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Dr. Charlotte Krause : Her Life & Literature
“Therefore, let the bullock go on ploughing till he will die of old age ! Let the sheep supply you with a means of protection from the cold north wind and its terrors ! Let the goat, returning from the pastures, offer her udder to your hands to be milked ! Have done with nets and foot-snares, with nooses and with huntsman's tricks ! Leave of deceiving the bird with lime rods, desist from scaring the hart into ruin with stringed feathers, and give up concealing crooked books in deceiving baits !
"If you insist upon killing creatures that harm you, well confine yourself to killing them ! Beware of letting your lips touch animal diet ! Pure and gentle be the food you partake of !”
This account of Ovid's with its clearly pronounced postulate of vegetarianism raises the question as to the origin of the Pythagorean teachings with greater force than any other of the traditions concerning the “Samian Sage', scanty and uncertain as they are.
The Jaina religion, which proclaims strict vegetarianism as once of its chief ethical postulates even now-a-days, had been spread in India, centuries before Pythagoras, in the shape of the teachings of Pārsvanātha, the 23rd Jina, and his predecessors, and during Pythagoras's life-time, Vardhamana, the 24th Jina, was teaching and preaching there. So was Gautama Buddha, the founder of Buddhism, whose ethics then likewise enjoined the protection of animal life in the form of a more or less strict vegetarianism. The Sānkhya doctrine too, which is full of rules commanding it, existed at that time.
It is a historical fact that Pythagoras did visit the East, and it is known that wherever he travelled, he was guided by the wish to study the wisdom of all those countries. So he was an adept in the mysteries of Ancient Egypt, and tradition says that the doctrines and practices of the Jews and even of the Druids were no less familiar to him than the highest of the Orphic secrets.
Thus, historically speaking, it is quite possible that
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