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Pythagoras : The Vegetarian*
Ever since Western scholars have occupied themselves with India's time-honoured culture, they have noted again and again that all the utterances of her spirituality are characterized by a prominently religious attitude, extant even in her attainments in the historical and scientific disciplines.
This religious attitude too is responsible for the depth of her admirable philosophical speculation. It accounts, moreover, for the subtlety and rigour of the postulates of her various ethical systems, and explains the important part which those postulates once played, and partly still play, in her cultural life.
Once of the most conspicuous of those postulates is the prohibition of animal diet. The Mahābhārata, the Smrtis, and numerous other Saṁskṛta works, down to the earliest of the Sārkhya scriptures, bear testimony to the fact that vegetarianism was once enjoined by Hinduistic ethics, where it still survives as an indispensable postulate amongst most of the modern Brahmin clans.
Asoka's edicts eloquently speak of the practical influence this postulate exercised on the daily life of the great Buddhist ruler and his zealous subjects.
This strictly vegetarian mode of life of nearly the whole population of present Gujarat, Kathiavad, Cutch and Rājaputānā tells its tale of the lovely influence of Svetāmbara Jainism, which has been counting vegetarianism amongst its chief restrictions since time immemorial.
Yet, if the present historical theories are correct, vegetarianism was not confined to India, even at the time of Mahāvīra Svāmī
* Published in August issue of the Journal Calcutta Review,
Calcutta University, 1932.
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