History of Vegitarianism and Cow Veneration in India

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

Page 86

CONTRIBUTIONS
sacrifice: sacrificing an animal is called, as is well-known, ā-labh 'to seize, to lay hold of', and the real killing which the priests not directly executing it are not allowed to observe,192 [68] is described as 'put to resť (samayati).
On the one hand, the fact that aghnya in the Veda ‘has nothing to do with the sacrificial animal can simply be explained thus that the ancient kenning (which is attested only once: Avestan agənyā) had long ago become a simple designation for cow when its literal sense was no longer felt, which is quite rare already in the Veda; Schmidt himself notes that it had become obsolete in the Brāhmaṇas. On the other hand, the assumption that the breeding or gregarious bull, the mother-cow and the milch-cow would have been designated as excepted from sacrifice, appears doubtful, because it presupposes that one had systematically kept back the most valuable animals
om the gods, whereas the contrary is not only to be expected but, occasionally, expressly demanded by the texts. A judgement is possible, as noted before, if at all, then only after a detailed examination of all the references; but either of the explanations and even Bailey's new etymology appear to me preferable to Schlerath's theory, which is far too incompatible with the other testimonies of the Vedic and post-Vedic literature.
Now if it is the case that in Vedic, indeed even in pre-Vedic times, cattle played an extraordinary role in mythology and ritual, and then later the newly emerging ahimsā ideal amalgamated itself with its 'sanctity', this could have had one result which would explain the unique position of the cow and the taboos concerning it in Hinduism. Indeed for instance even Jacobi, in his contribution 'Cow (Hindu) in the Encyclopaedia of Relegion and Ethics, saw no problem in tracing the sacredness of the cow in Hinduism historically from Aryan ideas and customs.193 If I, nevertheless, prefer to acknowledge, apart from this Aryan, also a significant non-Aryan, i.e. autochthone-Indian component, I am led not only by the analogy of the typically non-Aryan features of Hinduism, listed above in the discussion of the origin of ahimsā, features to which one should like to add even the ever so unique position of the cow; there is perhaps
192 Schwab 1886: 106. 193 In Crooke's essay (1912, mentioned above p. [55]) the conclusive point
of the transition from Aryan 'cow-veneration' with sacrifice and meat consumption to Hinduist killing and meat-taboo is not explained convincingly.
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