The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  WHY YOU MAY, AND MAY NOT, EAT MEAT

  The dharma-shastras, like the texts that precede them, wrestle with the question of vegetarianism. The Kama-sutra, in the course of a most idiosyncratic definition of dharma, takes meat eating to be a normal part of ordinary life but, at the same time, regards vegetarianism as one of the two defining characteristics of dharma (the other being sacrifice, which often involves the death of animals): Dharma consists in doing things, like sacrifice, that are divorced from material life and refraining from things, like eating meat, that are a part of ordinary life (2.2.7).

  In one verse, Manu seems actually to punish a person for not eating meat at the proper time: “But when a man who is properly engaged in a ritual does not eat meat, after his death he will become a sacrificial animal during twenty-one rebirths (5.35).” Thus he encourages people to eat meat—if they follow the rules. Elsewhere he describes meat eating too as an addiction that some people cannot give up entirely: “If he has an addiction [to meat], let him make a sacrificial animal out of clarified butter or let him make a sacrificial animal out of flour; but he should never wish to kill a sacrificial animal for no [religious] purpose (5.37).” Clearly Manu has sympathy for the vegetarian with his veggie cutlets, but also for the addicted carnivore.

  At first Manu reflects the Vedic view of limited retribution in the Other World: “A twice-born person who knows the rules should not eat meat against the rules, even in extremity; for if he eats meat against the rules, after his death he will be helplessly eaten by those that he ate. ‘He whose meat in this world do I eat/will in the other world me eat.’ Wise men say that this is why meat is called meat (5.33.55).” But then Manu switches to the post-Vedic view of transmigration, rather than an Other World, and to vegetarianism with a vengeance:

  As many hairs as there are on the body of the sacrificial animal that he kills for no [religious] purpose here on earth, so many times will he, after his death, suffer a violent death in birth after birth. You can never get meat without violence to creatures with the breath of life, and the killing of creatures with the breath of life does not get you to heaven; therefore you should not eat meat. Anyone who looks carefully at the source of meat, and at the tying up and slaughter of embodied creatures, should turn back from eating any meat (5.38.48-53).

  The last line alone expresses actual sympathy for the suffering of the slaughtered animals.

  Manu flees from the horns of his dilemma (on one horn, sacrifice; on the other, vegetarianism) to several lists of animals and classes of animals that you can or, on the other hand, cannot eat, lists that rival in unfathomable taxonomic principles not only Deuteronomy but Ashoka’s edicts; clearly, you can eat a great number of animals, if you know your way around the rules (5.5-25). The authors of shastras make many different lists involving animals: classes of beings one should and should not eat; situations in which lawsuits arise between humans and livestock; punishments for people who injure, steal, or kill various animals; animals (including humans) that Brahmins should not sell; and vows of restoration for anyone who has, advertently or inadvertently, injured, stolen, killed, or eaten (or eaten the excrement of) various animals.35 The passage with which this chapter began, “Restorations for Killing a Mongoose or an Unchaste Woman,” spells out one subset of this enormous group, as some animals are given (presumably to be killed) in restoration for killing other animals or for killing unchaste, hence subhuman, women.

  But in addition to the specific times when it is OK to eat meat—for a sacrifice, when it has been properly consecrated, when you would otherwise starve to death (10.105-08), etc.—Manu expresses a general philosophy of carnivorousness:

  The Lord of Creatures fashioned all this universe to feed the breath of life, and everything moving and stationary is the food of the breath of life. Those that do not move are food for those that move, and those that have no fangs are food for those with fangs; those that have no hands are food for those with hands; and cowards are the food of the brave. The eater who eats creatures with the breath of life who are to be eaten does nothing bad, even if he does it day after day; for the creator himself created creatures with the breath of life, some to be eaten and some to be eaters (5.28-30).

