a rule what I have said of the Buddhist view of _Ahimsa_ does not apply
to the religious, who leans to the strictest Jaina principle of having
nothing to do with shedding blood on any pretence. The Buddhist monks in
China teach the virtue of “fang sheng” (“life-saving”) by object-lessons
in the shape of tanks built near the convents to which people bring
tortoises, fishes and snakes to save them from death, and the monks also
keep homes for starving or lost animals. Favoured European visitors are
invited to witness the custom of feeding the wild birds before the
morning meal is served: the brothers sit silently at the refectory-table
with their bowls of rice and vegetables in front of them, but none
begins to eat till one brother rises, after a sort of grace has been
said, and goes to the door with a little rice in his hands which he
places on a low stone pillar. All the birds are waiting on the roofs and
fly down delighted to partake of their breakfast.
Fra Odoric, the Venetian Franciscan who dictated an account of his
travels in 1330, describes a convent scene which was shown to him as a
most interesting thing, so that when he went home he might say that he
had seen “this strange sight or novelty.” To win the consent of the
monks his native friend, who acted as cicerone, informed them that this
Raban Francus, this religious “Frenchman” (Europeans were all
“Frenchmen”) was going to the city of Cambaleth to pray for the life of
the great Can. Thus recommended he was admitted, and the “religious man”
with whom they had spoken “took two great basketsful of broken relics
which remained on the table and led me into a little walled park, the
door whereof he unlocked with his key, and there appeared unto us a
pleasant fair green plot, into the which we entered. In the said green
stands a little mount in form of a steeple, replenished with fragrant
herbs and fine shady trees. And while we stood there, he took a cymbal
or bell and rang therewith, as they use to ring to dinner or bevoir in
cloisters, at the sound thereof many creatures of divers kinds came down
from the mount, some like apes, some like cats, some like monkeys, and
some having faces like men. And while I stood beholding of them, they
gathered themselves together about him, to the number of 4,200 of these
creatures, putting themselves in good order, before whom he set a
platter and gave them the said fragments to eat. And when they had eaten
he rang upon his cymbal a second time and they all returned to their
former places. Then, wondering greatly at the matter, I demanded what
kind of creatures those might be. They are (quoth he) the souls of noble
men which we do here feed for the love of God who governeth the world,
and as a man was honourable or noble in this life, so his soul after
death entereth the body of some excellent beast or other, but the souls
of simple and rustical people do possess the bodies of more vile and
brutish creatures.”
Odoric’s informant was in error if he really said that distinctions of
rank influenced the soul’s destiny, as this is no Buddhist doctrine. The
charming description of the “strange sight or novelty” was imitated by
Mandeville, who adds, with a sympathetic tolerance which is very
characteristic of him, that the monks were “good religious men after
their faith and law.”
That the stricter was also the more primitive Buddhist rule seems
probable, and it may be that Buddha’s alleged defence of meat-eating was
an invention meant to cover later latitudinarianism. Nevertheless,
_Ahimsa_ was, from the first, a more integral part of the Jaina religion
than of the Buddhist. The true keynote of either faith can be detected
in their respective conversion stories. In all outbursts of religious
revivalism (of which nature both Buddhism and Jainism largely partook)
the moment of conversion is the hinge on which everything turns.
In the Buddhist story, a young prince, born on the steps of the throne,
nursed in luxury and happily wedded, sees consecutively a broken-down
old man, a man with a deadly disease, and a decomposing corpse. These
dreadful and common realities were brought home to his mind with
intolerable force. We seem to hear the despairing cry of R. L.
Stevenson: “Who would find heart to begin to live if he dallied with the
consideration of death”? We live because we drug ourselves with the
waters of a new Lethe which make us forget future as well as past. Sakya
Muni could not forget what he had seen or the lesson which it taught:
the rest of his life was devoted to freeing himself and others from
being endlessly subject to a like doom.
