'NOBLESSE OBLIGE'
'Sooner shall the cleft rock reunite so as to make a whole, than
may he who kills any living being be admitted into our
society.'--_Acceptance into the Monkhood._
It is very noticeable throughout the bazaars of Burma that all the beef
butchers are natives of India. No Burman will kill a cow or a bullock,
and no Burman will sell its meat. It is otherwise with pork and fowls.
Burmans may sometimes be found selling these; and fish are almost
invariably sold by the wives of the fishermen. During the king's time,
any man who was even found in possession of beef was liable to very
severe punishment. The only exception, as I have explained elsewhere,
was in the case of the queen when expecting an addition to her family,
and it was necessary that she should be strengthened in all ways. None,
not even foreigners, were allowed to kill beef, and this law was very
stringently observed. Other flesh and fish might, as far as the law of
the country went, be sold with impunity. You could not be fined for
killing and eating goats, or fowls, or pigs, and these were sold
occasionally. It is now ten years since King Thibaw was overthrown, and
there is now no law against the sale of beef. And yet, as I have said,
no respectable Burman will even now kill or sell beef. The law was
founded on the beliefs of the people, and though the law is dead, the
beliefs remain.
It is true that the taking of life is against Buddhist commands. No life
at all may be taken by him who adheres to Buddhistic teaching. Neither
for sport, nor for revenge, nor for food, may any animal be deprived of
the breath that is in it. And this is a command wonderfully well kept.
There are a few exceptions, but they are known and accepted as breaches
of the law, for the law itself knows no exceptions. Fish, as I have
said, can be obtained almost everywhere. They are caught in great
quantities in the river, and are sold in most bazaars, either fresh or
salted. It is one of the staple foods of the Burmese. But although they
will eat fish, they despise the fisherman. Not so much, perhaps, as if
he killed other living things, but still, the fisherman is an outcast
from decent society. He will have to suffer great and terrible
punishment before he can be cleansed from the sins that he daily
commits. Notwithstanding this, there are many fishermen in Burma.
A fish is a very cold-blooded beast. One must be very hard up for
something to love to have any affection to spare upon fishes. They
cannot be, or at all events they never are, domesticated, and most of
them are not beautiful. I am not aware that they have ever been known to
display any attachment to anyone, which accounts, perhaps, for the
comparatively lenient eye with which their destruction is contemplated.
For with warm-blooded animals it is very different. Cattle, as I have
said, can never be killed nor their meat sold by a Burman, and with
other animals the difficulty is not much less.
I was in Upper Burma for some months before the war, and many a time I
could get no meat at all. Living in a large town among prosperous
people, I could get no flesh at all, only fish and rice and vegetables.
When, after much trouble, my Indian cook would get me a few fowls, he
would often be waylaid and forced to release them. An old woman, say,
anxious to do some deed of merit, would come to him as he returned
triumphantly home with his fowls and tender him money, and beg him to
release the fowls. She would give the full price or double the price of
the fowls; she had no desire to gain merit at another person's expense,
and the unwilling cook would be obliged to give up the fowls. Public
opinion was so strong he dare not refuse. The money was paid, the fowls
set free, and I dined on tinned beef.
And yet the villages are full of fowls. Why they are kept I do not know.
Certainly not for food. I do not mean to say that an accidental meeting
between a rock and a fowl may not occasionally furnish forth a dinner,
but this is not the object with which they are kept--of this I am sure.
You would not suppose that fowls were capable of exciting much
affection, yet I suppose they are. Certainly in one case ducks were.
There is a Burman lady I know who is married to an Englishman. He kept
ducks. He bought a number of ducklings, and had them fed up so that they
might be fat and succulent when the time came for them to be served at
table. They became very fine ducks, and my friend had promised me one. I
took an interest in them, and always noticed their increasing fatness
when I rode that way. Imagine, then, my disappointment when one day I
saw that all the ducks had disappeared.
I stopped to inquire. Yes, truly they were all gone, my friend told me.
