After 600 B.C. the Brahmans and their secular overlords found it increasingly difficult to satisfy the popular demand for animal flesh. Like priests and rulers in the Middle East and elsewhere, they were unable to maintain high rates of animal slaughter and bountiful redistributions without the wasteful eating of animals needed to plow and manure the fields. As a result, meat eating became the privilege of a select group comprised of Brahmans and other high-caste Aryans, while the common peasants, lacking the power to tax or confiscate other people’s animals, had no choice but to preserve their own domestic stock for traction, milk, and dung production. Thus the Brahmans gradually came to be part of a meat-eating elite whose monopoly over the privilege of slaughtering animals for redistributive feasts had been transformed into a monopoly over the privilege of eating them. Long after ordinary people in northern India had become functional vegetarians, the Hindu upper castes—later the most ardent advocates of meatless diets—continued to dine lustily on beef and other kinds of meat.
I base my argument for this widening gulf between a pampered meat-eating aristocracy and an impoverished meatless peasantry partly on the fact that toward the middle of the first millennium B.C. a number of new religions began to challenge the legitmacy of the Brahman caste and its sacrificial rituals. Of these reformist religions, the best-known are Buddhism and Jainism. Founded in the sixth century B.C. by charismatic holy men, both Buddhism and Jainism outlawed caste distinctions, abolished hereditary priesthoods, made poverty a precondition of spirituality, and advocated communion with the spiritual essence of the universe through contemplation rather than through the sacrifice of animals. In their condemnation of violence, war, and cruelty, and their compassion for human suffering, both of these movements anticipated key elements of Christianity.
For the Buddhists, all life was sacred, although it could exist in higher and lower forms. For the Jains, not only was all life sacred but it shared a common soul: there were no higher and lower forms. In either case, priests who sacrificed animals were no better than murderers. Buddhists tolerated the eating of animal flesh, provided the eater had not participated in the killing. The Jains, however, condemning the killing of all animals, insisted on a pure vegetarian diet. The members of some Jainist sects even deemed it necessary to employ sweepers to clear the path in front of them in order to avoid the calamity of accidentally extinguishing the life of a single ant.
As I suggested earlier, the end of animal sacrifice coincided with the growth of universalistic, spiritualized religions. With the erstwhile “great providers” increasingly unable to validate their majesty through popular displays of open-handed generosity, people were encouraged to look for “redistributions” in an afterlife or in some new phase of being. I have also pointed out that the image of the ruler as great protector of the weak against the strong arose as a matter of practical statecraft during periods of imperial expansion. Buddhism, like Christianity, was ideally suited, therefore, for adoption as an imperial religion. It dematerialized the obligations of the emperor at the same time that it obligated the aristocracy to show compassion to the poor. This explains, I think, why Buddhism became an official religion under Asoka, one of the most powerful emperors in the history of India. Asoka, grandson of the founder of the north Indian Maurya Dynasty, converted to Buddhism in 257 B.C. He and his descendants forthwith set about creating the first and still the largest ever of Indian empires—a shaky realm stretching briefly from Afghanistan to Ceylon. Asoka was thus possibly the first emperor in history to set out to conquer the world in the name of a religion of universal peace.
Meanwhile, Hinduism was profoundly affected by the new religions and began to adopt some of the reforms which had made its Buddhist rival politically successful. Eventually, the widespread opposition to animal sacrifice came to be represented within Hinduism by the doctrine of ahimsa—nonviolence based on the sacredness of life. But this change did not come all at once nor did it proceed in a single direction. After the collapse in 184 B.C. of the Maurya Dynasty, Brahmanism revived and meat eating among the elite flourished once more. As late as A.D. 350, according to Prakash, “flesh of various animals” was served to Brahmans at Sraddhas, the redistributive ceremonies commemorating the dead. “The Kurma Purana goes to the extent of saying that one who does not take flesh in a Sraddha is born again and again as an animal.”