Now let us recall the Jaina conversion story. The son of a powerful king
was on his way to marry a beautiful princess. At a certain place he saw
a great many animals in cages and enclosures looking frightened and
miserable. He asked his charioteer why all those animals which desired
to be free and happy were penned up in cages and enclosures? The
charioteer replied that they were not to be pitied, they were “lucky
animals” which were to furnish a feast for a great multitude at His
Highness’s wedding. (This is the very thing that an English poor man
would have said.) Full of compassion, the future “saviour of the world”
reflected: “If for my sake all these living creatures are killed, how
shall I obtain happiness in another world?” Then and there he renounces
the pomps and vanities of human existence, and he means it, too. The
poor little bride, forsaken in this life, and not much comforted by
promised compensation in the next, “not knowing what she could do,” cuts
off her pretty hair and goes to a nunnery. In time she becomes a model
of perfection, and many of her kindred and servants are persuaded by her
to join the order.
In this story the revulsion is caused by pity, not by loathing. The
instant he sees these poor animals, the kind-hearted prince feels sorry
for them; then comes that unlucky word “lucky” which to the man of
ignorance seems to be so particularly appropriate; it jars on Mahavira’s
nerves as it would on the nerves of any sensitive or refined person.
Nothing moves men to tears or laughter so surely as the antithetical
shock of the incongruous. A rush of emotion overpowers Mahavira: he will
not be happy at the cost of so much misery; he would become odious in
his own sight. So he renounces all for the eternity of one moment of
self-approving joy.
The Jainas carefully exclude every excuse for taking animal life: none
is valid. Animals must not be killed for offering up in sacrifice, not
for their skin, flesh, tail feathers, brush, horns, tusks, sinews,
bones. They must not be killed with a purpose or without a purpose. If
we have been wounded by them, or fear to be wounded by them, or if they
eat our flesh or drink our blood, still we should not only bear it, but
also feel no anger. “This is the quintessence of wisdom, not to kill
anything whatever: know this to be the legitimate conclusion from the
principle of reciprocity.”
No one denies that the principle of reciprocity is the basis of all
morality, and by extending it from men to sentient things, the Jainas
have safeguarded their doctrine of _Ahimsa_ with a stronger wall of
defence than any built on the fantastic fear of devouring one’s
ancestors. Nor can it be said of the Jainas that to a superstitious
repugnance to taking life they join indifference to causing suffering:
inflicting suffering is hardly distinguished from inflicting death. “All
breathing, existing, living, sentient creatures should not be slain nor
treated with violence, nor abused, nor tormented, nor driven away. This
is the pure unchangeable law.” “Indifferent to worldly objects, a man
should wander about treating all the creatures in the world as he
himself would be treated.”
Perhaps the most remarkable of Jaina stories is a real masterpiece of
wit and wisdom in which this theory of reciprocity is enforced. For the
whole of it I must refer the reader to Professor Jacobi’s translation; I
can only give the leading points. Once upon a time three hundred and
sixty-three philosophers, representing a similar number of philosophical
schools, and differing in character, opinions, taste, undertakings and
plans, stood round in a large circle, each one in his place. They
discussed their various views, and at last one man took a vessel full of
red-hot coals which he held at a distance from him with a pair of tongs.
“Now, you philosophers,” said he, “just take this for a moment and hold
it in your hands. No trickery, if you please; you are _not_ to hold it
with the tongs or to put the fire out. Fair and honest!”
With extreme unanimity the three hundred and sixty-two drew back their
hands as fast as they could. Then the speaker continued: “How is this,
philosophers; what _are_ you doing with your hands?” “They will be
burnt,” said the others. “And what does it matter if they are burnt?”
“But it would hurt us dreadfully.” “So you do not want to suffer pain?”
Well, this is the case with all animals. This maxim applies to every
creature, this principle, this religious reflection, holds good of all
living things. Therefore those religious teachers who say that all sorts
of living things may be beaten or ill-treated, or tormented, or deprived
of life will, in time, suffer in the same way themselves, and have to
undergo the whole round of the scale of earthly existence. They will be
whirled round, put in irons, see their mothers, fathers, children die,
have bad luck, poverty, the society of people they detest, separation
from those they love, “they will again wander distraught in the
beginningless and endless wilderness.”
Like a true orator the Jaina member of this early Congress of Religions,
who has drifted from irony to fierce denunciation, does not leave his
hearers with these visions of terror, but with the consoling promise to
the merciful of everlasting beatitude.
[Illustration:
WILD BULLS AND TAMED BULLS.
Reliefs on two gold cups found at Vapheio.