In his absence his wife had gone up the river to visit some friends, and
had taken the ducks with her. She could not bear, she said, that they
should be killed, so she took them away and distributed them among her
friends, one here and one there, where she was sure they would be well
treated and not killed. When she returned she was quite pleased at her
success, and laughed at her husband and me.
This same lady was always terribly distressed when she had to order a
fowl to be killed for her husband's breakfast, even if she had never
seen it before. I have seen her, after telling the cook to kill a fowl
for breakfast, run away and sit down in the veranda with her hands over
her ears, and her face the very picture of misery, fearing lest she
should hear its shrieks. I think that this was the one great trouble to
her in her marriage, that her husband would insist on eating fowls and
ducks, and that she had to order them to be killed.
As she is, so are most Burmans. If there is all this trouble about
fowls, it can be imagined how the trouble increases when it comes to
goats or any larger beasts. In the jungle villages meat of any kind at
all is never seen: no animals of any kind are allowed to be killed. An
officer travelling in the district would be reduced to what he could
carry with him, if it were not for an Act of Government obliging
villages to furnish--on payment, of course--supplies for officers and
troops passing through. The mere fact of such a law being necessary is
sufficient proof of the strength of the feeling against taking life.
Of course, all shooting, either for sport or for food, is looked upon as
disgraceful. In many jungle villages where deer abound there are one or
two hunters who make a living by hunting. But they are disgraced men.
They are worse than fishermen, and they will have a terrible penalty to
pay for it all. It will take much suffering to wash from their souls the
cruelty, the blood-thirstiness, the carelessness to suffering, the
absence of compassion, that hunting must produce. 'Is there no food in
the bazaar, that you must go and take the lives of animals?' has been
said to me many a time. And when my house-roof was infested by sparrows,
who dropped grass and eggs all over my rooms, so that I was obliged to
shoot them with a little rifle, this was no excuse. 'You should have
built a sparrow-cote,' they told me. 'If you had built a sparrow-cote,
they would have gone away and left you in peace. They only wanted to
make nests and lay eggs and have little ones, and you went and shot
them.' There are many sparrow-cotes to be seen in the villages.
I might give example after example of this sort, for they happen every
day. We who are meat-eaters, who delight in shooting, who have a horror
of insects and reptiles, are continually coming into collision with the
principles of our neighbours; for even harmful reptiles they do not care
to kill. Truly I believe it is a myth, the story of the Burmese mother
courteously escorting out of the house the scorpion which had just
bitten her baby. A Burmese mother worships her baby as much as the woman
of any other nation does, and I believe there is no crime she would not
commit in its behalf. But if she saw a scorpion walking about in the
fields, she would not kill it as we should. She would step aside and
pass on. 'Poor beast!' she would say, 'why should I hurt it? It never
hurt me.'
The Burman never kills insects out of sheer brutality. If a beetle drone
annoyingly, he will catch it in a handkerchief and put it outside, and
so with a bee. It is a great trouble often to get your Burmese servants
to keep your house free of ants and other annoying creatures. If you
tell them to kill the insects they will, for in that case the sin falls
on you. Without special orders they would rather leave the ants alone.
In the district in which I am now living snakes are very plentiful.
There are cobras and keraits, but the most dreaded is the Russell's
viper. He is a snake that averages from three to four feet long, and is
very thick, with a big head and a stumpy tail. His body is marked very
prettily with spots and blurs of light on a dark, grayish green, and he
is so like the shadows of the grass and weeds in a dusty road, that you
can walk on him quite unsuspectingly. Then he will bite you, and you
die. He comes out usually in the evening before dark, and lies about on
footpaths to catch the home-coming ploughman or reaper, and, contrary to
the custom of other snakes, he will not flee on hearing a footstep. When
anyone approaches he lies more still than ever, not even a movement of
his head betraying him. He is so like the colour of the ground, he hopes
he will be passed unseen; and he is slow and lethargic in his movements,
and so is easy to kill when once detected. As a Burman said, 'If he sees
you first, he kills you; if you see him first, you kill him.'