  Recall the similar verse in the Mahabharata: “The mongoose eats mice, just as the cat eats the mongoose; the dog devours the cat, your majesty, and wild beasts eat the dog (12.15.21).” Manu’s terror of piscine anarchy—“fish eat fish”—is a direct extension of Vedic assumptions about natural violence. But Manu also says that “Killing in a sacrifice is not killing. . . . The violence [himsa] to those that move and those that do not move which is sanctioned by the Veda—that is known as nonviolence [ahimsa] (5.39, 44).” By defining the sacrifice as nonviolent, Manu made it nonviolent. In this way, he was able to list the Veda and nonviolence together in his final summary of the most important elements of the moral life, the basic principles of general and eternal dharma (12.83-93; 6.91-94; 10.63).

  The two views, violent and nonviolent, are juxtaposed in an uneasy tension in the context within which Manu debates most problems, the ritual.36 Manu transforms five of the earlier Vedic sacrifices (animal sacrifices in which violence is assumed) into five Hindu vegetarian sacrifices that avoid violence (3.70-74). He goes on to argue that these five sacrifices themselves are restorations for the evils committed by normal householders in “slaughterhouses” where small creatures are, often inadvertently, killed (an idea that now seems more Jaina than Hindu but in its day was widely shared): “A householder has five slaughterhouses, whose use fetters him: the fireplace, the grindstone, the broom, the mortar and pestle, and the water jar. The great sages devised the five great sacrifices for the householder to do every day to redeem him from all of these [slaughter-houses] successively (3.68-69).” The justifications of violence in both Manu and the Mahabharata lie behind a later text in which the Brahmins tell the king, “Violence is everywhere and therefore, whatever the Jaina renouncers say is blind arrogance. Can anyone keep alive without eating? And how is food to be got without violence? Is there anyone on earth who does not have a tendency toward violence? Your majesty! People live by violence alone. . . . If a person thinks of his good qualities and thinks badly of others—then also he commits violence.”37 It is ironic that in this very text, the “violence” of thinking badly of others—what we would call intolerance—is committed against Jaina renouncers, who are (blindly and arrogantly) accused of “blind arrogance.”

  Manu offers far fewer promeat than antimeat verses (three pro and twenty-five anti). Yet he ends firmly on the fence: “There is nothing wrong in eating meat, nor in drinking wine, nor in sexual union, for this is how living beings engage in life, but disengagement yields great fruit (5.56).” The implication is that these activities are permitted under the specified circumstances, but that even then it is better to refrain from them altogether. Manu’s final redaction brings together both a Vedic tradition of sacrifice and violence and a later tradition of vegetarianism and nonviolence. To him goes the credit for synthesizing those traditions and structuring them in such a way as to illuminate his own interpretation of their interrelationship.

  This is a dance of the victims and the victimizers. For the same people and animals appear on both sides of the line, and the assertions that certain animals should not be killed and that people who are leprous or blind have no rights are causally related: People who have killed certain animals are reborn as certain animals, but they are also reborn as lepers or blind men. So too not only are there punishments for humans who eat or sell certain animals, but there are also punishments for humans who eat or sell humans, including their sons and themselves, or who sell their wives (which Manu both permits and punishes) or drink the milk of women (5.9, 9.46, 174, 11.60, 62).

  Finally, Manu invokes the argument from equivalence: “The man who offers a horse sacrifice every year for a hundred years, and the man who does not eat meat, the two of them reap the same fruit of good deeds (5.54).” That is, to sacr
ifice (to kill an animal) or not to (kill and) eat an animal is the same thing. And if that fails, Manu invokes the attitude toward substitution that eventually leads to rituals such as “strangling” rice cakes, a clear atavism from an earlier sacrifice of a living creature.38

  The Kama-sutra too regards abstention from meat eating as the paradigmatic act of dharma, yet it notes that people do generally eat meat. Elsewhere too it assumes that the reader of the text will eat meat, as when it recommends, after lovemaking, a midnight supper of “some bite-sized snacks: fruit juice, grilled foods, sour rice broth, soups with small pieces of roasted meats, mangoes, dried meat, and citrus fruits with sugar, according to the tastes of the region (2.10.7-8).” But even Vatsyayana draws the line at dog meat. In arguing that one should not do something stupid just because a text (including his own) tells you to do it, he quotes a verse:

  Medical science, for example,

  recommends cooking even dog meat,

  for juice and virility;

  but what intelligent person would eat it? (2.9.42)

  It seems, however, that he objects to dog meat on aesthetic rather than dogmatic grounds.

