Hindu legal texts generated a great deal of what we now call “language” to sidestep this deep ambivalence. The most famous of these texts, The Laws of Manu, composed in the early centuries of the Common Era, ricochets back and forth between the vegetarian and sacrificial stances:
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. The Self-existent one himself created sacrificial animals for sacrifice; sacrifice is for the good of this whole (universe); and therefore killing in a sacrifice is not killing. Herbs, sacrificial animals, trees, animals (other than sacrificial animals), and birds who have been killed for sacrifice win higher births again. On the occasion of offering the honey-mixture (to a guest), at a sacrifice, and in rituals in which the ancestors are the deities, and only in these circumstances, should sacrificial animals suffer violence, but not on any other occasion; this is what Manu has said.{The Laws of Manu 5.38–41; The Laws of Manu, a new translation of the Manavadharmasastra, by Wendy Doniger, with Brian K. Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1991), 103.}
Outside the sacrificial arena, the cow that generously gives her milk replaces the steer that must be slaughtered to provide food;{Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 239–54.}
Hindu myths imagine the transition from hunting to farming, from killing to milking, from blood sacrifice to vegetable sacrifice.{Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, Other Peoples’ Myths: The Cave of Echoes (New York: Macmillan, 1988; reprint, University of Chicago Press, 1995), 82–96.}
We may see a variant of this argument in a part of Gulliver’s Travels that Elizabeth does not cite in her evocation of this text. When Gulliver finds himself unable to live on either the vegetarian fare of the Houyhnhnms or the flesh that is the food of the horrid Yahoos, he devises a solution: “I observed a cow passing by; whereupon I pointed to her, and expressed a desire to let me go and milk her.” Henceforth Gulliver survives, in perfect health, on a diet of milk and a bread made of oats—two civilized alternatives to the two natural extremes of raw flesh and grass.
In Hindu myths of this genre, the humans among the animals eat “fruits and roots”; in the Buddhist variants, they eat nothing at all (not being true humans yet) or they eat the earth itself, which is delicious and nourishing, and is sometimes called the earth-cow.{Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), 29, 321–46.} (Shame, too, a factor that Elizabeth’s son John interjects into the argument, enters in here: when people begin to hoard the food given by the earth-cow, they build houses to hide both the food and their newly discovered sexuality; for people who watch others copulating say, “How could anyone treat someone else like that?” and throw clods of earth at them.){Digha Nikaya, Agganna Suttanta 27.10; Visuddhimagga 13.49; cited by O’Flaherty, Origins of Evil, 33.} These two strategies, one realistic and one fantastic, provide natural alternatives to the food that men do in fact share with unmythical animals: meat.
But it is not quite so simple. Vegetarianism and compassion for animals are not the same thing at all. Elizabeth Costello vividly reminds us that it is usual for most individuals to eat meat without killing animals (most nonvegetarians, few of whom hunt or butcher, do it every day) and equally normal for an individual to kill without eating the kill—or, indeed, any other meat (what percentage of hit men or soldiers devour their fallen enemies?). Indeed, one historian of ancient India has suggested that vegetarianism and killing were originally mutually exclusive: that in the earliest period of Indian civilization, meat-eating householders would, in time of war, consecrate themselves as warriors by giving up the eating of meat.{Jan Heesterman, The Inner Conflict of Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).} They either ate meat or killed. In later Hinduism, the strictures against eating and killing continued to work at odds, so that it was regarded as better (for most people, in general: the rules would vary according to the caste status of the person in each case) to kill an Untouchable than to kill a Brahmin, but better to eat a Brahmin (presuming that one came across a dead one) than to eat an Untouchable (under the same circumstances). It is within this world of revisionist scripture and unresolved ambivalence that we must come to terms with Gandhi’s twisted vegetarianism—rightly problematized by “the blond man” who argues with Norma.
Nevertheless, the logical assumption that any animal that one ate had to have been killed by someone led to a natural association between the ideal of vegetarianism and the ideal of nonviolence toward living creatures. And this ideal came to prevail in India, reinforced by the idea of reincarnation and its implication that humans and animals were part of a single system of the recycling of souls: do not kill an animal, for it might be your grandmother, or your grandchild, or you.
COMPASSION TOWARD ANIMALS, AND INDIVIDUAL HUMAN SALVATION But compassion for animals is seldom the dominant factor in South Asian arguments for vegetarianism. Buddhists and Jains cared, like Elizabeth Costello, for individual human salvation, more, really, than they cared for animals; they refrained from killing and eating animals to protect their own souls from pollution (and even, as Norma nastily but correctly points out, to protect their bodies from social pollution). Yet it seems to me that this argument for individual salvation could be adopted in a secular form in the Western conversation more often than it is. It is an argument often made against capital punishment, that it should be abolished not because of its evil effects upon criminals but because it is bad for us, bad for us to be a people who kill people like that. So, too, whether or not we can argue that killing animals for food or experimentation is bad for the universe, for the food supply, for medical advances, or even whether or not we can prove that animals suffer as we do, or know that they are going to die, we might take from the South Asian context the very wise argument that we know that they are going to die, and that that makes it bad for us to kill them.
COMPASSION FOR ANIMALS AS NON OTHER Let me turn now to the argument, implicit in the rebirth scenario, that we must not kill and eat animals because they are like us. In India, this argument begins the other way around: the Vedic myths of sacrifice (before the theory of rebirth) close the gap between humans and animals in the other direction, by including humans with animals as sacrificial beasts. The Sanskrit term Pashu (cognate with Latin pecus, cattle [as in Pecos Bill or impecunious—meaning having no cattle, no bread, no money]) designates sacrificial and domestic animals, animals that we keep until we slaughter them, either in ritual or for food, or both. These are the animals that we own and measure ourselves by; they are the animals that are us. Mriga, related to the verb “to hunt” (margayati, from which is also derived the noun marga, “a trail or path”), designates any animal that we hunt, in particular a deer. But just as “deer” in English comes from the German Tier, meaning any wild animal, a meaning that persisted in English for some time (Shakespeare used the phrase “small deer” in this sense), so too in Sanskrit the paradigmatic mriga, the wild animal par excellence, is the deer, just as the paradigmatic pashu is the cow (or, more precisely, the bull). But mriga is also the general term for any wild animal in contrast with any tame beast or pashu. Pashus are the animals that get sacrificed, whatever their origins; mrigas are the animals that get hunted. In both cases, the ancient Indians defined animals according to the manner in which they killed them.
The Vedas and Brahmanas often list five basic kinds of sacrificial animal or pashu: bull ( go, which can also mean “cow”), horse, billygoat, ram, and human being (person, particularly male person or man).{Atharva Veda 11.2.9, with Sayana’s commentary.} The later Vedic tradition then opens the gap by distinguishing humans from animals in sacrificing only animals; The Laws of Manu lists pashus, mrigas, and humans as three separate groups—though one Hindu commentator glosses this by saying that, even though humans are in fact pashus, they are mentioned separately because of their special preeminence.{Govindaraja on Manu 1.39. In ManuSmrti, with Nine Commentaries, ed. Jayan-takrishna Harikrishna Dave (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Series, no. 29, 1975).} And still later Hinduism once again narrows the gap between humans and