No one is able to say precisely when cows and oxen became distinct objects of veneration among Brahmans and other high-caste Hindus. It is impossible to assign precise dates to changes in Hindu ritual because Hinduism is not a single organized religion but an immense number of loosely affiliated congregations centering on independent temples, shrines, deities, and castes, each with its own doctrinal and ritual specialties. One authority, S. K. Maitz, claims that the cow had already become the most sacred of animals by A.D. 350, but his evidence is a single canto in an epic poem which describes a certain king and his queen as “worshipping cows with sandal paste and garlands.” There is also the inscription of King Chandragupta II, dated to A.D. 465, which equates the killing of a cow with the killing of a Brahman. But the modern Hindu point of view may be intruding. The Gupta emperors issued royal decrees aimed at preventing the consumption of various animals by commoners. Hindu royalty fussed over horses and elephants as well as cows. They garlanded their animals, bathed them, provided them with carpeted stalls, and set them free to roam in protected reserves. It may have been only after A.D. 700 and the Islamic conquest of India that the sacred cow complex acquired its familiar modern form. The followers of Islam had no compunctions about eating beef. Hence under the Moguls, the Islamic emperors of India, cow protection may have become a political symbol of Hindu resistance against beef-eating Moslem invaders. At any rate, the Brahmans—for centuries the sacrificers and consumers of animal flesh—gradually come to regard it as their sacred duty to prevent the slaughtering or eating of any domestic animals, especially cows and oxen.
To the best of my knowledge, no one has previously been able to offer a rational explanation as to why India, unlike the Middle East or China, became the center of a religion that forbade the consumption of beef and venerated the cow as the symbol of life. Let us see if the general principles concerning the establishment of animal taboos that I suggested in the previous chapter are applicable. Ancient Indian beliefs and practices were initially similar to beliefs and practices common to most of Europe, Asia, and North Africa. As predicted, the general transformation from redistributive animal sacrifice to the taboo on the consumption of previously valuable and abundant species followed upon the intensification of agriculture, depletion of resources, and growth of population density. But these generalities do not explain the particular emphasis on cattle and vegetarianism in India or the particular religious complexes associated with animals in other regions.
The place to start, I think, is in the Ganges Valley, where the rate of population growth appears to have been much greater than in the Middle East—or, indeed, than anywhere else in the ancient world. During the Vedic period population was scanty and spread out in small villages. As late as 1000 B.C. population density was low enough to permit each family to own many animals (the Vedic texts mention twenty-four oxen harnessed to a single plow), and as in pre-Roman Europe cattle were regarded as the principal form of wealth. Less than 700 years later the Ganges had probably become the most populous region in the world. Estimates by Kingsley Davis and others give India a population of between 50 and 100 million in 300 B.C. At least half of that total must have been living in the Ganges Valley.
We know that during the early Vedic period the Gangetic plain was still covered with virgin forests. Scarcely a tree remained by 300 B.C. While irrigation provided a secure base for many farm families, millions of peasants received either insufficient flows of water or none at all. Because of fluctuations in monsoon rains, it was always risky to depend on rainfall alone. Deforestation undoubtedly increased the risk of drought. It also increased the severity of the floods wh
ich the Holy River Ganges unleashed when the monsoons dumped too much rain all at once onto the Himalayan foothills. Even today droughts that endure in India for two or three consecutive seasons endanger the lives of millions of people who depend on rainfall to water their crops. From the Mahabharata, an epic poem composed sometime between 300 B.C. and A.D. 300, we know of one drought that lasted twelve years. The poem tells how lakes, wells, and springs dried up, and how agriculture and cattle rearing had to be abandoned. Markets and shops were left empty. The sacrifice of animals came to a halt, and the very stakes for tying up the animals disappeared. There were no festivals. Everywhere heaps of bone could be seen and cries of creatures could be heard. People left the cities. Hamlets were abandoned and set on fire. People fled from one another. They feared each other. Places of worship were deserted. Old people were driven from their houses. Cattle, goats, sheep, and buffalo turned into ferocious beasts that attacked one another. Even the Brahmans died without protection. Herbs and plants withered. The earth looked like a crematorium and “in that dreadful age when righteousness was at an end, men began to eat one another.”
