Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies - DUBOIS, Abbé Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, Dubois | Page 600

REPUGNANCE TO ANIMAL FOOD
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motives of the abstinence which lie had seen practised by
the Hindus, or else he wished to excel them and to exag-
gerate their system according to his own manner.
As a matter of fact, everything induces us to believe
that the Hindus, though foolish enough in many respects,
are not so foolish as to believe, when they show repugnance
to feeding on anything which has had life, that they might
be swallowing the limbs of their ancestors. In proof of
this I may remark that the Lingayats, that is to say, the
followers of Siva, reject in toto the doctrine of metem-
psychosis, yet they abstain from all animal food more
religiously perhaps than the Brahmins themselves.
The fear of pollution and the horror of murder are in
fact the principal causes of the antipathy of Hindus to this
kind of food. Their primitive teachers, as I have already
remarked, simply had in view, when counselling such
abstinence, the preservation of useful animals, and also
the preservation of health. It was superstition, impetuous
as a flood, that always tended to overflow the banks of
reason.
We have already seen how susceptible and fastidious
a respectable Hindu is in the matter of pollution. How
then could a meat diet agree with his principles in this
respect ?
The putrefaction of animals, which in a hot
country manifests itself so quickly and in so disagreeable
a manner
the comparative facility, on the other hand,
with which products of the earth and other inorganic sub-
stances can be kept from the putrefying influence of the
sun the horror, so strongly felt, of feeding on the remains
of a dead body
and a number of other prejudices which
the leaders of the Hindu religion have been interested in
fostering, are reasons sufficiently powerful to act upon
minds prepared for them by custom and education. Let
us add to these considerations the horror inspired by
murder among Hindus in general a horror which is so
great in the case of many that it induces them to spare
even the lives of filthy and troublesome insects for the
Brahmins are persuaded that there is no difference between
the souls of men and those of the vilest of living things.
Hence they hold that there is, morally speaking, as much
crime in crushing an ant as in committing a murder.
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