The Fourfold Religion of Compassion

Vaisampayana said that the preceptor of the deities, having said what he had come to say to king Yudhishthira the just, ascended upwards for proceeding to heaven, before their eyes.

That was Brihaspati. He had been asked which of the six doors of piety was the greatest, and he had answered that the man who practises the religion of universal compassion achieves his highest good, and that one should never do to another what one regards as injurious to one's own self. Then he went up out of the air and left them standing on the field at Kurukshetra with the answer in their hands.

The old man on the bed of arrows had not spoken during that visit. Bhishma was still lying where the shafts had put him, waiting for the sun to turn north, and the king had been coming to him every day with the questions that the war had left behind.

Yudhishthira, endued with great energy and the foremost of eloquent men, turned back to his grandsire and addressed him.

"O thou of great intelligence," he said, "the Rishis and the Brahmanas and the deities, led by the authority of the Vedas, all applaud that religion which has compassion for its indication. But, O king, what I ask thee is this. How does a man who has perpetrated acts of injury to others in word, in thought and in deed, succeed in cleansing himself from misery?"

It is worth noticing what he did not ask. He did not ask how a man stays innocent. He asked about the man who has already done the harm, and who has done it in all three of the ways a man can do harm, and he asked it standing over a battlefield that he had won by killing his own family. He wanted to know whether there was a road back.

Bhishma's answer began not with a remedy but with a warning that compassion has parts, and that a thing with parts can be broken.

"Utterers of Brahma have said that there are four kinds of compassion, or abstention from injury," Bhishma said. "If even one of those four kinds be not observed, the religion of compassion, it is said, is not observed."

Then he gave the image that fixes it.

"As all four-footed animals are incapable of standing on three legs, even so the religion of compassion cannot stand if any of those four divisions or parts be wanting."

This is a harder rule than it looks. It does not say that a man who keeps three parts out of four has three quarters of the virtue. It says he has an animal on the ground. The parts are not a score to be totalled. They are legs, and the fourth one missing is not a deduction, it is a collapse.

And then the second image, which makes the same claim from the other direction.

"As the footprints of all other animals are engulfed in those of the elephant, even so all other religions are said to be comprehended in that of compassion."

Every other duty a man has can be set down inside this one and disappear into it, the way the print of a jackal or a deer or a dog vanishes when an elephant sets its foot over the place. Compassion is not one item on the list of the virtues. It is the print that holds all the others.

Then he named the ways the injury is done, because those are the parts he had been counting.

"A person becomes guilty of injury through acts, words and thoughts. Discarding it mentally at the outset, one should next discard it in word and in deed."

The order is deliberate and it is not the order a man would choose. The mind first, where nobody can see, then the mouth, then the hand.

"He who, according to this rule, abstains from eating meat is said to be cleansed in a threefold way. It is heard that utterers of Brahma ascribe the sin of eating meat to three causes. That sin may attach to the mind, to words, and to acts. It is for this reason that men of wisdom who are endued with penances refrain from eating meat."

The general teaching had narrowed, in a few sentences, to a plate of food.

"Listen to me, O king, as I tell thee what the faults are that attach to the eating of meat," Bhishma said. "The meat of other animals is like the flesh of one's own son. That foolish person, stupefied by folly, who eats meat is regarded as the vilest of human beings."

He did not soften that and he did not explain it away. He set the eater's dinner beside the body of the eater's child and left the two things touching.

Then he traced where the act goes after it is done.

"The union of father and mother produces an offspring. After the same manner, the cruelty that a helpless and sinful wretch commits produces its progeny of repeated rebirths fraught with great misery."

Cruelty breeds. It has children the way a marriage has children, and the children are the lives you will be born into afterwards, one after another, each of them a consequence of a meal.

Then he came to the reason the thing is so hard to give up, and he named it exactly.

