The Hindus (34 page)

Gradually many branches of Hinduism banished all animal sacrifices. Though this latter transition is almost always couched in terms of morality (
ahimsa
), there may also have been an element of necessity in it, the need to answer the challenge posed by the antisacrificial polemic of Buddhism and Jainism, which had converted many powerful political leaders. The Buddhists and Jainas too may have had moral reasons to abolish the sacrifice (as they said they did), but they may also have wanted to make a clean break with Hinduism by eliminating the one element by which most Hindus defined themselves, Vedic sacrifice. It was politic too for the Buddhists to promote a religion that did not need Brahmins to intercede for individual humans with gods, indeed that denied the efficacy of gods altogether, and this was the final move that distinguished Buddhists and Jainas from Hindu renunciants, who may not have employed Brahmins themselves but did not deny their authority for others. It was factors such as these, more than compassion for furry creatures, that made Buddhists and Jainas abjure animal sacrifice.
^do
(The stricter
ahimsa
of the Jainas, which forbade them to take any animal life, prevented them from farming, which killed the tiny creatures caught under the plow; they were therefore forced to become bankers and get rich.)

But when we fold this mix back into the broader issues, we must distinguish among killing animals, tormenting animals, sacrificing them, eating them, and, finally, worshiping them. Nonviolence, pacifism, compassion for animals, and vegetarianism are not the same thing at all. Indeed Manu equates, in terms of merit, performing a horse sacrifice and abjuring the eating of meat (5.53). It is usual for an individual 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 people without eating them (what percentage of hit men or soldiers devour their fallen enemies?). We have noted that the horse in the Vedic sacrifice was killed but not eaten. Similarly, vegetarianism and killing may have been originally mutually exclusive; in the earliest period of Indian civilization, in places where there was no standing army, meat-eating householders would, in time of war, like volunteer firemen, become soldiers and consecrate themselves as warriors by giving up the eating of meat.
⁵⁰
They either ate meat
or
killed.
^dp

In later Hinduism, the strictures against eating and killing continued to work at odds, so that it would have been 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 a Pariah than to kill a Brahmin, but better to eat a Brahmin (if one came across a dead one) than to eat a Pariah (under the same circumstances). The degree of purity/pollution in the food that is eaten seems to be an issue distinct from the issue of the amount of violence involved in procuring it. It makes a difference if you find the meat already killed or have to kill it, and this would apply not only to Brahmins versus Pariahs (admittedly an extreme case) but to cows versus dogs as roadkill.

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. Thus, in the course of a few centuries, the Upanishads took the Vedic depiction of the natural and social orders as determined by power and violence (
himsa
) and reversed it in a 180-degree turn toward nonviolence. The logical link is the realization, so basic to Hinduism in all periods, that every human and every animal dies, that every human and every animal must eat, and that eating requires that someone or something (since vegetables are part of the continuum of life too) must die. The question is simply how one is going to live, and kill to live, until death.

ADDICTION AND RENUNCIATION

One reason why the renunciant movements were accepted alongside the more conventional householder religion was that such movements addressed a problem that was of great concern to the wider tradition, the problem of addiction. A profound psychological understanding of addiction (
sakti
,
^dq
particularly excessive attachment,
ati-sakti
^dr
) to material objects and of the true hallmark of addiction, the recurrent failure to give them up even when one wants to give them up—the “just one more and I will stop” scenario—is evident throughout the history of Hinduism. Manu puts it well: “A man should not, out of desire, become addicted to any of the sensory objects; let him rather consider in his mind what is entailed in becoming excessively addicted to them (4.16).” One reaction to this perceived danger was the movement to control addiction through renunciation and/or asceticism, building dikes to hold back the oceanic tides of sensuality. Fasting and vows of chastity were widely accepted, in moderated forms, even among householders.

