Sacred Laws of Aryas

SR No.: 007687
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Gorge Buhler
Publisher: Oxford
Publication Year: 1897
Total Pages: 1979
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 36 MB

Page 480

Ixxxiv
VENDÎDÂD.
$ 20. If one reviews the different crimes described in the Vendîdad, and the respective penalties prescribed for them, one cannot but wonder at first sight at the strange inequality between crime and penalty. Beccaria would have felt uncomfortable while reading the Vendîdåd. It is safer to kill a man than to serve bad food to a shepherd's dog, for the manslayer gets off with ninety stripes, whereas the bad master is at once a Peshotanu!, and will receive two hundred stripes. Two hundred stripes are awarded if one tills land in which a corpse has been buried within the year?, if a woman just delivered of a child drinks water , if one suppresses the menses of a woman., if one performs a sacrifice in a house where a man has just died ', if one aeglects fastening the corpse of a dead man so that birds or dogs may not take dead matter to trees and rivers 6. Two hundred stripes if one throws on the ground a bone of a man's corpse, or of a dog's carcase, as big as two ribs; four hundred if one throws a bone as big as an arm bone, six hundred if one throws a skull, one thousand if the whole corpse? Four hundred stripes if one, being in a state of uncleanness, touches water or trees 8, four hundred if one covers with a cloth a dead man's feet, six hundred if one covers his legs, one thousand if the whole body! be so covered. Five hundred stripes for killing a whelp, six hundred for killing a stray dog, seven hundred for a house-dog, eight hundred for a shepherd's dog, one thousand stripes for killing a Vanghåpara dog 10, ten thousand stripes for killing a water-dog ".
Capital punishment is expressly pronounced only against the false cleanser 1% and the carrier alone 13.'
Yet any one who bethinks himself of the spirit of the old Aryan legislation will easily conceive that there may be in
Farg. IV, 40, and XIII, 24.
· Farg. VI, 5. • Farg. VII, 70 seq.
• Farg. XVI, 13 seq. · Farg. V, 39-44.
• Farg. VI, 47 seq. * Farg. VI, 18 seq.
• Farg. VIII, 104 seq. • Farg. VIII, 23 seq.
19 Farg. XIII, 8 seq. and 4. 11 Farg. XIV, 1 seq.
u Farg. IX, 47 seq. 1 Farg. III, 14 kq. Yet there were other capital crimes. See below, $ 23.
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