly possible for humans to live without eating meat.⁴²

But da Gama and his men gradually realised that they had been mistaken about the Indians’ Christianity and they became less tolerant about their vegetarian foibles. By this time, the other major European powers were eyeing with envy the Portuguese monopoly on Indian trade. At the end of the sixteenth century the Dutch finally muscled in on the game by sending armed galleons to back up their trading ventures. The British followed hot on their heels, promising the Great Mughal an alliance with Queen Elizabeth. They came in search of riches, but they knew there was also a market back home for tales of wonder and adventure, and each nation produced its own scribe of India.

One of the things that fascinated Europeans most were the vegetarians. In fact, only certain groups of Hindus were actually vegetarian. Most Brahmins upheld their caste purity laws by abstaining from meat, and to some Europeans this gave them an aura of austere sanctity. But still more surprising to Western travellers were the masses of ordinary people who lived on what in Europe was considered an exceptionally abstemious diet. Many Banians, the trading caste, were strict vegetarians especially on the Western coast in Gujarat, and some of these joined the all-vegetarian Jains.⁴³ Several Jain monks held prominent positions at the Mughal courts and Europeans were well-placed to observe them there and even interrogate them on their beliefs.⁴⁴ It should be noted that many of the ancient Sanskrit texts that applaud vegetarianism and ahimsa also list numerous exceptions under which meat-eating was allowed and even praised. These included cases of medical necessity; ritual sacrifice of animals; and hunting by the princely-warrior caste, the Ksatriyas.⁴⁵ Sanskrit texts such as the Laws of Manu (200 BC–AD 200) actually state (just like Aristotle) that it was natural for humans to be predators: ‘animals without fangs are the food of those with fangs, those without hands of those who possess hands, and the timid of the bold.’⁴⁶ It was partly because eating animals was natural that abstaining was seen as a virtue. Thus the same text promises that ‘He who does not seek to cause the sufferings of bonds and death to living creatures, but desires the good of all beings, obtains endless bliss.’⁴⁷ Europeans became fixated with the belief system underlying the Indians’ vegetarianism and nearly every traveller marvelled at it, revealing in their responses their own prejudices and preoccupations: what was the proper relation between man and beast? What diet was suitable for the human body? What happened to people’s temperament when they no longer committed daily violence to animals? Whatever the answers to these questions, one thing was certain: encountering Indian vegetarianism triggered a review of European morality. Hinduism became the arena in which these issues were fought out, and the travellers’ varying responses produced a vocabulary for discussing the vegetarian question in the wider context.

The Indians’ apparent animal worship was a massive hurdle for Christians to overcome.⁴⁸ Zoolatry was the ultimate degradation of God and humanity, and many took temple images of animals as proof that Hindus worshipped the devil.⁴⁹ The most prominent instance of ‘animal worship’ in India, which everyone commented on, was the reverence for the cow.⁵⁰ European Christians found the habit abominable – reminiscent as it was of the Israelites’ golden calf and the Egyptian god Apis – and this made a great excuse for pillaging golden cows from temples.⁵¹ The Franciscan missionary to India and China, Odoric of Pordenone (1286–1331), whose account was plagiarised in the widely successful Mandeville’s Travels, wrote disparagingly of pagans who washed in cow dung and urine as if it were holy water.⁵² Scatological details about Indians using cattle faeces as a cleansing agent for houses, bodies and souls became a staple of European writing about Hinduism.⁵³

Indian cow-worship from the frontispiece of Thomas Herbert’s A Relation of Some Yeares Travaile … (1634)