The Hindu appreciation of the value of exquisite pleasure (
kama
) was balanced by an awareness of the dangers that it posed, when cultivated to the point at which it became a vice (a danger appreciated even by the
Kama-sutra
), and by a number of religious disciplines designed to control the sensual addictions to material objects. Most sorts of renunciation were peaceful, both for the individual renouncer and for the society from which the renouncer withdrew, offsides, hors de combat, while remaining perceived as broadly beneficial to the community at large. But other kinds of renunciation were violent both to the physical body and to the social body, to the world of families. Hinduism was violent not only in its sensuality but in its reaction against that sensuality—violent, that is, both in its addictions and in the measures that it took to curb those addictions (acknowledging, like Dr. Samuel Johnson, that it is easier to abstain than to be moderate).

The senses, as we have seen, were analogized not to unglamorous tame animals like pigs or dogs or to more violent wild animals like lions or crocodiles, but to noble, beautiful, expensive horses. Both the senses and horses were a Good Thing for high-spirited warrior kings (though dangerous even for them; remember King Triyaruna and his chariot) but not such a Good Thing for more bovine priests and householders whose goal was control. And as Brahmins were perceived (at least by Brahmins) as needed to control kings, so asceticism was thought necessary to rein in the treacherous senses.

Some renouncers chose to marginalize themselves socially in order not to fall prey to the violence and tyranny of the senses—that is, to addiction. At the opposite end from renunciation on the spectrum of sensuality, addiction, like renunciation, served to marginalize upper-caste males and consign them to the ranks of the other marginalized people who are a central concern of our narrative, women and lower castes. Addiction to the vices marginalized some Brahmins and rajas by stripping them of their power and status; kings, at least in stories, lost their kingdoms by gambling or were carried away by hunting and landed in dangerous or polluting circumstances. Hunting was classified as a vice only when it was pursued when there was no need for food, just as gambling became a vice when undertaken independent of a need for money, and sex when there was no need for offspring. Hunting therefore is not a vice for poor people, who hunt for squirrels or whatever they can find to eat, though tribal hunters were regarded as unclean because of their habit of hunting. To some extent, these vices leveled the playing field.

But sensuality continued to keep its foot in the door of the house of religion; the erotic was a central path throughout the history of India. Though asceticism remained alive and well and living in India, in other parts of the forest, householders continued to obey the command to be fruitful and multiply. Material evidence, such as epigraphy, has recently indicated that Hinduism (like Buddhism) on the ground was less concerned with soteriology and more with worldly values than textual scholars have previously assumed. But the religious texts too show this ambivalence. The tension between the two paths, the violent (sacrificial), worldly, materialistic, sensual, and potentially addictive path of smoke and rebirth, on the one hand, and the nonviolent (vegetarian), renunciant, ascetic, spiritual, and controlled path of flame and Release, on the other, was sometimes expressed as the balance between worldly involvement and withdrawal from life, between the outwardly directed drive toward activity (
pravritti
) and the inwardly directed drive toward withdrawal (
nivritti
), between bourgeois householders and homeless seekers, or between traditions that regarded karma as a good or a bad thing, respectively.

From time to time one person or one group raised its voice to accuse the other of missing the point. Hostility was rare but not unknown. One Brahmana depicts the renunciant life in unflattering terms: “Fathers have always crossed over the deep darkness by means of a son, for a son gives a father comfort and carries him across; the self is born from the self. What use is dirt or the black antelope skin [of the ascetic]? What use are beards and asceticism? Brahmins, get a son; that is what people keep saying.”
⁵¹
The householder’s tendency to regard ascetics with a mixture of reverence, envy (perhaps tinged with guilt), pity, and distrust
⁵²
sometimes fueled the widespread image of false ascetics, fake fakirs, and mendacious mendicants, an image just about as old as the tradition of genuine ascetics.
⁵³
The 1891 census listed yogis under “miscellaneous and disreputable vagrants”
⁵⁴
(think of Raikva), and to this day villagers express “considerable skepticism about yogis in general in Hindu society.” Throughout India, people tell stories about yogis who are “mere men” and succumb to temptation by women.
⁵⁵
The householder could express his ambivalence by honoring “real” ascetics and dishonoring the fakes. Hindus have always been as skeptic as they are omphaloskeptic.