As population density grew, farms became increasingly smaller and only the most essential domesticated species could be allowed to share the land. Cattle were the one species that could not be eliminated. They were the animals that drew the plows upon which the entire cycle of rainfall agriculture depended. At least two oxen had to be kept per family, plus one cow with which to breed replacements when the oxen wore out. Cattle thus became the central focus of the religious taboo on meat eating. As the sole remaining farm animals, they were potentially the only remaining source of meat. To slaughter them for meat, however, constituted a threat to the whole mode of food production. And so beef was tabooed for the same reason that pork was tabooed in the Middle East: to remove temptation.
The respective interdictions against beef and pork, however, reflect the different ecological roles of the two species. The pig was abominated; the cow was deified. Why this should have been the case seems obvious from what I’ve said about the importance of cattle in the agricultural cycle. When pork became too costly to be raised for meat, the whole animal was rendered useless—worse than useless—because it had only been good as something to eat. But when cattle became too costly to be raised for meat, their value as a source of traction did not diminish. Hence they had to be protected rather than abominated, and the best way to protect them was not only to forbid the eating of their flesh but to forbid their slaughter. The ancient Israelites had the problem of preventing the diversion of grains to the production of pork. The solution was to stop raising pigs. But the ancient Hindus could not stop raising cattle since they depended on oxen to plow the land. Their main problem was not how to refrain from raising a certain species but how to refrain from eating it when they got hungry.
The conversion of beef into forbidden flesh originated in the practical life of individual farmers. It was the product neither of a superhuman culture hero nor of a collective social mind brooding over the cost/benefits of alternative resource management policies. Culture heroes express the preformed sentiments of their age and collective minds don’t exist. The tabooing of beef was the cumulative result of the individual decisions of millions and millions of individual farmers, some of whom were better able than others to resist the temptation of slaughtering their livestock because they strongly believed that the life of a cow or an ox was a holy thing. Those who held such beliefs were much more likely to hold onto their farms, and to pass them on to their children, than those who believed differently. Like so many other adaptive responses in culture and nature, the “bottom line” of the religious proscriptions on the use of animal flesh in India cannot be read from short-term cost/benefits. Rather, it is the long term that counted most—performance during abnormal rather than normal agricultural cycles. Under the periodic duress of droughts caused by failures of the monsoon rains, the individual farmer’s love of cattle translated directly into love of human life, not by symbol but by practice. Cattle had to be treated like human beings because human beings who ate their cattle were one step away from eating each other. To this day, monsoon farmers who yield to temptation and slaughter their cattle seal their doom. They can never plow again even when the rains fall. They must sell their farms and migrate to the cities. Only those who would starve rather than eat an ox or cow can survive a season of scanty rains. This human forbearance is matched by the fantastic endurance and recuperative powers of the Indian zebu breeds. Like camels, Indian cattle store energy in their humps, survive for weeks without food or water, and spring back to life when favored with the slightest nourishment. Long after other breeds have expired from disease, hunger, and thirst, zebus continue to pull plows, bear calves, and give milk. Unlike European cattle breeds, zebus were selected not for their strength, beefiness, or copious flow of milk, but largely for their ability to survive severe dry seasons and droughts.