(_From Schuckhardt’s “Schliemann’s Excavations.” By permission of
Messrs. Macmillan & Co., Ltd._)]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
IX
LINES FROM THE ADI GRANTH
THE Adi Granth, or sacred Book of the Sikhs of the Punjab, was composed
by the founder of their religion and their nationality, Baba Nanak (_b._
1469), who abolished caste and idolatry, and established a pure
monotheism. A striking incident at the Coronation Durbar was the arrival
of the Sikh mission in charge of the Adi Granth, which was brought on a
pilgrimage from its shrine in the exquisitely beautiful golden temple at
Amritsar to the tomb of the disciple of Nanak, who, before suffering
martyrdom at Delhi during the Mogul Empire, prophesied the advent of a
fair race destined to sweep the Mogul power to the winds. I take these
few sentences to show the essential continuity of Indian thought about
animals. In the faith of Nanak none remains of the particular tenets of
Buddhism or Jainism or Hinduism, but the animal is still _inside_, not
_outside_, the pale of what may be called Pan-humanity: the whole family
of earth-born creatures.
I.
Say not that this or that distasteful is,
In all the dear Lord dwells,—they all are His
Grieve not the humblest heart; all hearts that are,
Are priceless jewels, all are rubies rare.
Ah! If thou long’st for thy Beloved, restrain
One angry word that gives thy brother pain.
II.
All creatures, Lord, are Thine, and Thou art theirs,
One bond Creator with created shares;
To whom, O Maker! must they turn and weep
If not to Thee their Lord, who dost all keep?
All living creatures, Lord, were made by Thee,
Where Thou hast fixed their station, there they be.
For them Thou dost prepare their daily bread,
Out of Thy loving-kindness they are fed;
On each the bounties of Thy mercy fall,
And Thy compassion reaches to them all.
III.
One understanding to all flesh He gives,
Without that understanding nothing lives;
As is their understanding,—they are so;
The reckoning is the same. They come and go.
The faithful watch-dog that does all he can,
Is better far than the unprayerful man.
Birds in their purse of silver have no store,
But them the Almighty Father watches o’er.
They say who kill, they do but what they may,
Lawful they deem the bleating lamb to slay;
When God takes down the eternal Book of Fate,
Oh, tell me what, what then will be their state?
He who towards every living thing is kind,
Ah! he, indeed, shall true religion find!
IV.
Great is the warrior who has killed within
Self,—Self which still is root and branch of sin.
“I, I,” still cries the World, and gads about,
Reft of the Word which Self has driven out.
V.
Thou, Lord, the cage,—the parrot, see! ’Tis I!
Yama the cat: he looks and passes by.
By Yama bound my mind can never be,
I call on Him who Yama made and me.
The Lord eternal is: what should I fear?
However low I fall, He still will hear.
He tends his creatures as a mother mild
Tends with untiring love her little child.
VI.
I do not die: the world within me dies:
Now, now, the Vivifier vivifies;
Sweet is the world,—ah! very sweet it is,
But through its sweets we lose the eternal bliss!
Perpetual joy, the inviolate mansion, where
There is no grief, woe, error, sin, nor care;
Coming and going and death, enter not in;
The changeless only there an entrance win.
Whosoe’er dieth, born again must be,
Die thou whilst living, and thou wilt be free!
VII.
He, the Supreme, no limit has nor end,
And what HE is how can _we_ comprehend?
Once did a wise man say: “He only knows
God’s nature to whom God His mercy shows.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
X
THE HEBREW CONCEPTION OF ANIMALS
I
... “About them frisking played
All beasts of the earth, since wild, and of all chase
In wood or wilderness, forest or den;
Sporting the lion ramped, and in his paw
Dandled the kid; bears, tigers, ounces, pards,
Gambolled before them; the unwieldy elephant,
To make them mirth, used all his might, and wreathed
His lithe proboscis.”
_Paradise Lost_, Book IV.
THE idea of a condition of existence in which all creatures are happy
and at peace implies a protest against the most patent fact of life as
we see it. Western civilisation inherited from the Roman Empire the
hardness of heart towards animals of which the popularity of
beast-fights in the Arena was the characteristic sign. It was, however,
a Roman poet who first pointed out in philosophical language that the
sufferings of animals stand written in the great indictment against
Nature no less than the sufferings of men. Not only man is born to
sorrow, said Lucretius; look at the cow whose calf bleeds before some
lovely temple, while she wanders disconsolate over all the fields,
lowing piteously, uncomforted by the image of other calves, because her
own is not.
