The Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India

On arrival in India, European travellers were astonished when they noticed that the modern ‘Brahmins’ – the Hindu priest caste, custodians of the Sanskrit scriptures – were the direct descendants of the ancient ‘Brachmanes’ encountered by Alexander the Great 2,000 years earlier. When the erudite Italian aristocrat, Pietro della Valle, encountered naked, dreadlocked, ash-smothered ‘Yogis’ with painted foreheads on his travels to India in the 1620s, he affirmed with confidence that ‘There is no doubt but these are the ancient Gymnosophists so famous in the world … to whom Alexander the Great sent Onesicritus to consult with them’.1 For travellers and readers alike – brought up on the primordial antiquity of the Bible – this was a disorientating realisation.

Merchants were excited by the trade in Indian diamonds, cotton and spices but thinkers all over Europe became obsessed with unlocking the jealously guarded secrets of India’s strange and wonderful religions.2 Missionaries were having a tough time getting Indians interested in Christianity, but Europeans at home were fascinated by Hinduism. Inevitably, Christian writing about India was distorted by religious bigotry and underwritten by Europe’s nascent political agenda, but some seventeenth-century travellers examined Indian culture with remarkably open minds and even downright admiration. Enthusiastic descriptions were full of fantasies and projections too, but some aspects of Indian culture managed to penetrate the barriers of inter-cultural communication.3 Readers at home developed such an insatiable craving for genuine Eastern knowledge that ideas taken from Indian philosophy were incorporated into debates about religion, science, history, human nature and ethics. At times, Hindu culture appeared so awesome that it shook Europe’s self-centredness to its core.

The seventeenth-century ‘discovery’ of Indian vegetarianism was an astoundingly fertile cross-cultural encounter, but it was built upon an ancient history of passionate curiosity. Even before Alexander the Great reached India in 327 BC, its vegetarian philosophers were renowned in the ancient Greek world.4 According to the historians whom Alexander took on his military expedition, the moment the Greek army arrived in the ancient university town of Taxila (now in Pakistan), Alexander despatched his messenger Onesicritus to find the famous ‘gymnosophists’, or ‘naked philosophers’. In a legendary episode, which came to epitomise the meeting of East and West, Onesicritus came across a group of Brahmins sunning themselves on the outskirts of town. They burst into laughter at the sight of his hat and extravagant clothing, and derided his attempts to understand a translator’s rendition of their transcendent wisdom with the caustic comment that it was like ‘expecting water to flow through mud’.5 Eventually one of them was prevailed upon to deliver a potted summary of Indian philosophy. Onesicritus was immediately struck by the similarities between Indian and Greek thought. In amazement, he told the Brahmins that like them Plato had taught the immortality of the soul and that their key doctrine of vegetarianism had been advocated in Greece by Pythagoras, Socrates, and even Onesicritus’ own teacher, Diogenes.6

Although there are significant differences in their respective moral systems, it is nevertheless an extraordinary coincidence that roughly contemporaneous seminal Indian and Greek philosophers, the Buddha and Pythagoras, both taught that a soul’s reincarnations depended on behaviour in previous lives, and that it was wrong for people to eat animals. Faced with this enthralling correlation, European matchmakers fantasised about possible explanations for centuries; even today it remains one of the unsolved mysteries of world religion.7 It was well known in ancient Greece and Rome that Pythagoras had travelled to Egypt and Persia in search of philosophical knowledge, and many, then and later, found it irresistible to imagine that he must have reached India.8 Lucius Apuleius (AD 124–c.170), author of The Golden Ass, announced that the ‘pre-eminent race called Gymnosophists’ had indeed taught Pythagoras ‘the greater part of his philosophy’.9

Pythagoras was believed to have launched Hellenistic philosophy, introducing the interlinked seminal concepts of the immortality of the soul through reincarnation or ‘metempsychosis’, the notion that all living things are kindred, and the corollary that it was wrong to cause suffering to animals.10 Pythagoras wrote nothing down, but his doctrines became the basis of Plato’s philosophy. It became a staple belief among Platonists that the Greek philosophical tradition owed its origins to India. Even those who thought the Egyptians were the first to invent philosophy could agree, since Egypt was widely believed to be an ancient Indian colony.11

