History of Vegitarianism and Cow Veneration in India

SR No.: 006921
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Willem B Bollee
Publisher: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd
Publication Year: 2010
Total Pages: 186
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 19 MB

Page 37

HISTORY OF VEGETARIANISM IN INDIA
One does not obtain flesh without injuring living beings, but the killing of living beings does not lead to heaven; therefore, the killing for sacrifice is not killing.
Moreover, one must cook a big ox or a big goat for a Brahman or Ksatriya coming (on a visit); in this way one shows hospitality to him.
Bühler comments on this passage:71
All the four sūtras must be taken as a quotation, because the particle iti, 'thus', occurs at the end of IV, 8, and because the identity of sūtra 6 with Manu V, 41, as well as the close resemblance of sūtra 7 to Manu V, 48, shows that the quotation is not finished with sūtra 5. If we accept this explanation, we have in our passage the usual arrangement followed in the Dharma-sūtras. First comes the prose rule, next the verses which confirm it, and finally a Vedic passage on which both the rule and the verses rest ... If it is thus necessary to admit that Vasiştha's quotation is taken from a Mānava Dharma-sūtra, the agreement of the doctrine taught in the quotation and of a portion of the text with those of our Manu-smrti shows further that this Dharmasūtra must have been the forerunner of our metrical law-book.
To this it has to be said in the first place that the iti after sūtra 8 cannot in any way prove that the Manu citation is complete up to there; indeed one must rather regard the iti Mānavam of vs 5 as a distinct mark of the end of the quotation, and the ity abravīn Manuḥ of vs 6 as the concluding mark of another quotation, while the iti of vs 8 marks the end of a third citation, whether it deals now (as I believe) with an inaccurate quotation of the passages mentioned above p. [18] note 1 from ŚpBr. and AiBr. or, as Bühler (SBE XIV, p. XIX) presumes, with a (more precise) citation from a ‘hitherto unknown Brāhmaṇa'. There is no clue at all that Vasiştha also quotes this citation from the Mānava'.
If one further holds the sūtras 5 and 6 side by side, one cannot doubt that the second is a versification of the first; one may rather
71 SBE XXV, p. xxxi; cf. also SBE XVIII-XX, 26 note 5; SBE XXV, p. XXII; Jolly
1896: 12, 17; Winternitz III, 2 1965: 585f.
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