In this district no Burman hesitates a moment in killing a viper when
he has the chance. Usually he has to do it in self-defence. This viper
is terribly feared, as over a hundred persons a year die here by his
bite. He is so hated and feared that he has become an outcast from the
law that protects all life.
But with other snakes it is not so. There is the hamadryad, for
instance. He is a great snake about ten to fourteen feet long, and he is
the only snake that will attack you first. He is said always to do so,
certainly he often does. One attacked me once when out quail-shooting.
He put up his great neck and head suddenly at a distance of only five or
six feet, and was just preparing to strike, when I literally blew his
head off with two charges of shot.
You would suppose he was vicious enough to be included with the
Russell's viper in the category of the exceptions, but no. Perhaps he is
too rare to excite such fierce and deadly hate as makes the Burman
forget his law and kill the viper. However it may be, the Burman is not
ready to kill the hamadryad. A few weeks ago a friend of mine and myself
came across two little Burman boys carrying a jar with a piece of broken
tile over it. The lads kept lifting up the tile and peeping in, and then
putting the tile on again in a great hurry, and their actions excited
our curiosity. So we called them to come to us, and we looked into the
jar. It was full of baby hamadryads. The lads had found a nest of them
in the absence of the mother, who would have killed them if she had
been there, and had secured all the little snakes. There were seven of
them.
We asked the boys what they intended to do with the snakes, and they
answered that they would show them to their friends in the village. 'And
then?' we asked. And then they would let them go in the water. My friend
killed all the hamadryads on the spot, and gave the boys some coppers,
and we went on. Can you imagine this happening anywhere else? Can you
think of any other schoolboys sparing any animal they caught, much less
poisonous snakes? The extraordinary hold that this tenet of their
religion has upon the Burmese must be seen to be understood. What I
write will sound like some fairy story, I fear, to my people at home. It
is far beneath the truth. The belief that it is wrong to take life is a
belief with them as strong as any belief could be. I do not know
anywhere any command, earthly or heavenly, that is acted up to with such
earnestness as this command is amongst the Burmese. It is an abiding
principle of their daily life.
Where the command came from I do not know. I cannot find any allusion to
it in the life of the great teacher. We know that he ate meat. It seems
to me that it is older even than he. It has been derived both by the
Burmese Buddhists and the Hindus from a faith whose origin is hidden in
the mists of long ago. It is part of that far older faith on which
Buddhism was built, as was Christianity on Judaism.
But if not part of his teaching--and though it is included in the sacred
books, we do not know how much of them are derived from the Buddha
himself--it is in strict accordance with all his teaching. That is one
of the most wonderful points of Buddhism, it is all in accordance; there
are no exceptions.
I have heard amongst Europeans a very curious explanation of this
refusal of Buddhists to take life. 'Buddhists,' they say, 'believe in
the transmigration of souls. They believe that when a man dies his soul
may go into a beast. You could not expect him to kill a bull, when
perchance his grandfather's soul might inhabit there.' This is their
explanation, this is the way they put two and two together to make five.
They know that Buddhists believe in transmigration, they know that
Buddhists do not like to take life, and therefore one is the cause of
the other.
I have mentioned this explanation to Burmans while talking of the
subject, and they have always laughed at it. They had never heard of it
before. It is true that it is part of their great theory of life that
the souls of men have risen from being souls of beasts, and that we may
so relapse if we are not careful. Many stories are told of cases that
have occurred where a man has been reincarnated as an animal, and where
what is now the soul of a man used to live in a beast. But that makes no
difference. Whatever a man may have been, or may be, he is a man now;
whatever a beast may have been, he is a beast now. Never suppose that a
Burman has any other idea than this. To him men are men, and animals are
animals, and men are far the higher. But he does not deduce from this
that man's superiority gives him permission to illtreat or to kill
animals. It is just the reverse. It is because man is so much higher
than the animal that he can and must observe towards animals the very
greatest care, feel for them the very greatest compassion, be good to
them in every way he can. The Burman's motto should be _Noblesse
oblige_; he knows the meaning, if he knows not the words.