A related tension runs between the vitality of the Hindu sensual and artistic traditions, on the one hand, and the puritanism of many Hindu sects, on the other. It also led to an ongoing ambivalence toward women. Renouncers tended to encourage a virulent loathing and fear of women, while worldly Hindus celebrated women in their sculptures, their poetry, and, sometimes, real life. In addition to various options that were later developed to accommodate
moksha
, one solution was to remove from men entirely the responsibility for the conflict between sexuality and chastity and to project it onto women.
⁵⁶
For men who took the option of fertility, therefore, women were revered as wives and mothers, while for those who were tempted by chastity, women were feared as insatiable seductresses. This schizoid pattern emerges again and again in attitudes to women throughout the history of Hinduism.

These differences fueled debates on a number of key philosophical and practical issues in Hinduism. For Hindus continue to drive, like King Vrisha in the Brahmana story, with one foot on the accelerator of eroticism and one foot on the brake of renunciation. The tension appears, for instance, in the interaction of two forms of worship: on the one hand, a form that visualizes the god with qualities (
sa-guna
), as an animal, or a man or a woman, with arms and legs and a face, a god that you can tell stories about, a god you can love, a god that becomes incarnate from time to time, assuming an illusory form out of compassion for human beings who need to be able to imagine and love and worship the deity, and, on the other hand, a worship that sees god ultimately without qualities (
nir-guna
), beyond form, ineffable and unimaginable, an aspect of
brahman
. This second viewpoint is often a force for tolerance, rather than difference: If you believe that the deity is ultimately without form, you are less likely to insist on the particular form that you happen to worship or to stigmatize the different form that your neighbor worships. Yet the creative tension between renouncers and Hindus who chose to remain in the thick of human things at times threatened the tolerance and diversity of Hinduism.

We must, in any case, beware of essentializing these oppositions, as the early Orientalists did, as even Karl Marx did, when he characterized Hinduism, in an article in the
New York Tribune
, in June 10, 1853, as “at once a religion of sensualist exuberance, and a religion of self-torturing asceticism; a religion of the Lingam and of the juggernaut; the religion of the Monk, and of the Bayadere [dancing girl].” Rather, we should regard these dichotomies as nothing more than general guidelines or intellectual constructs that help us find our way through the labyrinth of ancient Indian religious groups. Just because the Hindus themselves often formulated their ideas in terms of polar opposites—and they did—there is no reason to believe that these categories corresponded to any sort of lived experience. For though the ideal of renunciation seemed in ways to challenge or even to threaten the traditional Vedic system, it was entirely assimilated by Hinduism, the world’s great “have your rice cake and eat it” tradition. To practicing Hindus, it was all part of the same religion, one house with many mansions; their enduring pluralism allowed Hindus to recognize the fissures but to accept them as part of a unified world. In a way somewhat analogous to the attitude of lay Buddhists or Catholics to nuns and monks, many Hindu householders were happy to support renouncers in order to gain secondhand merit from a regimen that they themselves were not willing to undergo, and renouncers were happy to be supported by householders in exchange for their blessings and, sometimes, their teachings. Despite the recurrent conflicts and occasional antagonisms between the two paths, by and large the creative tension between them was peaceful; the two options generally respected each other and lived together happily for centuries, carrying on in tandem. The idea of nonviolence supplemented rather than replaced the Vedic demand for blood sacrifice. Renunciation remained a separate live option alongside the earlier options. Whole groups—the lower castes, for instance—never saw any conflict between the two ideals or simply ignored both. Where a less vigorous, or less tolerant, tradition might have burned the Upanishadic sages at the stake, where most other religions would have either kicked out or swallowed up the antinomian ascetics, Vedic Hinduism moved over to make a place of honor for them.