"As the tongue is the cause of the knowledge or sensation of taste, so the scriptures declare that attachment proceeds from taste. Well dressed, cooked with salt or without salt, meat in whatever form one may take it gradually attracts the mind and enslaves it."

Not persuades. Enslaves. And the enslavement is gradual, which is the point of the sentence, because a man does not notice a chain that is put on him one link at a time over a lifetime of dinners.

"How will those foolish men that subsist upon meat succeed in listening to the sweet music of celestial drums and cymbals and lyres and harps?"

A man whose ears are full of the kitchen will not hear the drums of heaven when they are played for him.

"They who eat meat applaud it highly, suffering themselves to be stupefied by its taste, which they pronounce to be something inconceivable, undescribable, and unimaginable. Such praise, even of meat, is fraught with demerit."

The praise itself is a sin. Not only the eating, but the talking about the eating, the connoisseur's delight in it.

"In former days," Bhishma said, "many righteous men, by giving the flesh of their own bodies, protected the flesh of other creatures, and as a consequence of such acts of merit have proceeded to heaven. In this way, O monarch, the religion of compassion is surrounded by four considerations. I have thus declared to thee that religion which comprises all other religions within it."

Yudhishthira had been listening as a king listens, which is to say with the rites of his household in his mind, and he found a hole in it at once.

"Thou hast told it many times that abstention from injury is the highest religion," he said. "In Sraddhas, however, that are performed in honour of the Pitris, persons for their own good should make offerings of diverse kinds of meat. Thou hast said so thyself while discoursing formerly upon the ordinances in respect of Sraddhas. How can meat, however, be procured without slaying a living creature? Thy declarations, therefore, seem to me to be contradictory."

It is a fair objection and he pressed it. The same grandsire, on the same bed of arrows, had already laid down that the dead fathers are gratified by flesh offered at their rites, and had specified which flesh and for how long each kind satisfies them. Now the same mouth was calling the eater of flesh the vilest of men. One of the two teachings had to give way.

"A doubt has therefore arisen in our mind respecting the duty of abstaining from meat," he said, and then he broke the doubt into the pieces he wanted answered separately, because he had learned by then that the grandsire answers what he is asked.

What are the faults that one incurs by eating meat, and what are the merits one wins by not eating it. What are the demerits of the man who eats meat that he has killed himself. What are the merits of the man who eats only the meat of animals killed by others. What are the merits and demerits of the man who kills a living creature for somebody else. And of the man who neither kills nor asks, but simply buys it in the market.

"I desire, O sinless one, that thou shouldst discourse to me on this topic in detail. I desire to ascertain this eternal religion with certainty."

Then he added the four things every man wants, and asked where they come from.

"How does one attain to longevity? How does one acquire strength? How does one attain to faultlessness of limbs? Indeed, how does one become endued with excellent indications?"

He had asked, without quite meaning to, a question about butchery and a question about beauty in the same breath, and Bhishma answered both of them with one word.

"Listen to me, O scion of Kuru's race, as to what the merit is that attaches to abstention from meat," Bhishma said. "Those high-souled persons who desire beauty, faultlessness of limbs, long life, understanding, mental and physical strength, and memory, should abstain from acts of injury."

That was the answer to the second question, and it was the same as the answer to the first. Then he said where the doctrine came from, which matters, because he was not inventing it.

"On this topic innumerable discourses took place between the Rishis. Listen, O Yudhishthira, to what their opinion was."

He gave the opinions as a roll, one authority at a time.

The merit acquired by that man who, with the steadiness of a vow, adores the deities every month in horse sacrifices is equal to the merit of him who discards honey and meat. The seven celestial Rishis, the Valakhilyas, and those Rishis who drink the rays of the sun, endued with great wisdom, all applaud abstention from meat.

The Self-born Manu has said that the man who does not eat meat, or slay living creatures, or cause them to be slain, is a friend of all creatures. Such a man is incapable of being oppressed by any creature. He enjoys the confidence of all living beings, and he always enjoys besides the approbation and commendation of the righteous.