But alongside such stereotyping, Europeans as early as Marco Polo were prepared to see a utilitarian rationale behind cow worship. Cattle, they noticed, were the primary beasts of burden in India, responsible for cultivating the fields as well as providing milk, so any religious law that sought to protect the cow contributed to the agronomy and well-being of the country.⁵⁴ ‘[T]his superior regard for the cow,’ wrote François Bernier in 1667, ‘may more probably be owing to her extraordinary usefulness.’⁵⁵ In fact, there was already a long tradition of reading self-interested motives into cow-protection laws. St Thomas Aquinas, even while arguing against vegetarianism, allowed that some food taboos were rational, instancing Egypt where ‘the eating of the flesh of the ox was prohibited in olden times so that agriculture would not be hindered’.⁵⁶ St Jerome, likewise, commented that in Egypt and Palestine the killing of calves was prohibited in ‘the interests of agriculture’. Even in sixteenth-century England, Queen Elizabeth had outlawed meat-eating during Lent to allow cattle stocks and grazing lands to be replenished.⁵⁷

Brahmin with cow, from Henry Lord’s A Display of two forraigne sects in the East Indies (1630)

However, the protection of animals that were not useful flabbergasted even the most hardened travellers. The sixteenth-century Portuguese writer Duarte Barbosa was astounded by the ‘marvellous’ extreme to which the Indians took ‘this law of not killing anything’. ‘For it often happens,’ he reported, ‘that the Moors bring them some worms or little birds alive, saying they intend to kill them in their presence; and they ransom them, and buy them to set them flying, and save their lives for more money than they are worth.’⁵⁸ He was still more astonished – as future European travellers would be – to find that noxious insects like lice were looked after by special people allotted to the task of feeding them with their own blood.⁵⁹

Christians thought that animals were made for humans, so an animal’s value was dependent on its usefulness. The Hindus and Jains, they perceived, had a fundamentally different system which attributed value to animal life independent from, and even at the expense of, man. In the 1590s the Dutch traveller to India John Huygen van Linschoten articulated this in his internationally best-selling travelogue Itinerario (The Journey), by explaining that the Banians ‘kill nothing in the world that has life, however small and useless it may be’. Despite his culture-shock, Linschoten rendered such morals comprehensible by giving them a Christian gloss: the Hindus, he explained, consider it ‘a work of great charity, saying, it is don to their even neighbours’.⁶⁰ It became common for Europeans to regard the Hindu value of animal life not so much as something completely alien, but as an extension of laws compatible with Christianity such as ‘loving thy neighbour’.⁶¹ In that framework, Hindus were seen by some as more virtuous than Christians. As one English gentleman put in the 1680s, it was ‘a sad thing’ that in respect of their treatment of animals ‘Christians, very many of them, may go to School, and learn of Infidels and Heathens to reform their Lives and Manners’.⁶²

The ultimate surprise for the Europeans were the Indian ‘animal hospitals’.⁶³ Again, Europeans were most challenged by the fact that such hospitals expended effort and money on animals that were past their usefulness. ‘They have hospitals for sheepe, goates, dogs, cats, birds, and for all other living creatures,’ wrote Ralph Fitch, the first Englishman to write a travelogue on India in 1594. ‘When they be old and lame, they keepe them until they die.’⁶⁴ In Europe, sick animals or cattle past their productive age were automatically killed. The ‘ingratitude’ that this implied became a source of anxiety for Europeans.⁶⁵ Hindus appeared to be extraordinary exemplars of charity, which put some European noses out of joint. Many travellers responded to this with ridicule, but others were impressed by the workings of a moral system that was entirely neglected in the West.

In dealing with this challenge, Europeans projected onto the Indians the simplified Pythagorean idea that they abstained from killing animals for fear of hurting a reincarnated human soul. This implied that the Hindus were not valuing the life of the animal itself, but the soul of the human trapped within it. Since most Christians dismissed reincarnation as a preposterous theological error, interpreting Hindu vegetarianism in this way deflected the ethical challenge and amputated their principle of non-violence (ahimsa). It meant that writers could fall back on the long-standing Christian tradition of ridiculing the Pythagorean objection to eating flesh, as the Christian theologian Tertullian put it in the second century AD, ‘lest by chance in his beef he eats of some ancestor of his’.⁶⁶ One author who assessed the scientific case for vegetarianism at the end of the seventeenth century, simply declared that the Pythagoreans didn’t count as vegetarians because their diet was based on ‘a Mistake in their Philosophy, and not a Law of Nature’.⁶⁷ Christians defused the moral strength of vegetarianism by reducing it to a comical superstition.