Eighteen hundred years later Schopenhauer said that by taking a very
high standard it was possible to justify the sufferings of man but not
those of animals. Darwin arrived at the same conclusion. “It has been
imagined,” he remarks, “that the sufferings of man tend to his moral
improvement, but the number of men in the world is nothing compared with
the number of other sentient beings which suffer greatly without moral
improvement.” To him, the man of the religious mind whom men lightly
charged with irreligion, it was “_an intolerable thought_” that after
long ages of toil all these sentient beings were doomed to complete
annihilation.
Yes, and to the young conscience of mankind this was also an intolerable
thought. And since it was intolerable the human conscience in the
strength of its youth shook it off, cast it aside, awoke from it as we
awake from a nightmare. Religion has been regarded too exclusively as a
submission to Nature. At times it is a revolt against Nature, a
repudiation of what our senses report to us, an assertion that things
seen are illusions, and that things unseen are real. Religion is born of
Doubt. The incredibility of the Known forced man to seek refuge in the
Unknown. From that far region he brought back solutions good or bad,
sublime or trivial, to the manifold problems which beset man’s soul.
A poet, doomed to early death, who looked into Nature on a summer’s day
and could discern nothing but “an eternal fierce destruction,” wrote, in
his despair—
“Things cannot to the will
Be settled, but they tease us out of thought.
... It is a flaw
In happiness to see beyond our bourn;
It forces us in summer skies to mourn,
It spoils the singing of the nightingale.”
But when the world was young things _could_ be settled to the will. We
are, of course, constantly regulating our impressions of phenomena by a
standard of higher probability. If we see a ship upside down, we say,
“This is not a ship, it is a mirage.” When the primitive man found
himself face to face with seeming natural laws which offended his sense
of inherent probability, he rejected the hypothesis that they were
actual or permanent, and supposed them to be either untrustworthy
appearances or deviations from a larger plan.
Every basic religion gave a large share of thought to animals. The
merit, from a humane point of view, of the explanation of the mystery
offered by the religious systems of India has been praised even to
excess. In contrast to this, it was often repeated that the Hebrew
religion ignored the claims of animals altogether. I wish to show that
even if this charge were not open to other disproof, no people can be
called indifferent to those claims which believes in a Nature Peace.
Traces of such a belief spread from the Mediterranean to the Pacific,
from the Equator to the Pole. But the Peace is not always complete;
there are reservations. In the glowing prediction of a Peace in Nature
in the Atharva-Veda, vultures and jackals are excluded. Mazdeans would
exclude the “bad” animals. The Hebrew Scriptures, on the other hand,
declare that all species are good in the sight of their Maker. Every
beast enjoyed perfect content according to the original scheme of the
Creator. But man fell, and all creation was involved in the consequences
of his fall.
I remember seeing at the Hague an impressive painting by a little-known
Italian artist[6] which represents Adam about to take the apple from Eve
while at their feet a tiger tenderly licks the wool of a lamb. Adam’s
face shows that he is yielding—yielding for no better reason than that
he cannot say “No”—to the beautiful woman at his side; and there,
unconscious and happy, lie the innocent victims of his act: love to be
turned to wrath, peace to war. The Nature Peace has been painted a
hundred times, but never with such tragic significance.
Footnote 6:
Cignani. A singular sixteenth-century “Nature War” may be observed in
a _graffito_ on the pavement of the Chapel of St. Catherine in the
church of St. Domenico, at Siena. A nude youth, resembling Orpheus,
sits on a rock in a leafy grove, in the midst of various animals; with
a disturbed air he looks into a mirror at the back of which is an eye,
a leopard shows his teeth at him, while a vulture screams at a monkey,
and another bird snatches a surprised rabbit or squirrel; the other
creatures, unicorn, wolf, eagle, display signs of uneasiness.
Endeavours to read this fable have not proved satisfactory.
[Illustration:
_Photo:_ _Bruckmann._
THE GARDEN OF EDEN.
(_By Rubens._)
Hague Gallery.]