The righteous-souled Narada has said that the man who wishes to increase his own flesh by eating the flesh of other creatures meets with calamity.

Brihaspati, who had gone up into the sky in front of them not long before, has said that the man who abstains from honey and meat acquires the merit of gifts and of sacrifices and of penances.

"In my estimation," said Bhishma, adding his own name to the list, "these two persons are equal, namely, he who adores the deities every month in a horse sacrifice for a space of a hundred years, and he who abstains from honey and meat."

Then he said the thing that concedes the difficulty instead of pretending it away.

"That man who, having eaten meat, gives it up afterwards, acquires by such an act a merit so great that a study of all the Vedas, or a performance of all the sacrifices, cannot bestow its like. It is exceedingly difficult to give up meat after one has become acquainted with its taste."

And he named what such a man is actually handing out, in the language of the sacrificial fee.

"That learned person who gives to all living creatures the Dakshina of complete assurance comes to be regarded, without doubt, as the giver of life-breaths in this world."

"It is seen that even those men who are possessed of learning, and who seek Emancipation, are not free from the fear of death," Bhishma said. "What need there be said of those innocent and healthy creatures endued with love of life, when they are sought to be slain by sinful wretches subsisting by slaughter?"

Then he described the man who has stopped, and the description is a list of the places where men are ordinarily afraid.

That man is never put in fear, wherever he may be. In terrible wildernesses. In inaccessible fastnesses. By day or by night or at the two twilights. In the open squares of towns and in assemblies of men. Before upraised weapons. In places where there is great fright from wild animals or from snakes. All creatures seek his protection. He never causes any anxiety in others, and he himself has never to become anxious.

Then Bhishma looked at the trade from the other end.

"If there were nobody who ate flesh, there would then be nobody to kill living creatures. The man who kills living creatures kills them for the sake of the person who eats flesh. If flesh were regarded as inedible, there would then be no slaughter of living creatures. It is for the sake of the eater that the slaughter of living creatures goes on in the world."

That is the sentence that answers Yudhishthira's careful question about the man who only buys. There is no such man. The knife is held at the far end of a rope, and the eater is holding the other end of it.

"This I heard in days of old, O son of Kunti, from Markandeya, when that Rishi discoursed on the demerits of eating flesh."

And Markandeya had counted the slaughterers, and there were three of them.

He who eats the flesh of animals that were desirous of living, whether he killed them himself or another did, incurs the sin of the slaughter. He who purchases flesh slays living creatures through his wealth. He who eats flesh slays living creatures through the act of eating. He who binds or seizes and actually kills is the slaughterer. Those are the three kinds of slaughter. And he who does not himself eat flesh but approves of an act of slaughter is stained with the sin of it all the same.

Later Bhishma widened the roll again, and by the time he had finished there was nobody left standing outside it. He who arranges for obtaining flesh, he who approves of those arrangements, he who slays, he who buys, he who sells, he who cooks, and he who eats, are all regarded as eaters of flesh.

Yudhishthira's objection about the Sraddha was still standing. Bhishma answered it without withdrawing anything he had said.

"One should never eat the meat of animals not dedicated in sacrifices, slain for nothing, and not offered to the gods and the Pitris with the aid of the ordinances. There is not the slightest doubt that a person by eating such meat goes to hell. If one eats meat that has been sanctified in consequence of its having been procured from animals dedicated in sacrifices, and that have been slain for the purpose of feeding Brahmanas, one incurs a little fault."

A little fault. Not none. That is the whole of the concession, and it is worth reading twice: the ordinance that permits the offering does not pronounce it clean, it only prices it low.

"That religion which has acts for its indications has been ordained for householders, O chief of kings, and not for those men who are desirous of emancipation. Manu himself has said that meat which is sanctified with mantras and properly dedicated, in rites performed in honour of the Pitris, is pure. All other meat falls under the class of what is obtained by useless slaughter, and is therefore uneatable, and leads to hell and infamy."