  THE CONTROL OF ADDICTION

  The Brahmins emitted the shastras, as frightened squid emit quantities of ink, to discipline the addiction that could invade the rational faculties, as the barbarians from the north would invade India in the Kali Age. The Kama-sutra shares with both the Artha-shastra and Manu (as well as with other important Indian traditions such as yoga) an emphasis on the need for the control of addiction, though each text has its own reasons for this.

  The texts often call the four major addictions the vices of lust, sometimes naming them after the activities themselves—gambling, drinking, fornicating, hunting—and sometimes projecting the guilt and blame from the addict onto the objects of addiction: dice, intoxicants (wine, various forms of liquor, as well as marijuana and opium), women (or sex), and wild animals. The addictions are also called the royal vices, and indeed the typical member of the royal or warrior class is “a drinker of wine to the point of drunkenness, a lover of women, a great hunter—killing for sport,” as well as a gambler and (beyond the four classical vices) a slayer of men and eater of meat.39 That is, it was the king’s job to indulge in what were, sometimes for him and always for people of other classes, deadly vices. Kings were allowed to have the vices that kill the rest of us, but even kings could be killed by an excess of them; the Artha-shastra advises a king to have a secret agent tempt the crown prince with all four vices and another secret agent dissuade him from them (1.1.28-29).gi The Mahabharata (2.61.20) remarks that the four vices are the curse of a king, and indeed all four play a major part in the Mahabharata story: Pandu is doomed by excessive hunting and forbidden sex (book 1); Yudhishthira and Nala are undone by gambling (books 2 and 3); and the entire clan is destroyed by men who break the law against drinking (book 16). The four addictive vices of desire were also associated with violence, in the double sense of releasing pent-up violent impulses and being themselves the violent form of otherwise normal human tendencies (to search for food, take risks, drink, and procreate).

  Hunting is the most obscure of the vices to the mind of nonhunting Euro-Americans, but it shares the quality of “just one more”—there are many stories of hunters who kept going even after they knew they should turn back, until they found themselves benighted or in a dangerous place, or both, gj as well as the quality of blindness (as in “blind drunk”) that makes the hunter mistake a human being for an animal, with disastrous consequences. Both Draupadi (MB 3.248) and Sita (R 3.42) are abducted when their men are away, hunting; King Parikshit, obsessed with hunting, impatiently insults a sage who obstructs his hunt, and is cursed to die (MB 1.26-40); and deer appear to King Yudhishthira in a dream, complaining that their numbers are dwindling because of his family’s incessant hunting (MB 3.244).

  We have seen the lament of the compulsive gambler, in the Rig Veda, and noted the self-destructive gambling of two great kings in the Mahabharata (Yudhishthira and Nala). The Artha-shastra ranks gambling as the most dangerous vice a king can have, more dangerous than (in descending order) women, drinking, and hunting (8.3.2-6). But gambling, in the form of a game of dice, was an integral part of the ceremony of royal consecration, the metaphor for the disintegrating four Ages, and a central trope for the role of chance in human life. Whereas Einstein remarked that God does not play dice with the universe, Hindu texts state that God—Shiva—does indeed playgk dice.40 The Vedic consecration ritual includes a ritual dice game of multiple symbolic meanings: the four Ages, the risk implicit in the sacrifice itself, the element of chance in getting and keeping power, the royal vice of gambling that must be channeled into political daring, and the king’s hope of “gathering” in all the winning throws of all the other players (as Raikva did). The king is regarded as the maker of the age, and the ceremonial dice game played at his consecration is said, like the gambling of Shiva in Shaiva mythology, to determine what kind of cosmic age will come up next: Golden Age or Kali Age.41

  But one particular king, Yudhishthira, happens to be, as an individual rather than someone in the office of king, a compulsive and unsuccessful gambler, gl and his enemies take advantage of this: They send in to play against Yudhishthira a man known to be invincible, almost certainly dishonest, and Yudhishthira gambles away his possessions, then his brothers, himself, and his wife. Only Draupadi’s courage and wit and legal knowledge are able to save them from slavery, and even so, they lose the kingdom and must go into exile for twelve years, and remain disguised for a thirteenth. Thus the human vice of addictive gambling intrudes upon the controlled ritual of gambling.

