History of Vegitarianism and Cow Veneration in India

Author(s): Willem B Bollee
Publisher: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd

Page 23

HISTORY OF VEGETARIANISM IN INDIA
and aạimisa implicity required an explanation, and he renders them without prejudice as māmsa and matsya, adding that others thought them to be the names of two fruits with a consistency similar to that of meat and fish, because they stand in a section otherwise dealing with plants.25
This explanation as fruits with hard seeds or stalks, or the like, is the only generally recognized explanation today. In 1932 a new edition and translation of the Dasaveyāliya produced by Schubring was printed in Glückstadt through the munificence of one of the Ahmedabad businessmen,26 (11) and then it was sent to India. When one found out there that in 5, 1,73 mamsa and maccha were translated by 'meat' and 'fish', the whole edition was shelved; up to this day it has not been delivered, and a Bombay solicitor explained to me that there could be no question of meat and fish in the text, as it would go against the preaching of ahimsā by the founder of the religion, Mahāvīra. The Jains lodged a protest with the editor of the 'Sacred Books of the Easť, Max Müller, against Jacobi's translation of the Ayāra-passage, and the high priest of the Bombay Jain community sent Jacobi the following elucidation of the passage: 'A monk or a nun on a begging tour is prohibited from receiving a conserve of fruits containing a large portion of bark or an exterior covering of a fruit.'27
25 anye tv abhidadhati: vanaspaty-adhikarāt tathāvidha-phalâbhidhāne ete iti. 26 'Ahmedabad: The Managers of Sheth Anandji Kalianji' - in Schubring
1932: 210, the incriminated words meat and fish with many bones in vss 73 and 84 have been replaced by a series of crosses. This, and the reason for it, ought of course have been mentioned in the editor's Preface
(WB). 27 Cf. Kapadia 1933: 232ff. In his long letter addressed to Motilal Ladhaji
dt. 14/2/1924 and reproduced there, Jacobi, by virtue of two passages in the Mahābhāşya and in Vācaspatimiśra's Nyāyasūtra Commentary, meets the Jains halfway through the proposal to understand the phrases 'meat with many bones' and 'fish with many fishbones' as 'metaphorical designations, which became proverbial for 'an object containing the substance which is wanted in intimate connection with much that must be rejected': The meaning of the passage is, therefore, that a monk should not accept as alms any substance of which only a part can be eaten and a great part must be rejected.'
It is needless to refute in detail Jacobi's argumentation (not completely cited here); an impartial reading of the Ayāranga section should be enough to convince the reader that the question is of real meat and fish. Should 'meat with many bones' metaphorically stand for all, of which only a small part is edible and the greater discardable, it would be inexplicable that the verse appe siya bhoyaņa-ijāe in the Ayaranga would
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