The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  Indra’s argument, that dogs would pollute the sacrificial offerings merely by looking at them, let alone touching them, is a common one. Manu (7.21) warns that if the king did not wield the rod of punishment justly, the dog would lick the oblation and everything would be upside down. In the Mahabharata version of the story of Rama and Sita, when Rama throws Sita out for the first time, he compares her, after her sojourn in Ravana’s house, to an oblation that a dog has licked (3.275.14). Much of the trouble in the Mahabharata begins with a dog who does not lick an oblation:

  When Janamejaya and his brothers were performing a sacrifice, a dog, a son of the bitch Sarama, came near. The brothers beat the dog, who ran howling back to his mother and told her that they had beaten him though he had neither looked at nor licked the offerings. Sarama then went to the sacrificial grounds and said to Janamejaya, “Since you beat my son when he had not done anything wrong, danger will befall you when you do not see it coming (1.3.1-18).”

  As a result of his prejudiced mistreatment of this pup, Janamejaya soon gets into serious trouble with other animals (snakes). Thus the Mahabharata both begins and ends with a story about justice for dogs.

  But in Yudhishthira’s case the conflict remains unresolved; the text equivocates. The sudden intrusion of the voice of the author in the first person at the beginning of the episode (“the dog that I have already told you about quite a lot [17.2.26]”) is highly unusual, almost unprecedented. It is as if the author has anticipated the end of the story and begins to remind the audience that it is just a story—and not only just a story, but just a test (as they used to say of air-raid signals on the radio), one of a series of tests that Dharma set for his son, all of which he passed (17.3.18). For the dog never does go to heaven, never violates Hindu law, because there was no dog; it was all an illusion. In case of a real dog . . . what then? The story shows just how rotten the caste system is but does not change it. No dogs get into heaven.

  NONCRUELTY AND NONVIOLENCE

  “I am determined not to be cruel,” says Yudhishthira. The term that he uses for “not to be cruel” is more literally “not to harm humans [a-nri-shamsa].”fk It is a doubly weakened word: a double negative (it doesn’t refer to doing something good, just to not doing something bad) and species specific (specifying harm to humans); to apply it to the treatment of an animal is therefore rather forced, given the usual Hindu distinction between cruelty to humans and to animals. The term (“not to be cruel”), which occurs here three times in four verses (17.3.7, 8, 10, and 30), is sometimes translated as “compassion,”fl but the usual Sanskrit word for that is karuna, a more positive word.50 Indra praises Yudhishthira for “weep[ing] with” all creatures (anukrosha), a word sometimes translated as “compassion,” but more than compassion, a vivid form of sympathy. Yudhishthira is damning himself with faint praise if all he can muster up, in place of either “compassion” or “weeping with,” is that he doesn’t harm humans. He is hedging, just as Ashoka did when he stopped short of embracing nonviolence entirely but merely mitigated some of the brutality to animals in his kingdom.

  The issue of noncruelty to animals is a minor variant on the heavier theme of nonviolence (ahimsa) toward both animals and humans, in an age when violence—toward humans as well as toward animals—is inevitable. Ahimsa (“the absence of the desire to kill”) is another of those double negatives, like “noncruelty.” (The Indian nationalist leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak [1856-1920] translated ahimsa, in the Gita, as “harmlessness,”51 another double negative.) Elsewhere too (3.297.72), Yudhishthira says that noncruelty is the highest dharma. On another occasion, when Yudhishthira threatened to renounce the world, Arjuna had urged him to resign himself to violent action, invoking a host of Vedic gods and one new, sectarian god (Skanda), as well as mongooses and cats and mice, and saying: “People honor most the gods who are killers. Rudra is a killer, and so are Skanda, Indra, Agni, Varuna, Yama. I don’t see anyone living in the world with nonviolence (ahimsa). Even ascetics (tapasas) cannot stay alive without killing (12.15.16, 20-21, 24).” Similarly, Rama, defending himself against charges of foul play against an animal, the monkey Valin, argued: “Even sages go hunting.” Arjuna’s own consideration of renouncing action prompts Krishna’s reply in the Bhagavad Gita, a text that mentions ahimsa only in the course of four lists of conventional virtues (10.5, 13.7, 16.2, and 17.14) and never discusses it.

