In dealing with this challenge, Europeans projected onto the Indians the simplified Pythagorean idea that they abstained from killing animals for fear of hurting a reincarnated human soul. This implied that the Hindus were not valuing the life of the animal itself, but the soul of the human trapped within it. Since most Christians dismissed reincarnation as a preposterous theological error, interpreting Hindu vegetarianism in this way deflected the ethical challenge and amputated their principle of non-violence (ahimsa). It meant that writers could fall back on the long-standing Christian tradition of ridiculing the Pythagorean objection to eating flesh, as the Christian theologian Tertullian put it in the second century AD, ‘lest by chance in his beef he eats of some ancestor of his’.66 One author who assessed the scientific case for vegetarianism at the end of the seventeenth century, simply declared that the Pythagoreans didn’t count as vegetarians because their diet was based on ‘a Mistake in their Philosophy, and not a Law of Nature’.67 Christians defused the moral strength of vegetarianism by reducing it to a comical superstition.
Having projected Pythagoreanism onto the Hindus, some Europeans explained the similarity by claiming that Pythagoras had taught the Indians their vegetarian doctrines, rather than the other way round.68 This gave Pythagoras the European a superior status, and it also meant that Brahmins could be more readily assimilated into biblical history by claiming that they and their philosophy were descended from the Egyptians. By the time the clergyman Samuel Purchas published his enormous anthology of travel literature in 1625, the idea that the Indians were identical to Pythagoreans was already widespread. Purchas himself thought Pythagoras must have been to India and he printed several authors who had noticed, as King James I’s ambassador to Jahangir, Sir Thomas Roe, put it in 1616, that the Indian ‘Pythagorians’ believe in ‘the soules transmigration, and will not kyll any living creature, no, not the virmine that bites them, for feare of disseising the speiritt of some frend departed’.69 Purchas made Indian vegetarianism part of common parlance and, inevitably, these ideas wove themselves into Europe’s cultural fabric.
In the 1620s the humanist nobleman, Pietro della Valle (1586–1652), was astonished when a Brahmin called ‘Beca Azarg’ told him that Pythagoras was the same person as the Hindu god Brahma; that it was ‘Pythagoras’ who had taught metempsychosis and vegetarianism to the Brahmins and that they still revered his books.70 It was, laughed della Valle, ‘a curious notion indeed, and which perhaps would be news to hear in Europe, that Pythagoras is foolishly ador’d in India for a God’. ‘But this,’ concluded della Valle, ‘with Beca Azarg’s good leave, I do not believe.’71 Henry Lord, chaplain to the English trading post at Surat in Gujarat, did believe it. In the hope that Hinduism could be reconciled to Christianity by purging it of Pythagorean doctrines, in 1630 he set himself up as a latter-day heretic-hunting St Augustine, calling upon the Archbishop of Canterbury to reprimand the Hindus for disobeying God’s instruction to eat flesh.72 By contrast, the French editor of The Open Door to Hidden Paganism (1651), the most advanced account of the Hindus, by the Dutch missionary Abraham Rogerius, took the view that ‘Plato and Pythagoras were not ashamed to learn the basic tenets of their philosophy from the Brahmans.’73 In a conservative backlash against such liberal views in the China illustrata of 1667, the Jesuit scientist-missionary Athanasius Kircher retorted that metempsychosis had been carried to India by an execrable band of Egyptian priests and had subsequently been spread across the Eastern world (along with its corollary vegetarianism) by a ‘deadly monster’ called Buddha, ‘a very sinful brahmin imbued with Pythagoreanism’. ‘These are not tenets, but crimes,’ concluded Kircher venomously. ‘They are not doctrines, but abominations.’74
In 1665 Edward Bysshe dragged the debate into the forefront of modern politics by publishing an anthology of the ancient writings on India, including Palladius’ dialogue, in which he presented the Brahmins as pure idealists who stood up to Alexander just as modern Puritans stood up to the tyranny of Charles II.75 In the context of mid-century Puritanism, Sir Thomas Roe’s chaplain, Edward Terry (1589/90–1660), gave a strikingly accurate account of the ancient doctrine of ahimsa – that an animal values its life just as humans value theirs, so destroying it manifestly against its will constitutes an act of violent injury (himsa). This was a remarkable moment of cross-cultural understanding which Terry appears to have accomplished by interviewing Jain monks, probably in Gujarat or while travelling with Jahangir’s court. However, he did not want to give too much ground to the Indians; he drew attention away from the morally powerful doctrine of ahimsa by claiming that their main reasons for being vegetarian were the ‘mad and groundlesse phansie’ of Pythagorean metempsychosis and the false commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill any living Creature’. He castigated them for ‘forbearing the lives of the Creatures made for mens use’, but nevertheless acknowledged that they provided a better moral example than Christians who fought unrighteous wars and made riotous ‘havock and spoil’ with the animals. Going some way to meet them, Terry lauded their temperance and felt that their other ‘excellent moralities’ showed that the divine law of nature was ‘ingraved upon [their] hearts’.76
As the seventeenth century matured, liberal philosophies started to compete more strongly with the Christian orthodoxies about man and nature. Over the heads of the Indian vegetarians, the great minds of the day fought out their disputes. Were Brahmins ignorant idolaters or ancient philosophers who could teach a thing or two to the Europeans?
The seminal analysis of Indian vegetarianism came from a most unlikely quarter, and showed how the association with Pythagoras could be a path towards assimilating Hinduism. François Bernier, who served as physician at the court of the Great Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb for eight years in the 1660s, had been trained in sceptical and Epicurean philosophy under Pierre Gassendi. With this enlightened background, Bernier attacked Indian culture not simply because Hindus were deluded idolaters who failed to see the obvious truth of Christianity; rather, his ridicules were aimed at the practice of superstitious rituals (many of which, he noted, were equivalent to the irrational beliefs of European Christians).77 Bernier smiled wryly as he watched Hindus gathering en masse to bathe in sacred rivers, banging on cymbals and using incantations to ward off the evil influence of an eclipse. He recited all the ‘monstrosities’ of Hindu culture from widow-burning to sun worship. But there was one doctrine for which Bernier pulled his punches: their Pythagorean vegetarianism.
Perhaps the first legislators in the Indies hoped that the interdiction of animal food would produce a beneficial effect upon the character of the people, and that they might be brought to exercise less cruelty toward one another when required by a positive precept to treat the brute creation with humanity. The doctrine of the transmigration of souls secured the kind treatment of animals … It may also be that the Brahmens were influenced by the consideration that in their climate the flesh of cows or oxen is neither savoury nor wholesome.78
Bernier’s willingness to recognise the health benefits of abstaining from meat may have been inspired by his master, Gassendi, who had himself been a staunch advocate of the vegetable diet (see chapter 11). But Bernier