Having projected Pythagoreanism onto the Hindus, some Europeans explained the similarity by claiming that Pythagoras had taught the Indians their vegetarian doctrines, rather than the other way round.⁶⁸ This gave Pythagoras the European a superior status, and it also meant that Brahmins could be more readily assimilated into biblical history by claiming that they and their philosophy were descended from the Egyptians. By the time the clergyman Samuel Purchas published his enormous anthology of travel literature in 1625, the idea that the Indians were identical to Pythagoreans was already widespread. Purchas himself thought Pythagoras must have been to India and he printed several authors who had noticed, as King James I’s ambassador to Jahangir, Sir Thomas Roe, put it in 1616, that the Indian ‘Pythagorians’ believe in ‘the soules transmigration, and will not kyll any living creature, no, not the virmine that bites them, for feare of disseising the speiritt of some frend departed’.⁶⁹ Purchas made Indian vegetarianism part of common parlance and, inevitably, these ideas wove themselves into Europe’s cultural fabric.

In the 1620s the humanist nobleman, Pietro della Valle (1586–1652), was astonished when a Brahmin called ‘Beca Azarg’ told him that Pythagoras was the same person as the Hindu god Brahma; that it was ‘Pythagoras’ who had taught metempsychosis and vegetarianism to the Brahmins and that they still revered his books.⁷⁰ It was, laughed della Valle, ‘a curious notion indeed, and which perhaps would be news to hear in Europe, that Pythagoras is foolishly ador’d in India for a God’. ‘But this,’ concluded della Valle, ‘with Beca Azarg’s good leave, I do not believe.’⁷¹ Henry Lord, chaplain to the English trading post at Surat in Gujarat, did believe it. In the hope that Hinduism could be reconciled to Christianity by purging it of Pythagorean doctrines, in 1630 he set himself up as a latter-day heretic-hunting St Augustine, calling upon the Archbishop of Canterbury to reprimand the Hindus for disobeying God’s instruction to eat flesh.⁷² By contrast, the French editor of The Open Door to Hidden Paganism (1651), the most advanced account of the Hindus, by the Dutch missionary Abraham Rogerius, took the view that ‘Plato and Pythagoras were not ashamed to learn the basic tenets of their philosophy from the Brahmans.’⁷³ In a conservative backlash against such liberal views in the China illustrata of 1667, the Jesuit scientist-missionary Athanasius Kircher retorted that metempsychosis had been carried to India by an execrable band of Egyptian priests and had subsequently been spread across the Eastern world (along with its corollary vegetarianism) by a ‘deadly monster’ called Buddha, ‘a very sinful brahmin imbued with Pythagoreanism’. ‘These are not tenets, but crimes,’ concluded Kircher venomously. ‘They are not doctrines, but abominations.’⁷⁴

In 1665 Edward Bysshe dragged the debate into the forefront of modern politics by publishing an anthology of the ancient writings on India, including Palladius’ dialogue, in which he presented the Brahmins as pure idealists who stood up to Alexander just as modern Puritans stood up to the tyranny of Charles II.⁷⁵ In the context of mid-century Puritanism, Sir Thomas Roe’s chaplain, Edward Terry (1589/90–1660), gave a strikingly accurate account of the ancient doctrine of ahimsa – that an animal values its life just as humans value theirs, so destroying it manifestly against its will constitutes an act of violent injury (himsa). This was a remarkable moment of cross-cultural understanding which Terry appears to have accomplished by interviewing Jain monks, probably in Gujarat or while travelling with Jahangir’s court. However, he did not want to give too much ground to the Indians; he drew attention away from the morally powerful doctrine of ahimsa by claiming that their main reasons for being vegetarian were the ‘mad and groundlesse phansie’ of Pythagorean metempsychosis and the false commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill any living Creature’. He castigated them for ‘forbearing the lives of the Creatures made for mens use’, but nevertheless acknowledged that they provided a better moral example than Christians who fought unrighteous wars and made riotous ‘havock and spoil’ with the animals. Going some way to meet them, Terry lauded their temperance and felt that their other ‘excellent moralities’ showed that the divine law of nature was ‘ingraved upon [their] hearts’.⁷⁶