For the Burman's compassion towards animals goes very much farther than
a mere reluctance to kill them. Although he has no command on the
subject, it seems to him quite as important to treat animals well during
their lives as to refrain from taking those lives. His refusal to take
life he shares with the Hindu; his perpetual care and tenderness to all
living creatures is all his own. And here I may mention a very curious
contrast, that whereas in India the Hindu will not take life and the
Mussulman will, yet the Mussulman is by reputation far kinder to his
beasts than the Hindu. Here the Burman combines both qualities. He has
all the kindness to animals that the Mahommedan has, and more, and he
has the same horror of taking life that the Hindu has.
Coming from half-starved, over-driven India, it is a revelation to see
the animals in Burma. The village ponies and cattle and dogs in India
are enough to make the heart bleed for their sordid misery, but in Burma
they are a delight to the eye. They are all fat, every one of them--fat
and comfortable and impertinent; even the ownerless dogs are well fed. I
suppose the indifference of the ordinary native of India to animal
suffering comes from the evil of his own lot. He is so very poor, he has
such hard work to find enough for himself and his children, that his
sympathy is all used up. He has none to spare. He is driven into a dumb
heartlessness, for I do not think he is actually cruel.
The Burman is full of the greatest sympathy towards animals of all
kinds, of the greatest understanding of their ways, of the most
humorously good-natured attitude towards them. Looking at them from his
manhood, he has no contempt for them; but the gentle toleration of a
father to very little children who are stupid and troublesome often, but
are very lovable. He feels himself so far above them that he can
condescend towards them, and forbear with them.
His ponies are pictures of fatness and impertinence and go. They never
have any vice because the Burman is never cruel to them; they are never
well trained, partly because he does not know how to train them, partly
because they are so near the aboriginal wild pony as to be incapable of
very much training. But they are willing; they will go for ever, and
are very strong, and they have admirable constitutions and tempers. You
could not make a Burman ill-use his pony if you tried, and I fancy that
to break these little half-wild ponies to go in cabs in crowded streets
requires severe treatment. At least, I never knew but one
hackney-carriage driver either in Rangoon or Mandalay who was a Burman,
and he very soon gave it up. He said that the work was too heavy either
for a pony or a man. I think, perhaps, it was for the safety of the
public that he resigned, for his ponies were the very reverse of
meek--which a native of India says a hackney-carriage pony should
be--and he drove entirely by the light of Nature.
So all the drivers of gharries, as we call them, are natives of India or
half-breeds, and it is amongst them that the work of the Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals principally lies. While I was in
Rangoon I tried a number of cases of over-driving, of using ponies with
sore withers and the like. I never tried a Burman. Even in Rangoon,
which has become almost Indianized, his natural humanity never left the
Burman. As far as Burmans are concerned, the Society for the Prevention
of Cruelty to Animals need not exist. They are kinder to their animals
than even the members of the Society could be. Instances occur every
day; here is one of the most striking that I remember.
There is a town in Burma where there are some troops stationed, and
which is the headquarters of the civil administration of the district.
It is, or was then, some distance from a railway-station, and it was
necessary to make some arrangement for the carriage of the mails to and
from the town and station. The Post-Office called for tenders, and at
length it was arranged through the civil authorities that a coach should
run once a day each way to carry the mails and passengers. A native of
India agreed to take the contract--for Burmans seldom or never care to
take them--and he was to comply with certain conditions and receive a
certain subsidy.
There was a great deal of traffic between the town and station, and it
was supposed that the passenger traffic would pay the contractor well,
apart from his mail subsidy. For Burmans are always free with their
money, and the road was long and hot and dusty. I often passed that
coach as I rode. I noticed that the ponies were poor, very poor, and
were driven a little hard, but I saw no reason for interference. It did
not seem to me that any cruelty was committed, nor that the ponies were
actually unfit to be driven. I noticed that the driver used his whip a
good deal, but then some ponies require the whip. I never thought much
about it, as I always rode my own ponies, and they always shied at the
coach, but I should have noticed if there had been anything remarkable.