  Many Hindus continued to engage in animal sacrifice at this time, while Buddhists and Jainas and, significantly, an increasing number of Hindus rejected it. Replacing the animal slaughter included in the major Vedic sacrifices,52 ahimsa as a Hindu term claims a space closely associated with Jainism and Buddhism.53 Yet the Brahmin redactors of the Mahabharata created a text that accepted the political implications of the violence of the universe, in part precisely in order to distinguish themselves from the nonviolent Buddhists and Jainas.54

  Commentators have sometimes regarded Yudhishthira as a Brahmin king (like Pushyamitra) or a Buddhist king (like Ashoka), or both, a Brahminical Ashoka, who is tempted to reject violence much as Ashoka, by the testimony of his edicts, hoped to do.fm Yudhishthira’s refusal to rule after the war may have been a response to Asoka’s thirteenth Major Rock Edict or to legends about Ashoka that circulated after his death.55 (Aspects of the life and character of Arjuna too may have been created in response to Ashoka.56)

  The Mahabharata, like Ashoka, is torn between violence and nonviolence, and occasionally, as in the story of Yudhishthira’s dog, rests for a moment in the compromise position of avoiding cruelty. Both Ashoka and Pushyamitra left their marks on Yudhishthira. All three kings responded, in different ways, to the challenge of Buddhists and Jainas, particularly to Jainas, who really did preach an uncompromising ahimsa. And all three kings created versions of the new ahimsa agenda that they could live with, a negotiated peace with both extremes. But nonviolence is not a Buddhist or Jaina monopoly, nor is compassion; everyone was wrestling with these problems at this time, though in different ways, and gradually compassion came to supplement, or sometimes even to replace, generosity (dana, “giving”) as the primary virtue of householders and sacrificers.

  The Brahmins’ ultimate credibility as a religious elite depended on disassociating themselves from the direct cruelties of governing,57 despite their close advisory association with kings. For since the particular dharma, the sva-dharma, of Indian kings was inherently violent, they needed royal chaplains to wash off from their hands, every day, the blood of war dead and executed criminals, and they had to perform horse sacrifices to make restorations time after time (horse sacrifices that created yet more violence against animals). The ancient composite image of the royal sage or the warrior priest was compromised once and for all by that division of labor, and all of King Yudhishthira’s horses and all of his men could not put those images together again.

  Even nonviolence could be violent in India; the urge to refrain from killing animals for food, for instance, or to control violent addiction, often burst out in violence against the self. We have seen the tale of the rabbit in the moon, who offered his own flesh to Indra. This is a variant of a much repeated paradigm, the popularity of which shows us how deeply embedded in Hinduism is the ideal of self-sacrifice, often to the point of martyrdom and self-torture. One of the most famous, and often retold,fn examples is this one:

  KING SHIBI SAVES THE DOVE FROM THE HAWK

  The fame of King Shibi’s extraordinary generosity reached the gods in heaven, and Indra and Agni decided to put him to the test. Agni assumed the form of a dove, and Indra a hawk, pursuing the dove. The dove flew in terror to Shibi. But the hawk objected, “I live on the meat of small birds; if you deprive me of my food, you are condemning me to death. Is this dharma?” King Shibi asked the hawk if he would accept some other flesh as a substitute. “Hawks eat doves,” countered the hawk, but eventually he said, “If you love this dove, cut off a piece of flesh that weighs as much as the dove.” Shibi had a scale brought and sliced off pieces
of his flesh, but no matter how much he cut, the dove still weighed more. Finally, he climbed into the scale altogether. The hawk revealed that he was Indra and the dove was Agni, and he promised Shibi that his fame would last forever (3.130-31).

  The Shylockian precise pound of flesh and the use of hawks and doves to symbolize military aggression and peacefulness are themes that we can recognize from our own world. In the Pali Buddhist version, King Shibi (sometimes called Shivi) vows to give his living heart, his flesh, his blood, or his eyes to anyone who asks for them; Indra, disguised as a blind Brahmin,fo58 asks him for his eyes, which Shibi has his court physician cut out, causing him excruciating pain, and gives to him; eventually Indra restores Shibi’s eyes.59 The king’s indifference to physical pain is both a macho Kshatriya virtue and a badge of ascetic conquest of the body;60 as a king Shibi draws upon the Kshatriya tradition, in which the warrior Karna, for instance, pretending to be a Brahmin and wrongly believing that he is in fact a Charioteer’s son, betrays his hidden Kshatriya blood by remaining silent and motionless while a worm eats right through his thigh. (He does not want to disturb the sleep of his guru, whose head is resting upon Karna’s thigh [12.3]).