Tracing Greek philosophy back to the Brahmins was a theory of inestimable significance. Despite cavils from Aristotle, it put the ideal of vegetarianism near the heart of ancient philosophy and enticed generations of travelling philosophers to drink at the original fountain of knowledge in India. Philostratus (AD 170–245) wrote a semi-fictional biography of Christ’s first-century neo-Pythagorean rival, the legendary magical man-god and abolisher of sacrifices, Apollonius of Tyana.12 Following in Alexander’s footsteps to visit the Brahmins of Taxila, Apollonius defended vegetarianism, saying that the earth ‘grows everything for mankind; and those who are pleased to live at peace with the brute creation want nothing’, while carnivorous men, ‘deaf to the cries of mother-earth, whet their knife against her children’. ‘Here then,’ explained Apollonius, ‘is something which the Brahmins of India … taught the naked sages of Egypt also to condemn; and from them Pythagoras took his rule of life.’13 Joining the dots between similar ethical systems, Apollonius posited Indian vegetarianism as a mandate for re-establishing harmony with the natural world. He was unambiguous: the basis of Pythagorean vegetarianism was Indian and the Brahmins were the fount of all true philosophy.

Plotinus (AD 205–70), the founder of Neoplatonism and principal Western proponent of metempsychosis, tried and failed to get to India to meet the Brahmins,14 but his vegetarian star-pupil Porphyry (AD c.234–305) did the next best thing. Porphyry read the now lost account by the pagan convert to Christianity Bardesanes of Edessa (AD 154– c.222), who had interviewed a group of Indian ambassadors in Mesopotamia as they made their way to the court of the sun-worshipping homosexual-orgiast Emperor of Rome, Elagabalus.15 In his seminal vegetarian treatise, On Abstinence from Animal Food, Porphyry championed the Brahmins for living on the natural products of the earth. ‘To eat other food, or even to touch animate food,’ explained Porphyry, ‘is thought equivalent to the utmost impurity and impiety.’ Eating meat was not technically against the law in India, Porphyry explained, but the Brahmins believed that abstinence from flesh was the purest diet (mirroring the arguments being made by ascetic flesh-abstaining Christians).16

Porphyry’s vituperative detestation of the Christians, and Apollonius’ stalwart rivalry with them, did not help to ingratiate the Brahmins or vegetarianism to Jerusalem’s new religion. The Church fathers had much to say about abstinence from flesh, so the vegetarian Brahmins presented them with complex doctrinal questions. Was Indian vegetarianism a sign of prodigious spirituality, or was it blasphemous superstition? Worse still, could their diet give support to the contemporaneous vegetarian heresies breeding back home?

The Athenian pagan convert, St Clement of Alexandria (AD 150– c.215), was keen on flesh-free diets, which no doubt gave him a special interest in the Indian gymnosophists who, he said, ‘feed on nuts, and drink water’. But the extremity of their abstinence, he insisted, made them dangerously similar to the heretical Gnostic Encratites, whom he called ‘blockheads and atheists’.17 St Hippolytus (fl. AD 234) also damned the Brahmins by suggesting in his Refutation of all Heresies, that it was from them that the Encratites originally derived their doctrines. Yet he grudgingly admitted that the Brahmins themselves appeared to live in a sort of Paradise, in which their food literally grew on trees. That the Brahmins did not have to cultivate the earth to get their bread implied that they somehow lived outside the remit of God’s curse on Adam: ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.’18 The pagan Greeks thought of the Indians living like the inhabitants of the Golden Age, the earth yielding fruit and grain to them without any labour.19 Christians translated such fantasies into the belief that Eden had originally been situated in India.20 On the other hand, lacking cultivation was sometimes construed as a sign of lack of ‘culture’, making the Indians uncivilised savages.21

But Bardesanes’ enthusiasm for India was infectious. Bishop Euse-bius of Caesarea, who wrote the Ecclesiastical History during the fourth-century Roman persecution, repeated Bardesanes’ comment that the Brahmins ‘neither commit murder, nor worship images, nor taste animal food, nor are ever intoxicated … but devote themselves to God’.22 That they did not worship idols (which was true of some Hindus) suggested that they were Christians in spirit, even though they had not heard of Christ. The even more enthusiastic hermit St Jerome (AD c.347–420), in his defence of abstinence from flesh, declared that the Brahmins exemplified the spiritual benefits of fasting and were worthy of imitation by any Christian. He cited them alongside Diogenes and the Essenes, and even the unimpeachable biblical examples of Daniel the Prophet, Moses, John the Baptist and all the antediluvians including Adam and Eve. The Brahmins, said Jerome with admiration, ‘are so rigidly self-restrained that they support themselves either with the fruit of trees which grow on the banks of the Ganges, or with common food of rice or flour’.23 This ringing endorsement by one of the most revered Church fathers inspired Christian vegetarians for centuries.