Towards the end of the year it became necessary to renew the contract,
and the contractor was approached on the subject. He said he was
willing to continue the contract for another year if the mail subsidy
was largely increased. He said he had lost money on that year's working.
When asked how he could possibly have lost considering the large number
of people who were always passing up and down, he said that they did not
ride in his coach. Only the European soldiers and a few natives of India
came with him. Officers had their own ponies and rode, and the Burmans
either hired a bullock-cart or walked. They hardly ever came in his
coach, but he could not say what the reason might be.
So an inquiry was made, and the Burmese were asked why they did not ride
on the coach. Were the fares too high?--was it uncomfortable? But no, it
was for neither of these reasons that they left the coach to the
soldiers and natives of India. It was because of the ponies. No Burman
would care to ride behind ponies who were treated as these ponies
were--half fed, overdriven, whipped. It was a misery to see them; it was
twice a misery to drive behind them. 'Poor beasts!' they said; 'you can
see their ribs, and when they come to the end of a stage they are fit to
fall down and die. They should be turned out to graze.'
The opinion was universal. The Burmans preferred to spend twice or
thrice the money and hire a bullock-cart and go slowly, while the coach
flashed past them in a whirl of dust, or they preferred to walk. Many
and many times have I seen the roadside rest-houses full of travellers
halting for a few minutes' rest. They walked while the coach came by
empty; and nearly all of them could have afforded the fare. It was a
very striking instance of what pure kind-heartedness will do, for there
would have been no religious command broken by going in the coach. It
was the pure influence of compassion towards the beasts and refusal to
be a party to such hard-heartedness. And yet, as I have said, I do not
think the law could have interfered with success. Surely a people who
could act like this have the very soul of religion in their hearts,
although the act was not done in the name of religion.
All the animals--the cattle, the ponies, and the buffaloes--are so tame
that it is almost an unknown thing for anyone to get hurt.
The cattle are sometimes afraid of the white face and strange attire of
a European, but you can walk through the herds as they come home in the
evening with perfect confidence that they will not hurt you. Even a cow
with a young calf will only eye you suspiciously; and with the Burmans
even the huge water buffaloes are absolutely tame. You can see a herd of
these great beasts, with horns six feet across, come along under the
command of a very small boy or girl perched on one of their broad backs.
He flourishes a little stick, and issues his commands like a general. It
is one of the quaintest imaginable sights to see this little fellow get
off his steed, run after a straggler, and beat him with his stick. The
buffalo eyes his master, whom he could abolish with one shake of his
head, submissively, and takes the beating, which he probably feels about
as much as if a straw fell on him, good-humouredly. The children never
seem to come to grief. Buffaloes occasionally charge Europeans, but the
only place where I have known of Burmans being killed by buffaloes is in
the Kale Valley. There the buffaloes are turned out into the jungle for
eight months in the year, and are only caught for ploughing and carting.
Naturally they are quite wild; in fact, many of them are the offspring
of wild bulls.
The Burmans, too, are very fond of dogs. Their villages are full of
dogs; but, as far as I know, they never use them for anything, and they
are never trained to do anything. They are supposed to be useful as
watch-dogs, but I do not think they are very good even at that. I have
surrounded a village before dawn, and never a dog barked, and I have
heard them bark all night at nothing.
But when a Burman sees a fox-terrier or any English dog his delight is
unfeigned. When we first took Upper Burma, and such sights were rare,
half a village would turn out to see the little 'tail-less' dog trotting
along after its master. And if the terrier would 'beg,' then he would
win all hearts. I am not only referring to children, but to grown men
and women; and then there is always something peculiarly childlike and
frank in these children of the great river.
