History of Vegitarianism and Cow Veneration in India

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

Page 40

CONTRIBUTIONS
A Brāhmaṇa who lives in the same village (with his host) and a visitor on business or pleasure (are) not (called) guests. (But a guest), whether he arrives at the moment (of dinner) or at an inopportune time, must not stay in the house of a (householder) without receiving food.
But for the completion '(but a guest)' there is no occasion or justification at all; the only possible translation is rather: 'A fellow villager is not a guest, and neither is a sāmgatika brahmin. Whether he comes on time or untimely, he must not spend the night in his house without eating.'
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That two absolutely incompatible stanza-halves are brought together here is corroborated by the stanza Manu 3, 103: nâikagrāmīņam atithim vipram samgatikam tathā/upasthitam gṛhe vidyad bhārya yatrâgnayo 'pi vā,74 'One must not consider as a guest a fellow villager or a samgatika brahmin who has turned up in the house, or where(else) are wife and fires.' Thus we have in Vas. VIII 8 a sloka [26] whose two halves are not compatible with each other; however, they fit perfectly to the respective other halves of two Manu slokas, 3, 103 and 105, but the last pada of the Vas. sloka appears once again there where it is really pertinent - Vas. VIII 5 - and where also the third pada would be pertinent and can be found in Manu. (Moreover, one should note that in Vas. 8 the transposition of the accusative into the nominative has led to the false sandhi: grāmīna atithir, which therefore proves the originality of the Manu text, while reciprocally in Manu, the abnormal sandhi: prāpto a-kāle75 has evidently been smoothed out secondarily to prāptas tv a-kāle.) The circumstances here are not unlike those in the case of Vas. IV 7, only rather more complicated, and it is difficult not to believe in a rather awkward performance on the part of a Vas.-compiler or, more probably, an interpolator having worked with our Manu text.
We observe a similar distortion as in Vas. VIII 8 again in stanza Vas. XI 34, concerning our theme:
niyuktas tu yatiḥ śrāddhe daive vā māmsam utsṛjet yavanti paśu-romāni tavan narakam rcchati.
74 The sloka appears again in Śārkh. gṛhyas. 2, 16, 3 with the variant viprosyâgatam eva ca instead of vipram samgatikam tathā.
75 Führer wrongly prints: prapte.
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