Then he reached back past the ordinances, to a time when the rites were performed without any animal at all.

"It is heard that in the ancient Kalpa, persons desirous of regions of merit hereafter performed sacrifices with seeds, regarding such animals as dedicated by them."

Grain on the fire, and the grain counted as the beast. That was the old way, and the Rishis fell to arguing about whether the newer way was lawful. They took the question to Vasu, the ruler of the Chedis, a king famous for his truth who travelled through the sky in a car of his own.

"King Vasu, knowing that flesh is inedible, answered that it was edible."

He knew the answer and gave the other one. From that moment Vasu fell down from the firmament on to the earth. He had been a king who flew. He landed. And then, having landed, he repeated his opinion, with the result that he had to sink below the earth for it.

Two words, and a man went from the sky to the ground and from the ground to under it.

"Desirous of benefiting all men, the high-souled Agastya, by the aid of his penances, dedicated once for all the wild animals of the deer species to the deities. Hence there is no longer any necessity of sanctifying those animals before offering them."

The Sraddha stands. Agastya paid for it long ago, on behalf of everybody.

"There is complete happiness in abstaining from meat, O monarch," Bhishma said. "He that undergoes severe austerities for a hundred years and he that abstains from meat are equal in point of merit."

Then he laid out the vow in its practicable forms, for men who could not manage the whole of it at once.

In the lighted fortnight of the month of Karttika in especial, one should abstain from honey and meat, and in this there is great merit. He who abstains for the four months of the rains acquires the four valued blessings of achievement, longevity, fame and might. He who abstains for the whole month of Karttika transcends all kinds of woe and lives in complete happiness. They who abstain by either months or fortnights at a stretch have the region of Brahma ordained for them.

Then he named the men who had kept it, because a rule is only a rule until somebody keeps it.

"Many kings in ancient days, O son of Pritha, who had constituted themselves the souls of all creatures, and who were conversant with the truths of all things, abstained from flesh either for the whole of the month of Karttika or for the whole of the lighted fortnight in that month."

They were Nabhaga and Amvarisha, and the high-souled Gaya, and Ayu and Anaranya and Dilipa and Raghu and Puru and Kartavirya and Aniruddha and Nahusha and Yayati and Nrigas and Vishwaksena and Sasavindu and Yuvanaswa, and Sivi the son of Usinara, and Muchukunda and Mandhatri and Harischandra.

Bhishma stopped at that last name and made his grandson a present of a second rule.

"Do thou always speak the truth. Never speak an untruth. Truth is an eternal duty. It is by truth that Harischandra roves through heaven like a second Chandramas."

Then he went on, and the list did not get shorter.

These other kings also, Syenachitra and Somaka and Vrika and Raivata and Rantideva and Vasu and Srinjaya, and Dushmanta and Karushma and Rama and Alarka and Nala, and Virupaswa and Nimi, and Janaka of great intelligence, and Aila and Prithu and Virasena, and Ikshvaku and Sambhu and Sweta and Sagara, and Aja and Dhundhu and Suvahu and Haryaswa and Kshupa and Bharata, did not eat flesh for the month of Karttika.

And as the consequence thereof they attained to heaven, and blazed forth with effulgence in the region of Brahman, adored by Gandharvas and surrounded by thousands of damsels of great beauty.

"That man who practises this religion, or who recites it for causing others to hear it," Bhishma said, "will never have to go to hell, even if he be exceedingly wicked in conduct in other respects."

Yudhishthira came back with the honest difficulty, which was not about doctrine at all.

"Alas, those cruel men who, discarding diverse kinds of food, covet only flesh, are really like great Rakshasas," he said. "Alas, they do not relish diverse kinds of cakes, and diverse sorts of potherbs, and various species of Khanda with juicy flavour, so much as they do flesh. My understanding becomes stupefied in this matter. I think there is nothing which can compare with flesh in the matter of taste."