As the seventeenth century matured, liberal philosophies started to compete more strongly with the Christian orthodoxies about man and nature. Over the heads of the Indian vegetarians, the great minds of the day fought out their disputes. Were Brahmins ignorant idolaters or ancient philosophers who could teach a thing or two to the Europeans?

The seminal analysis of Indian vegetarianism came from a most unlikely quarter, and showed how the association with Pythagoras could be a path towards assimilating Hinduism. François Bernier, who served as physician at the court of the Great Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb for eight years in the 1660s, had been trained in sceptical and Epicurean philosophy under Pierre Gassendi. With this enlightened background, Bernier attacked Indian culture not simply because Hindus were deluded idolaters who failed to see the obvious truth of Christianity; rather, his ridicules were aimed at the practice of superstitious rituals (many of which, he noted, were equivalent to the irrational beliefs of European Christians).⁷⁷ Bernier smiled wryly as he watched Hindus gathering en masse to bathe in sacred rivers, banging on cymbals and using incantations to ward off the evil influence of an eclipse. He recited all the ‘monstrosities’ of Hindu culture from widow-burning to sun worship. But there was one doctrine for which Bernier pulled his punches: their Pythagorean vegetarianism.

Perhaps the first legislators in the Indies hoped that the interdiction of animal food would produce a beneficial effect upon the character of the people, and that they might be brought to exercise less cruelty toward one another when required by a positive precept to treat the brute creation with humanity. The doctrine of the transmigration of souls secured the kind treatment of animals … It may also be that the Brahmens were influenced by the consideration that in their climate the flesh of cows or oxen is neither savoury nor wholesome.⁷⁸

Bernier’s willingness to recognise the health benefits of abstaining from meat may have been inspired by his master, Gassendi, who had himself been a staunch advocate of the vegetable diet (see chapter 11). But Bernier even rendered the doctrine of reincarnation comprehensible to Europeans by arguing that it was not designed to protect animals for their own sake, but ultimately for the benefit of humans. He was following a common tradition that had long been used to clear Pythagoras from imputations of superstition, exemplified by the third-century Epicurean biographer-philosopher Diogenes Laertius, who claimed that Pythagoras never believed in metempsychosis, but that ‘his real reason for forbidding animal diet’ was to give people ‘a healthy body and keen mind’.⁷⁹ Indeed, this interpretative technique had been used by Christians on the Bible, for example when St Thomas Aquinas insisted that if Moses appeared to care for animals, he was really just trying ‘to turn the mind of man away from cruelty which might be used on other men’.⁸⁰ Erasing from Hinduism the ethic of respect for animal life, and replacing it with European ideas of diet, agronomy and temperament, may seem like aggressive manipulation, but in doing so Bernier was treating Hinduism in much the same way as Christians treated the Bible. By transposing exegetical traditions onto Indian practice and regarding the Hindus as pseudo-Pythagoreans, Bernier developed a humanist interpretation of Indian culture that detected a reservoir of ancient sagacity behind their ‘fables’.

