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HISTORY OF VEGETARIANISM IN INDIA
sacrifice in favour of renunciatory ahimsā, because in the episode the intermediation of ascetic values is not involved. I wonder how this late source can be used for the purpose to refute or change conclusions drawn from earlier material. Moreover, the episode does contain references to renunciatory values as Proudfoot himself has noted (128). His summary does not properly reflect the results of his own analysis.
Brian K. Smith (1990, 196 n. 33, repeated in Doniger and Smith 1990: XXXII n. 39) objects to my opinion on the ground that concern for the victim is universal and that therefore there is no 'ritual ahimsā'. In the ritual texts ahimsā also refers to the prevention of injury to the sacrificer, his progeny and cattle. Smith remarks: 'such a self-interested ahimsă in relation to oneself and one's possessions is of course a desideratum in Vedism, but that is certainly not the ahimsā of post-Vedism.' The later conception of ahimsā, it is true, differs from the Vedic one, but this does not exclude that the one is derived from the other. I have argued that the ritual ahimsā [223] was turned on its head by the later thinkers. Hindu, Jain and Buddhist ahimsā also remained self-interested, though the motivation changed.
Chapple (4ff.) has the impression that Alsdorf and myself minimize the importance of Jainism in the development of ahimsā and vegetarianism. He also states that both of us 'claim that Mahāvīra was not a vegetarian, a claim that has been contradicted by the Jaina scholar H. R. Kapadia'. He does not attempt to refute Alsdorf's (8ff.) demonstration that two of the oldest canonical Jaina texts unambigously show that Jaina monks did eat meat and fish when they received it as alms, and that in another canonical text the sick Mahāvīra refuses to accept two pidgeons prepared especially for himself, but asks for meat of a chicken killed by a cat. Thus Mahāvīra's attitude towards meat-eating agreed with that of the Buddha who did allow it if the animal was not killed specifically for the monk. Alsdorf (53f.) looked for the origins of ahimsā and vegetarianism in the pre-Aryan Indus civilization.
I disagreed (627). It is true that the presence of animal bones in the refuse of Mohenjo-daro is by itself not a cogent argument for the absence of vegetarianism in that culture. My main argument was and is that the Vedic sources do allow us to reconstruct a development within the Vedic culture. Chapple is of the opinion that recent scholarly investigations tend to refute my conclusions. The evidence he quotes is far from cogent. Even if one assumes that the animals on the Indus civilization seals and amulets were
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