  The logical reductio ad adsurdum of the vegetarian agenda—letting animals eat one’s own body, as in the Other World in the Brahmanas—also results from a combination of the bitter realism of the Mahabharata and the challenge of nonviolence. The story of Shibi resolves the aporia by the familiar illusio ex machina: There was no dove, no hawk; it was just a test. But in a world where there are, after all, hawks who eat doves, a human may avoid personally taking animal life by eating vegetables. Extending ahimsa into a universal law, however, a Kantian sanatana dharma beyond the human world (taking into account those screaming carrots and the trees soundlessly screaming), would make most creatures starve to death.

  SACRIFICE AND ANTISACRIFICE

  Nonviolence toward animals clashes head-on with animal sacrifice. The Mahabharata says there are seven wild sacrificial beasts (pashus)fp—lion, tiger, boar, monkey, bear, elephant, and buffalo—and seven domestic sacrificial beasts, which we know from the Brahmanas: the usual first four—bull, stallion, billy goat, and ram—plus ass, mule (a mixed breed, bred from a horse and a donkey) and a human man (6.5.12-14). But despite including humans as pashus, the text leans over backward to deny human sacrifice. Krishna says to a king who is threatening to sacrifice a number of captive kings, “What pleasure is there for the kings who are anointed and washed like sacrificial beasts in the house of Pashupati? You have captured kings and you want to sacrifice them to Rudra. . . . No one has ever seen a sacrifice of men. So how can you intend to sacrifice men to the god Shiva? How can you give the title of sacrificial beasts to men of the same species as yourself (2.14.18; 2.20.8-11).”

  To prevent human sacrifice, the Brahmanas prescribed a course of substitutions.In the Vedic myth of the sage who used a horse head to tell the Ashvins about the soma,61 the head of a horse stood in for the head of a human in a sacrificial beheading. In the Mahabharata, which rules out human sacrifice, debate centered on the horse sacrifice, the most spectacular of sacrifices, which reaches so high to heaven that it is the first place where the antisacrificial lightning strikes. Daksha’s sacrifice is a horse sacrifice, and so is Yudhishthira’s.

  YUDHISHTHIRA’S HORSE SACRIFICE

  After the final, victorious battle, Yudhishthira renounces his previous desire to renounce kingship and decides to perform a spectacular horse sacrifice, making public his serious intentions for the future: to rule with justice as well as with power. But the ritual also looks backward to the past, expiating his sins and exorcising his grief (as Rama’s horse sacrifice does for him). For almost everyone has been killed in the great battle; the Pandava brothers remain alive, Pyrrhic victors, to rule their decimated kingdom. Soon even they will die, after most of their remaining comrades kill one another in a stupid drunken brawl.

  The great horse sacrifice of Yudhishthira should be a triumphant event. And to a certain extent it is: The consecrated stallion is set free to roam for a year, guarded by Arjuna, who, in the course of his wanderings, fights a number of battles and kills a number of people (despite Yudhishthira’s pleas to him to avoid killing whenever possible) until he himself is killed by his son Babhruvahana and revived by Babhuvahana’s mother, Chitrangada.62 Arjuna and the stallion return safely to the capital; three hundred animal victims, including bulls and birds and aquatic animals, are tied to sacrificial stakes. The Brahmins set some of the animals free, “pacify” others, and “take” and “pacify” (i.e., suffocate) the horse. Draupadi lies down beside the suffocated stallion (14.91.2). (Other wives of other Pandavas, including Arjuna’s wives Ulupi and Chitrangada, are present but are not said to lie with the stallion.) The Brahmins remove the fat (or marrow) from the horse and boil it; the Pandavas inhale the fumes, which purify them of all evils. (They do not eat the flesh.) The priests offer the remaining pieces of the horse as oblations into the fire. The ceremony is intended not only to purify the Pandavas but to fortify the kingdom for Yudhishthira and to produce an heir for Arjuna, because Draupadi’s five children, one born from each husband, all were killed at the end of the great war. The horse therefore stands not only for Yudhishthira but also for Arjuna. Yudhishthira ascends his throne.