The Miltonic Adam sees in the mute signs of Nature the forerunners of
further change:—
“The bird of Jove, stooped from his airy tour,
Two birds of gayest plume before him drove;
Down from a hill the beast that reigns in woods,
First hunter then, pursued a gentle brace,
Goodliest of all the forest, hart and hind.”
In an uncanonical version of Genesis which was translated from an
Armenian manuscript preserved at Venice, by my dear and sadly missed
friend, Padre Giacomo Issaverdens, a still more dramatic description is
given of the manner in which the Peace ended. When Adam and Eve were
driven from the Garden of Eden they met a lion, which attacked Adam.
“Why,” asked Adam, “do you attack me when God ordered you and all the
animals to obey me?” “You disobeyed God,” replied the lion, “and we are
no longer bound to obey you.” Saying which, the noble beast walked away
without harming Adam. But war was declared.
War was declared, and yet the scheme of the Creator could not be for
ever defeated. Man who had erred might hope—and how much more must there
be hope for those creatures that had done no harm.
When the Prophets spoke of a Peace in Nature in connexion with that
readjustment of the eternal scales which was meant by the coming of the
Messiah, it cannot be doubted that they spoke of what was already a
widely accepted tradition. But without their help we should have known
nothing of it and we are grateful to them. Of all the radiant dreams
with which man has comforted his heart, aching with realities, is there
one to be compared with this? It is of the earth earthly, and that is
the beauty of it. “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard
lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion together; and a
little child shall lead them; the cow and the bear shall feed; and their
young ones lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.”
“For behold I create new heavens and a new earth. They shall not
hurt nor destroy in all My holy mountain, saith the Lord.”
Is not this the best of promised lands, the kindest of Elysiums, which
leaves none out in the cold of cruelty and hatred? The importunate
questioner may inquire, How can this primal and ultimate happiness
compensate for the intervening ages of pain? About this, it may be
observed that in religious matters people ought not to want to know too
much. This is true of the faithful and even of the unfaithful.
Scientific researches in the great storehouse which contains the
religions of the world are more aided by a certain reserve, a certain
reverence, than by the insatiable curiosity of the scalpel. Religions
sow abroad _idées mères_; they tell some things, others they leave
untold. They take us up into an Alpine height whence we see the broad
configuration of the country and lose sight of the woods and the
tortuous ravines among which we so often missed the track. Now, from the
Alpine height of faith, the idea of an original and final Nature Peace
makes the intervening discord seem of no account—a false note between
two harmonies.
The Nature Peace as the emblem of perfect moral beauty became nearly the
first Christian idea carried out in art. I remarked a rude but striking
instance of it on one of the funereal monuments which have been found
lately at Carthage, belonging to a date when Christian and pagan
commemorated their dead in the same manner, the former generally only
adding some slight symbolical indication of his faith. In this stele
Christ, carrying the lamb across His shoulders, is attended by a panther
and a lion. All such primitive attempts to represent a Nature Peace are
chiefly interesting (and from this point of view their interest is
great) from the fact that in child-like, stammering efforts they reveal
the intrinsic idiosyncrasy of Christian thought after the Church had
parted from the realities of proximity with its Founder, and had not
reached the realities of a body corporate striving for supremacy. Christ
the Divine Effluence was the faith which made men willing to face the
lions.
Doubtless many of those martyrs clung to the sublime conception of a
final Peace, the complement of the first. That this was accepted as no
allegory by the later spiritualised Jews, and especially by the
Pharisees, seems to be a well-established fact. It is difficult to
interpret in any other way the solemn statement of St. Paul, that the
“whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together _until now_,”
waiting for redemption; or the beatific vision of Josephus: “The whole
Creation also will lift up a perpetual hymn ... and shall praise Him
that made them together with the angels and spirits and men, now freed
from all bondage.” _Homines et jumenta salvabis Domine._
II.
What was the view taken of animals by the Jewish people, apart from the
fundamental ideas implied by a primordial Peace in Nature?
It was the habit of Hebrew writers to leave a good deal to the
imagination; in general, they only cared to throw as much light on
hidden subjects as was needful to regulate conduct. They gave precepts
rather than speculations. There remain obscure points in their
conception of animals, but we know how they did _not_ conceive them:
they did not look upon them as “things”; they did not feel towards them
as towards automata.