  As for drinking, and intoxication more generally conceived, we have encountered Indra’s colossal hangover in the Brahmanas. There were at least twelve types of alcohol popular in ancient India: sura (also called arrack, made from coconut or from other fermented fruits or grains, or sugarcane, the drink most often mentioned, particularly as used by non-Brahmins42), panasa (from jackfruit), draksha (from grapes, often imported from Rome), madhuka (from honey), kharjura (dates), tala (palm), sikhshiva (sugarcane), madhvika (distilled from the flowers of Mahue longifolia), saira (from long pepper), arishta (from soapberry), narikelaja (from coconut), and maireya (now called rum).43

  The Artha-shastra advises the king to appoint only teetotaling counselors (to guard against loose talk) and to keep his sons from liquor, which might make them cast covetous eyes on his throne (1.5, 2.16). Against enemy princes, however, liquor is a useful weapon: An enemy prince should be weakened by intoxication so that he can be more easily compelled to become an ally (2.17).

  Finally, addictive lust. The Kama-sutra, working the other side of the street, as it were, teaches the courtesans how to create, and manipulate, sexual addiction in others. Advice to the courtesan: “A brief saying sums it up: She makes him love her but does not become addicted to him, though she acts as if she were addicted (6.2.2).” And the clear signs of a man’s addiction to her are that “he trusts her with his true feelings, lives in the same way as she does, carries out her plans, is without suspicion, and has no concern for money matters (6.2.73).” Once he is hooked, she can control him: “When a man is too deeply addicted to her, he fears that she will make love with another man, and he disregards her lies. And because of his fear, he gives her a lot (6.4.39-42).” The Kama-sutra also offers advice to anyone, male or female, professional or amateur, on the uses of drugs to put lovers in your power (7.1-2).

  More generally, renunciants regarded sex as a snaregm and a delusion, gn and householder life as a deathtrap. Manu even admits that what makes women so dangerous is the fact that men are so weak:

  It is the very nature of women to corrupt men here on earth; for that reason, circumspect men do not get careless and wanton among wanton women. It is not just an ignorant man, but even a learned man of the world, too, that a wanton woman can lead astray when he is in the control of lust and anger. No one should sit in
a deserted place with his mother, sister, or daughter; for the strong cluster of the sensory powers drags away even a learned man (2.213-15).

  Manu’s entire text is an intricate regimen for the control of the senses, essential for anyone on the path to Release but also a desideratum for people on the path of rebirth. Kautilya, by contrast, tosses off the need for control of the senses with just a few, rather unhelpful lines: “The conquest of the senses arises out of training in the sciences [vidyas] and is accomplished by renouncing desire, anger, greed, pride, drunkenness, and exhilaration (1.6.1).” And later: “Absence of training in the sciences is the cause of a person’s vices (8.3.1-61).” But Kautilya also prescribes what we would call aversion therapy for a young prince who is addicted to any of the four vices of lust:

  If in the overflowing of adolescence he sets his mind on the wives of other men, the king’s agents should turn him off by means of filthy women pretending to be noble women in empty houses at night.44 If he lusts for wine, they should turn him off by a drugged drink [a spiked drink that makes him nauseated]. If he lusts for gambling, they should have players cheat him. If he lusts for hunting, they should have him terrified by men pretending to be robbers blocking his path (1.17.35-38).

  The Kama-sutra too knows how dangerous the senses can be and likens them, as usual, to horses: “For, just as a horse in full gallop, blinded by the energy of his own speed, pays no attention to any post or hole or ditch on the path, so two lovers blinded by passion in the friction of sexual battle are caught up in their fierce energy and pay no attention to danger (2.7.33).” How to guard against that danger? Study the Kama-sutra, but also use your head (2.7.34).