Only to-day, as I was walking up the bank of the river in the early
dawn, I heard some Burman boatmen discussing my fox-terrier. They were
about fifteen yards from the shore, poling their boat up against the
current, which is arduous work; and as I passed them my little dog ran
down the bank and looked at them across the water, and they saw her.
'See now,' said one man to another, pausing for a moment with his pole
in his hand--'see the little white dog with the brown face, how wise she
looks!'
'And how pretty!' said a man steering in the stern. 'Come!' he cried,
holding out his hand to it.
But the dog only made a splash in the water with her paws, and then
turned and ran after me. The boatmen laughed and resumed their poling,
and I passed on. In the still morning across the still water I could
hear every word, but I hardly took any note; I have heard it so often.
Only now when I come to write on this subject do I remember.
It has been inculcated in us from childhood that it is a manly thing to
be indifferent to pain--not to our own pain only, but to that of all
others. To be sorry for a hunted hare, to compassionate the wounded
deer, to shrink from torturing the brute creation, has been accounted by
us as namby-pamby sentimentalism, not fit for man, fit only for a
squeamish woman. To the Burman it is one of the highest of all virtues.
He believes that all that is beautiful in life is founded on compassion
and kindness and sympathy--that nothing of great value can exist without
them. Do you think that a Burmese boy would be allowed to birds'-nest,
or worry rats with a terrier, or go ferreting? Not so. These would be
crimes.
That this kindness and compassion for animals has very far-reaching
results no one can doubt. If you are kind to animals, you will be kind,
too, to your fellow-man. It is really the same thing, the same feeling
in both cases. If to be superior in position to an animal justifies you
in torturing it, so it would do with men. If you are in a better
position than another man, richer, stronger, higher in rank, that
would--that does often in our minds--justify ill-treatment and contempt.
Our innate feeling towards all that we consider inferior to ourselves is
scorn; the Burman's is compassion. You can see this spirit coming out in
every action of their daily life, in their dealings with each other, in
their thoughts, in their speech. 'You are so strong, have you no
compassion for him who is weak, who is tempted, who has fallen?' How
often have I heard this from a Burman's lips! How often have I seen him
act up to it! It seems to them the necessary corollary of strength that
the strong man should be sympathetic and kind. It seems to them an
unconscious confession of weakness to be scornful, revengeful,
inconsiderate. Courtesy, they say, is the mark of a great man,
discourtesy of a little one. No one who feels his position secure will
lose his temper, will persecute, will be disdainful. Their word for a
fool and for a hasty-tempered man is the same. To them it is the same
thing, one infers the other. And so their attitude towards animals is
but an example of their attitude to each other. That an animal or a man
should be lower and weaker than you is the strongest claim he can have
on your humanity, and your courtesy and consideration for him is the
clearest proof of your own superiority. And so in his dealings with
animals the Buddhist considers himself, consults his own dignity, his
own strength, and is kind and compassionate to them out of the greatness
of his own heart. Nothing is more beautiful than the Burman in his ways
with his children, and his beasts, with all who are lesser than himself.
Even to us, who think so very differently from him on many points, there
is a great and abiding charm in all this, to which we can find only one
exception; for to our ideas there is one exception, and it is this: No
Burman will take any life if he can help it, and therefore, if any
animal injure itself, he will not kill it--not even to put it out of its
pain, as we say. I have seen bullocks split on slippery roads, I have
seen ponies with broken legs, I have seen goats with terrible wounds
caused by accidental falls, and no one would kill them. If, when you are
out shooting, your beaters pick up a wounded hare or partridge, do not
suppose that they wring its neck; you must yourself do that, or it will
linger on till you get home. Under no circumstances will they take the
life even of a wounded beast. And if you ask them, they will say: 'If a
man be sick, do you shoot him? If he injure his spine so that he will be
a cripple for life, do you put him out of his pain?'
If you reply that men and beasts are different, they will answer that in
this point they do not recognise the difference. 'Poor beast! let him
live out his little life.' And they will give him grass and water till
he dies.
This is the exception that I meant, but now, after I have written it, I
am not so sure. Is it an exception?