heavenly bliss to him who injures no living creature, and reprobates all animal slaughter, and in particular the killing of kine. But he evades the difficulty by pleading that the killing of beasts for sacrifice is not slaughter in the common sense of the word; he permits a twice-born man to kill animals for sacrifice and for the entertainment of a guest; and, in a very feeble way, he excuses such practices on the ground that herbs, trees, and animals used for sacrifice "receive, being reborn, higher existences."[1] This theory is justly satirised by a writer in the Buddhist Jātaka.[2] But it persists in modern times, the degraded Buddhist monks of Tibet, when they eat flesh meat, repeating a charm which ensures that the animal shall be reborn in heaven.[3] Manu sums up the matter by admitting that there is no sin in eating meat, "but abstinence brings great rewards"; and he allows a form of commutation, ordaining that, when a man desires meat, he may make an animal out of butter and eat it.[4]
The same difficulty in reconciling these conflicting views has been felt by modern Hindus. Some forty years ago a paper by a learned Hindu scholar, Dr. Rájendralála Mitra, entitled "Beef in Ancient India,"[5] in which he described the use of the sacred animal for food, caused much astonishment and alarm. From it the inference was drawn that beef-eating, due to mere sensual appetite, was as common in ancient India as it is in many other countries at the present day. This belief, I venture to think, is unfounded, and rests upon a mistaken view of the intention with which the animal was killed and eaten.
It is now almost a commonplace that many pastoral and agricultural tribes kill and eat their sacred animal as a
- ↑ iv., 246; xi., 69, 71, 60; v., 39 et seq., 56; iii., 267 et seq.
- ↑ vi., 10.
- ↑ L. A. Waddell, The Buddhism of Tibet, p. 216.
- ↑ v., 37, 56.
- ↑ Republished from The Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Indo-Aryans, vol. i., pp. 354 et seq. Cf. Romesh Chunder Dutt, History of Civilisation in Ancient India, vol. i., p. 41.