  But the success of the sacrifice is undermined by a story told right after it ends and the guests depart. A mongoose came out of his hole there and declared, in a human voice, “This whole sacrifice is not equal to one of the grains of barley that were given by a Brahmin who lived by observing the vow of gleaning.” fq He then told a story about this Brahmin: During a famine he gave his few remaining grains of barley to a guest who turned out to be Dharma in disguise; the gleaner promptly went to heaven, with his family. When the mongoose finished telling this tale, he vanished (14.92-93), and the storyteller concluded, “Indeed, nonhostility [adroha] to all creatures, contentment, clean conduct, tapas, self-restraint, truthfulness, and generosity all are regarded as equal (14.94.1).” King Janamejaya, listening to the story, then replied, “Kings are addicted to sacrifice, and sages are addicted to inner heat. The Brahmins busy themselves with pacification, tranquilization, and restraint.” He went on to argue that since Indra had become ruler of heaven through sacrifice, surely Yudhishthira, who (with Bhima and Arjuna) resembled Indra in wealth and power, was right to perform the horse sacrifice, and the mongoose was wrong to criticize him. The storyteller then told him another story:

  INDRA’S ANIMAL SACRIFICE DEBATE

  Once upon a time, Indra began a great sacrifice, involving the slaughter of many animals. But as the sacrificial animals [pashus] were seized for slaughter, the great sages saw how wretched they were and were overcome by pity (kripa). They said to Indra, “This is not the right way to sacrifice. Domestic animals (pashus) were not created for sacrifice. This brutality of yours is destructive of dharma, for injury (himsa) cannot be called dharma. Sacrifice instead with seeds of grain that have been kept for three years.” But Indra, God of a Hundred Sacrifices, in his delusion and pride, did not agree to their words. They put the matter to King Vasu: “What is the ruling about sacrifice? Should it be done with domestic animals that are designated for sacrifice, or with infertile seeds? With horses or with fruits?” King Vasu, without thinking, said, “You can sacrifice with whatever is at hand,” and for saying this, which was not true, he went immediately to hell. For a sacrifice performed with materials wrongly obtained, or with an evil mind, does not yield the fruits of dharma. People—Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, and Shudras—do go to heaven by giving away what they have gleaned, and also by compassion to all creatures, and chastity, and sympathy (14.94.1-34).

  Indra presumably completes his sacrifice, since he disregards the sages’ words. But we are told that he did this not out of wisdom but out of his pride and delusion; King Vasu too is punished for disregarding the sages’ question. Janamejaya’s pluralism (some people have one addiction; others have another) i
s not the right answer, but the text never tells us what the right answer would be, because there is no right answer. These stories cast a serious shadow of doubt on the glory of the horse sacrifice.

  So too the unofficial “black” ritual of witchcraft, the snake sacrifice, shadows both of Yudhishthira’s official, “white” rituals, the consecration and the horse sacrifice. The Mahabharata sees a vice behind every virtue, a snake behind every horse, and a doomsday behind every victory.

  CHAPTER 11

  DHARMA IN THE MAHABHARATA

  300 BCE to 300 CE

  CHRONOLOGY

  c. 300 BCE-300 CE The Mahabharata is composed

  c. 200 BCE-200 CE The Ramayana is composed

  327-25 BCE Alexander the Great invades Northwest South Asia

  c. 324 BCE Chandragupta founds the Mauryan dynasty

  c. 265-232 BCE Ashoka reigns

  c. 250 BCE The Third Buddhist Council takes place at Pataliputra

  c. 185 BCE The Mauryan dynasty ends

  c. 185 BCE Pushyamitra founds the Shunga dynasty

  73 BCE The Shunga dynasty ends

  c. 150 BCE The monuments of Bharhut and Sanchi are built

  c. 166 BCE-78 CE Greeks and Scythians enter India

  Dharma is subtle.