Such willingness to identify points of contact between Hinduism and Christianity found its apotheosis in the monastic Bishop of Helenopolis, Palladius (AD c.363–431), who dramatised a dialogue between Alexander and Dandamis the Brahmin. Dandamis shuns Alexander’s splendid gifts, outsmarting the ‘conqueror of many nations’ with the rebuttal that, ‘The earth supplies me with everything, even as a mother her child with milk,’ and quips that it is better to be fed to beasts than to make oneself ‘a grave for other creatures’.24 Paraphrasing arguments from Palladius’ own teacher, St John Chrysostom (AD 347–407), the Archbishop of Constantinople, and echoing Cynic philosophy, Dandamis says that even wolves were better than humans for at least they only ate meat because their nature compelled them to.

Palladius’ account was incorporated into later versions of the hugely popular medieval Alexander Romance which spread throughout Europe, and possibly reached India in time to influence the sacred Buddhist text, the Milindapanha, a dialogue in which the vegetarian sage Nagasena converts Menander, the Greek King of Alexander’s Bactrian kingdom. In the Alexander Romance the Brahmins claim to live in blissful harmony: ‘When we are hungry, we go to the trees whose branches hang down here and eat the fruit they produce.’ These Brahmins explicitly combine their vegetarianism with anti-monarchical sentiments; their role as entrenched critics of Western consumerism, tyranny and carnivorousness was growing apace.25

The extent to which medieval Christendom was ready for a new encounter with India was illustrated by Marco Polo’s literary success on his arrival in Europe in the 1290s. After growing up at the court of Kublai Khan at Shang-tu (Xanadu) and travelling in Asia for more than twenty years, Marco Polo was captured by the Genoese and clapped in jail. Fortuitously, he was made to share a cell with the romance writer Rustichello. Polo whiled away the hours of imprisonment by dictating what he had seen in the East, and, between them, the two prisoners produced one of the most extraordinary travel adventures of all time, written like a medieval romance – except that this time nearly everything they said was true.26

Rather than simply ridiculing the outlandish cultures he had encountered, Polo made a striking leap towards cultural relativism. He recognised that by their own standards and even his own, the Brahmins were exceedingly virtuous. They were scrupulously honest, they bathed regularly (unlike Europeans), and they lived extraordinarily long and healthy lives during which, Polo explained, they would not eat or ‘kill any creature or any living thing in the world, neither fly nor flea nor louse nor any other vermin, because they say that they have souls’.27 With such eye-witness reports, Europeans were quick to hold up the Brahmins as a quintessential embodiment of the ‘virtuous pagan’.

Marco Polo in Tartar attire

Among the many other wonders Polo described was Adam’s Peak on Ceylon (Sri Lanka) which was said by local Muslims to contain Adam’s grave, and by ‘idolaters’ to hold a footprint of the Buddha.28 Decades later, in 1338 the Pope’s ambassador, John of Marignolli, was sent off to the East to examine the new Christian missions. He visited Ceylon to check up on Polo’s fantastic reports about Adam’s grave and was utterly astonished to discover that, as Polo had suggested, ‘Paradise is a place that (really) exists upon the earth’.29

Back home, Marignolli wrote up his experiences for Emperor Charles IV whom he served as chaplain. He described how he had strolled through the garden that was once Adam’s home, tasting mangoes, jackfruit, coconuts and bananas which, like the local spices, Marignolli surmised, were descended from the luscious trees of Paradise. On this mountain he found the remains of Adam’s marble house, an imprint of Adam’s foot, and – most amazing of all – a monastery populated by holy men (clearly Buddhists) who, he said, ‘never eat flesh, because Adam and his successors till the flood did not do so’. These extremely holy, half-naked monks were as virtuous as any people on earth – despite not being Christians. They confounded Marignolli by arguing ‘that they are not descended either from Cain or from Seth, but from other sons of Adam’. They claimed that the hill they lived on had protected them – and the original artefacts of Paradise – from the ravages of Noah’s Flood. ‘But as this is contrary to Holy Scripture’, Marignolli added nervously, ‘I will say no more, about it.’ He could not resist the temptation of saying more, however, for he had found something that fulfilled Christians’ wildest dreams: ‘Our first parents,’ he concluded, ‘lived in Seyllan upon the fruits I have mentioned, and for drink had the milk of animals. They used no meat till after the deluge, nor to this day do those men use it who call themselves the children of Adam.’

