History of Vegitarianism and Cow Veneration in India

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

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CONTRIBUTIONS
by the modern bloodless form of worship, the pūjā,130 it was the growing significance of ahimsā, above all, which increasingly diminished the (need for) sacrifice. With the inertia of the old beside the new, which is so characteristic of India, sacrifice has survived as a relic within narrow circles. It was never contested in theoretical weight and importance, but in practice is becoming a learned tour de force, by virtue of which one occasionally bypasses the actual offences of killing animals and meat consumption by means of substitutes, which on account of the old texts must make the whole sacrificial ritual simply invalid, respectively, ineffective. The report [43] of a German indologist (Sontheimer? [WB]) who, two years ago, attended a large sacrificial event in Poona lasting several days was not without a comic touch.
The third stratum of the law literature constitutes, as noted above (p. [21]), the commentaries to the old texts, which are to be considered partly as self-supporting independent law-works only using the shape of commentaries, and the nibandhas, compendia which represent essentially more or less comprehensive and systematic compilations of statements of the ancient authors or texts and so can almost take on the character of collections of quotations. Thus the oldest preserved and, at the same time, most extensive and complete nibandha, the repeatedly mentioned Kệtyakalpataru of Lakşmīdhara written at the beginning of the twelfth century, quotes,
130 It is a particularly striking example of the typically Indian juxtaposition
of contrasts which, as we see it, are incompatible, viz. that even in modern Hinduism there are bloody, even very bloody sacrifices. The goat- and buffalo-sacrifices at the Kalighat in Calcutta are particularly well-known; there is evidence of past human sacrifices (purusa-medha) in Bhavabhūti's Mālatīmādhava (act 5 (WB]) which is certainly not a figment of a poet's imagination. On former (and perhaps even today's) human sacrifices in Nepal, and the orgy of blood at the Durgā-festival there see FilchnerMarathe 1953: 132–37 and also the depiction of the Kali sacrifice in Darjeeling in Nebesky-Wojkowitz 1955: 180–84. It needs hardly be emphasized that these bloody sacrifices by no means continue the Vedic, Aryan sacrifice. No one will consider the goddess Kālī-Durgā, to whom they are made, to be an Aryan deity no more than one would derive tantrism from the Aryan religion. - See Mallebrein & von Stietencron 2008: 249 under: sacrifice. There is a trend in Orissa towards raising tribal deities up to the status of a superior, vegetarian god corresponding to recent attempts to abolish animal sacrifices, in which it marks the first step (ibid., p. 106 and Mallebrein 2007). On human sacrifices, see further the references in Tawney-Penzer, X 1928: 181 and Mallebrein and von Stietencron, 2008: 249. (WB).
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