And this brings us to the question why the cow rather than the ox has come to be the most venerated animal. The flesh of either sex is equally taboo, but in ritual and art Hinduism emphasizes the sacredness of cows far more than that of male cattle. Yet practice belies theory. Oxen outnumber cows two to one in the Gangetic plain—a sex ratio which can be accounted for only by the existence of systematic selection against female calves through malign neglect and indirect “bovicide” (exactly paralleling the sub rosa treatment of female human infants). This lopsided ratio reflects the greater value of oxen over cows as a source of traction for plowing the fields. Despite all the fuss made over the holy mother cow, under normal circumstances oxen are, in fact, treated much better. They are kept in stalls, fed by hand, and given grain and oil cake supplements to make them strong and healthy. Cows, on the other hand, are treated in everyday rural life the way American Indians treated their dogs or the way European farmers used to treat their pigs. They are the village scavengers. They are not kept in stalls and fed on fodder crops. Instead, they are let loose to roam around the village to pick up whatever scraps of garbage they can find. Having licked the village clean, they are permitted to wander off in search of a few blades of grass that somehow survived their last tour of a roadside ditch or that have sprouted in the spaces between the railroad ties. Because cows are treated as scavengers, they are likely to show up in such inconvenient places as the gutters of busy thoroughfares and the edges of airport runways, giving rise to the foolish charge that India has been overrun by millions of “useless” cattle.
If the cow more than the ox is the symbol of ahimsa, the sacredness of life, perhaps it is because the cow more than the ox is endangered by the sentiment that it is “useless.” During times of hunger the cow stands more in need of ritual protection than the draft oxen. Yet from the point of view of the resumption and continuity of the agricultural cycle the cow is actually more valuable than the male draft animal. Although it is not as strong as an ox, it can in emergencies pull the plow as well as someday produce replacements for animals that succumb to thirst and hunger. Under duress, therefore, the cow must be treated as well as—if not better than—the ox, and that is probably why it is the principal object of ritual veneration. Mohandes Gandhi knew what he was talking about when he said Hindus worshiped the cow not only because “she gave milk, but because she made agriculture possible.”
Why beef came to be forbidden flesh in India cannot fully be explained unless one can also account for its not becoming taboo in the other early centers of state formation. One possibility is that Indian farmers were more dependent on irregular monsoon rainfall than were farmers in other regions. This may have made it more urgent to protect cows and oxen during times of hunger. In Egypt and Mesopotamia, where cattle were venerated and their sacrifice prohibited in late dynastic times, beef continued to be eaten. But both Egypt and Mesopotamia, unlike India, were totally dependent on irrigation agriculture and never had large numbers of farmers who relied on drought-resistant cattle to get through the dry season.
One explanation for the Chinese aversion to milk is that they are physiologically “allergic” to it. Adult Chinese who drink quantities of milk generally get severe cramps and diarrhea. The cause is not really an allergy but a hereditary deficiency in the ability of the intestines to manufacture the enzyme lactase. This enzyme must be present if the body is to digest lactose, the predominant sugar found in milk. Between 70 and 100 percent of Chinese adults have a lactose deficiency. The trouble with this explanation is that many Indians—between 24 and 100 percent, depending on the region—also have a lactase deficiency. And so do most human populations, Europeans and their American descendants being the exception. Moreover, all the unpleasant consequences of lactase deficiency can easily be avoided if milk is drunk in small quantities or if it is consumed in any one of a number of soured or fermented forms such as yogurt or cheese, in which the lactose is broken down into less complex sugars. In other words, lactase deficiency is only a barrier to the drinking of large quantities of milk American-style. It can’t explain the aversion to butter, sour cream, cheese, and yogurt—all of which are conspicuously absent from Chinese cuisine.
What stands out in the comparison of Chinese and Indian ecosystems is the virtual absence in China of the cow as a farm animal. John Lasson Buck’s authoritative survey of pre-Communist Chinese agriculture showed that in northern China there were on the average .05 oxen but less than .005 cows per farm. This indicates a cattle sex ratio of more than 1,000 males to 100 females, as compared with a ratio of between 210:100 and 150:100 in the Central Gangetic Plain and 130:100 for all of India. This difference reflects the fact that the cow had virtually no role in the northern Chinese domestic economy other than to breed oxen, which explains at least one aspect of the Chinese distaste for milk: there were no cows around the typical northern Chinese village. No cows, no milk, no chance to acquire a taste for milk products.
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