“Pretty tricky. Not an easy thing to reply to. But why don’t you try the same trick in response?”
“Me? When have I ever written fiction?”
Wendy Doniger
♦
IT SEEMS somehow reductionistic to respond to these deeply moving readings as if they had been dry academic arguments. But all I can do is offer some texts from the other traditions that I know, in support of what I take to be the ideas implicit in J. M. Coetzee’s Tanner Lectures—namely, an argument for the inevitable, if unfalsifiable, links between communion with animals, compassion for animals, and the refusal to torment, if not necessarily the refusal to kill and/or eat, animals. Let me begin, as he does, with the eating.
Thomas O’Hearne, one of Elizabeth Costello’s critics in the second Tanner Lecture, argues that to treat animals compassionately is “very recent, very Western, and even very Anglo-Saxon,” and that we delude ourselves when we think that we can impose this idea on other traditions who are “blind” to it. Elizabeth challenges him too weakly (people keep pets, and children love animals, all over the world). I would make a stronger case for the non-Western religions, though not so strong as most animal-lovers generally assume.
After about the sixth century B.C.E., most Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains did indeed feel that people should not eat animals, in part, as is generally argued, because they themselves might be reborn as animals, but more because they feared that animals might retaliate in the afterworld. A Vedic text from 900 B.C.E. tells of a boy who went to “the world beyond” (that is, the world to which one goes after death—the theory of rebirth is not yet reflected in this text) and saw a man cut another man to pieces and eat him, and another man “eating a man who was screaming,” and another man “eating a man who was soundlessly screaming.” When he returned to earth, his father explained that the first man represented people who, when they had been in this world, had cut down trees and burnt them, the second people who had cooked for themselves animals that cry out, and the third people who had cooked for themselves rice and barley, which scream soundlessly.{Jaiminiya Brahmana 1.42–44; Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, Tales of Sex and Violence: Folklore, Sacrifice, and Danger in the Jaiminiya Brahmana (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 32–35.}
Now, we might regard this as an extreme ecological program—to ban not only the eating of animals, but the burning of fuel and the consumption of vegetables (there was one Hindu, in the twentieth century, who claimed to have recorded the screams of carrots that were strapped down to a table and chopped up). But in fact this is not what this text argues for. When the terrified boy asked his father, “How can one avoid that fate?” his father told him that he could easily avoid it simply by offering oblations to the gods before consuming fuel, animals, and vegetables. This is an example of the rationalization attributed to the Greeks in Elizabeth’s argument with Wunderlich in the first lecture: invent the gods and blame them.
Other parts of this same text do express a kind of submerged guilt at the slaughter of animals, perhaps even compassion, though the ostensible point of the myth is to justify the slaughter: in the beginning, cattle had the skin that humans have now, and humans had the skin that cattle have now. Cattle could not bear the heat, rain, flies, and mosquitoes, and asked humans to change skins with them; in return, they said, “You can eat us and use our skin for your clothing.” And so it was. And the sacrificer puts on the red hide of a cow so that, when he goes to the other world, cattle do not eat him; otherwise, they would eat him.{See the story of “How Men Changed Skins with Animals,” Jaiminiya Brahmana 2.182–83; also in O’Flaherty, Tales of Sex and Violence. For a discussion of this genre of prevarication in other religions, see Jonathan Z. Smith, “The Bare Facts of Ritual,” in Imagining Religion (Chicago: University of Chicaog Press, 1982), 53–65.} Another common ploy to assuage guilt—which is to say, to silence compassion—was to assert that the animal willingly sacrificed itself.{See the discussion of the willingness of the sacrificed animal in Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, “The Good and Evil Shepherd,” in Gilguclass="underline" Essays on Transformation, Revolution, and Permanence in the History of Religions, Dedicated to Zwi Werblowsky, ed. S. Shaked, D. Shulman, and G. G. Stromsa (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1987), 169–91.} On yet other occasions an attempt was made to convince the animal that it was not in fact killed. Thus in the hymn of the horse sacrifice in the Rig Veda, ca. 1000 B.C.E., the priest says to the horse, “You do not really die through this, nor are you harmed. You go on paths pleasant to go on.”{Rig Veda 1.162.21; Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, The Rig Veda: An Anthology, 108 Hymns Translated from the Sanskrit (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1981), 91.}
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.