History of Vegitarianism and Cow Veneration in India

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

Page 37

HISTORY OF VEGETARIANISM IN INDIA
One does not obtain flesh without injuring living beings, but the killing of living beings does not lead to heaven; therefore, the killing for sacrifice is not killing.
Moreover, one must cook a big ox or a big goat for a Brahman or Ksatriya coming (on a visit); in this way one shows hospitality to him.
Bühler comments on this passage:71
All the four sūtras must be taken as a quotation, because the particle iti, 'thus', occurs at the end of IV, 8, and because the identity of sūtra 6 with Manu V, 41, as well as the close resemblance of sūtra 7 to Manu V, 48, shows that the quotation is not finished with sūtra 5. If we accept this explanation, we have in our passage the usual arrangement followed in the Dharma-sūtras. First comes the prose rule, next the verses which confirm it, and finally a Vedic passage on which both the rule and the verses rest ... If it is thus necessary to admit that Vasiştha's quotation is taken from a Mānava Dharma-sūtra, the agreement of the doctrine taught in the quotation and of a portion of the text with those of our Manu-smrti shows further that this Dharmasūtra must have been the forerunner of our metrical law-book.
To this it has to be said in the first place that the iti after sūtra 8 cannot in any way prove that the Manu citation is complete up to there; indeed one must rather regard the iti Mānavam of vs 5 as a distinct mark of the end of the quotation, and the ity abravīn Manuḥ of vs 6 as the concluding mark of another quotation, while the iti of vs 8 marks the end of a third citation, whether it deals now (as I believe) with an inaccurate quotation of the passages mentioned above p. [18] note 1 from ŚpBr. and AiBr. or, as Bühler (SBE XIV, p. XIX) presumes, with a (more precise) citation from a ‘hitherto unknown Brāhmaṇa'. There is no clue at all that Vasiştha also quotes this citation from the Mānava'.
If one further holds the sūtras 5 and 6 side by side, one cannot doubt that the second is a versification of the first; one may rather
71 SBE XXV, p. xxxi; cf. also SBE XVIII-XX, 26 note 5; SBE XXV, p. XXII; Jolly
1896: 12, 17; Winternitz III, 2 1965: 585f.
24