Having identified its potential, Bernier was astonished by the advantages of vegetarianism, noticing in particular that it was India’s greatest military asset. Whereas European armies were weighed down with barrels of salted beef and tankards of wine – without which the European soldier would absolutely refuse to fight – Indian armies were perfectly content with readily transportable dried food such as lentils and rice. He looked on with disbelief as Aurangzeb’s immense army transported enough provisions for ‘prodigious and almost incredible’ numbers of people.⁸¹

Such concrete evidence of the benefits of vegetarianism made a sizeable dent in the typical European argument that meat-eating was essential for sustaining human life, or at least for strength and virility. It was commonly supposed that anyone who abstained from flesh must be effeminate, weak and lazy. This, Europeans said to themselves, was what made it so easy for meat-eating Muslims and Europeans to conquer Indian vegetarians.⁸² This idea of Asian effeminacy, which dates back at least 2,500 years to Hippocratic medical ethnology, became one of the most pervasive means of denigrating Hindus, especially towards the end of the eighteenth century.⁸³ But it was counterbalanced by the recognition that the Hindus’ frugality made them at least as long-lived as Europeans, and fuelled their admired industriousness and resilience to disease.⁸⁴

The Europeans’ idea that meat-eating was normal, or essential, was swiftly being demolished by the discovery of vegetarian peoples all over the world. Europeans gradually realised that instead of representing the norm, they were an exceptionally carnivorous society. In Africa and America travellers found people living in primitive simplicity ‘before’ the luxury of civilisation had corrupted them – a state with both Edenic and barbaric connotations.⁸⁵ In the East vegetarianism had been preserved beyond the state of nature by virtuous temperance and the institution of sacred laws against killing animals.⁸⁶ Such discoveries were to provide grist to the mill of any European who wished to argue that eating meat was by no means a nutritional necessity.

Bernier’s attempt to understand and even learn from this Hindu doctrine has to be considered as liberal, especially compared to the invectives of his European contemporaries at the Mughal court, such as the Venetian Niccolao Manucci who described the Indian vegetarians as ‘a people who do not deserve the name of man’.⁸⁷

Bernier’s acquaintance Jean-Baptiste Tavernier was less vituperative than Manucci, but furnished plenty of sensationalist examples of Indian vegetarianism in his Travels in India (1676), warning prospective visitors with the story of a Persian merchant who was whipped to death for shooting a peacock, and noting the extreme lengths taken to ensure that relatives were not killed – in the form of ants in firewood. Tavernier praised the high morality of the Hindus, but he – like many others before and since – could not but see an absurd contradiction in preserving the life of vermin, and yet happily burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands.⁸⁸

Surprisingly, the most enthusiastic seventeenth-century travel writer was an English clergyman, the Reverend John Ovington, who travelled to India in 1689. Ovington accepted Bernier’s utilitarian rationale: vegetarianism clearly made the Indians less cruel, just as healthy, and spiritually and mentally ‘more quick and nimble’. But Ovington even endorsed the Indians’ animal protection practices on their own terms: ‘India of all the Regions of the Earth, is the only publick Theatre of Justice and Tenderness to Brutes, and all living Creatures,’ he said, ‘a Civil Regard … is enjoyn’d as a common Duty of Humanity’. Their innocence, said Ovington, made the Hindus comparable to ‘the original Inhabitants of the World, whom Antiquity supposes not to have been Carnivorous, nor to have tasted Flesh in those first Ages, but only to have fed upon Fruits and Herbs’. Ovington concluded by giving Hinduism a carte blanche of philosophical integrity: ‘there is not one of these Customs which are fasten’d upon them by the Rules of their Religion, but what comport very well, and highly contribute to the Health and Pleasure of their Lives.’⁸⁹

The way was paved for Europeans to take Indian vegetarianism, if not as a lesson in philosophy and justice, then at least in medical health. The voyages of discovery and the new wave of early anthropology that followed in their wake impelled Europe towards a combination of cultural syncretism and relativism. Attempts to sustain the idea that European Christians had the best society often crumbled in the face of evident virtue and integrity in other peoples. International vegetarianism, which plugged directly into European discourses on diet and the relationship between man and nature, proved a serious challenge to Western norms. As readers back home assimilated the information in the travelogues, Indian vegetarianism started to exert influence on the course of European culture.

^*For an account of deism, see chapter 9.