He was not defending the eaters. He was admitting that he could see why they do it, and asking his grandsire to tell him plainly what flesh is and what exactly is edible and what is not.

Bhishma did not deny the premise. That is the striking thing in the whole discourse.

"It is even so, O mighty-armed one, as thou sayest. There is nothing on earth that is superior to flesh in point of taste. There is nothing that is more beneficial than flesh to persons that are lean, or weak, or afflicted with disease, or exhausted with travel. Flesh speedily increases strength. It produces great development. There is no food, O scorcher of foes, that is superior to flesh."

He granted the cook and the physician everything they could ask, and then said that none of it was the question.

"But, O delighter of the Kurus, the merits are great that attach to men who abstain from it. That man who wishes to increase his own flesh by the flesh of another living creature is such that there is none meaner and more cruel than he. In this world there is nothing dearer to a creature than his life. Hence one should show compassion to the lives of others as one does to one's own."

The case against meat was never that it is bad food. It is the best food. The case is that it is somebody.

Then he gave the Kshatriya his own ordinance, since he would not pretend that kings live like hermits.

"They do not incur any fault by eating flesh that has been acquired by expenditure of prowess. All the deer of the wilderness were dedicated to the deities and the Pitris in days of old by Agastya, hence the hunting of deer is not censured. There can be no hunting without risk of one's own life. There is equality of risk between the slayer and the slain. Either the animal is killed, or it kills the hunter. Hence even royal sages betake themselves to hunting."

The permission is narrow, and what narrows it is the word equality. What is allowed is not the eating. It is the risk.

Bhishma had one more thing to say about where the eaters go, and he said it in the language of the body.

"While dwelling in the uterus, all creatures are cooked in the fluid juices, alkaline and sour and bitter, that produce painful sensations and are difficult to bear. There they dwell in a state of helplessness, and are even repeatedly torn and pierced. They that are covetous of meat are seen to be repeatedly cooked in the uterus in such a state. Attaining to diverse kinds of birth, they are cooked in the hell called Kumbhipaka."

Cooked. He used one word for the womb, the hell and the kitchen, and having used it three times he did not need to explain the joining.

"They who eat the flesh of animals who are desirous of life are themselves eaten by the animals they eat, without doubt. Since he hath eaten me, I shall eat him in return. Even this, O Bharata, constitutes the character of flesh as Mansa."

That is the old etymology, and it is a sentence spoken by the meat. Mam sa. Me, he. The syllables are the animal's promise, carried in the mouth of every man who names what is on his plate.

"The slayer is always slain. After him the eater meets with the same fate. Whatever acts one does in whatever bodies, one has to suffer the consequences thereof in those bodies."

Then the grandsire stopped arguing and began simply to name the thing, over and over, the way a man tolls a bell.

Abstention from cruelty is the highest Religion. Abstention from cruelty is the highest self-control. Abstention from cruelty is the highest gift. Abstention from cruelty is the highest penance. Abstention from cruelty is the highest sacrifice. Abstention from cruelty is the highest puissance. Abstention from cruelty is the highest friend. Abstention from cruelty is the highest happiness. Abstention from cruelty is the highest truth. Abstention from cruelty is the highest Sruti.

"Gifts made in all sacrifices, ablutions performed in all sacred waters, and the merit of all the gifts mentioned in the scriptures, all these do not come up to abstention from cruelty. The penances of a man that abstains from cruelty are inexhaustible. He is regarded as always performing sacrifices. He is the father and the mother of all creatures."

He had begun by calling compassion an animal that cannot stand on three legs. He ended by calling it a parent.

"Even these are some of the merits of abstention from cruelty. Altogether they are so many that they are incapable of being exhausted, even if one were to speak for a hundred years."

He had rather less than that left.