Marignolli – perhaps with the misleading assistance of Muslim interpreters – readily incorporated vegetarian Buddhism into the biblical tradition. He claimed that the ‘skins’ Adam and Eve were given to wear after the Fall were actually coconut-fibre clothes (as modelled by the inhabitants of Ceylon). The vegetarian Buddhists and Brahmins of India, according to this dazed Christian, were continuing the prelapsarian vegetable diet. Having abandoned his initial caution, Marignolli doffed his European clothes, donned a coconut-fibre sarong, and joined the Buddhist fraternity until it was time for him to return. The Franciscan who set out to check up on the progress of the Eastern Catholic mission ended up using vegetarianism as a bridge between his religion and Buddhism.30

The Renaissance travellers who followed the missionaries to India reinforced expectations of finding remnants of Paradise. When the Venetian merchant Nicolò Conti returned from his Indian travels in 1448, the Pope sent his secretary, Poggio Bracciolini, to record what he had seen. The ancient Greek accounts of India – principally Strabo’s Geography (AD 23) – had just been rediscovered, and Conti’s new stories caused huge excitement. He spoke of ‘Bachali’ – presumably the descendants of the converts Bacchus had made on his mythical trip to India – who ‘abstain from all animal food, in particular the ox’.31 The Brahmins (whom Poggio differentiated from the Bachali) were great astrologers and prophets, living free from diseases to the age of 300, and their asceticism competed with anything practised in Europe.32

In 1520 the German cleric Joannes Boemus published his Omnium gentium mores, leges & ritus, a massive comparative ethnology which went through innumerable editions in French, Italian, Spanish and in English as The Fardle of Facions (1555). Boemus filled out what the classical sources did not provide with utopian fantasy: the ‘unchristened Brahmanes’, he said, put Europeans to shame by living a ‘pure and simple life … content with suche foode as commeth to hande’.33 This was hardly less fantastic than the part-fictional, part-plagiarised Travels of Sir John Mandeville written in the mid-1300s, which had imagined the ‘Isle of Bragman’ inhabited by pagans ‘full of all virtue’ living chaste and sober lives in ‘perpetual peace’.34 Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) was inspired by similar idealistic reports; More’s Utopians, like the Indians, exercise temperance, are kind to animals and live in political harmony; there is even a cryptic suggestion that they are gymnosophists.35

This type of exotic idealism was elaborated by scores of other writers, such as Tommaso Campanella who wrote The City of the Sun in 1602, soon after being committed to twenty-five years’ imprisonment for attempting to establish a Hermetic solar utopia in Calabria. The narrator of Campanella’s story – a world-travelled sea captain – reports that the inhabitants of the City of the Sun rarely drink wine, never get the diseases of gluttonous Europe, live for up to 200 years, and derive their deistic* religion from the Brahmins.36 Campanella was so aware that vegetarianism would be expected of his ideal community that he wittily took the issue face on: ‘They were unwilling at first to slay animals, because it seemed cruel; but thinking afterward that it was also cruel to destroy herbs which have a share of sensitive feeling, they saw that they would perish from hunger … Nevertheless, they do not willingly kill useful animals, such as oxen and horses.’37 More than a century later the theme was still very much alive, reappearing satirically in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) in which the barbarous flesh-eating Yahoos contrast with the idealised Houyhnhnms who only eat herbivorous food (as does Gulliver during most of his residence with them).38 Like the travel literature they were based on, these utopian works critiqued European manners by setting them against other cultures. It is little wonder that puritanical enthusiasts in Europe sought to recreate the ideal communities at home which they read about in both travel and utopian literature.

As the voyages of discovery fuelled a new wave of interest in India, travel literature became a subject of serious intellectual study. Renaissance scholars started interpreting Indian religions along similar lines as classical Greek and Roman paganism, forging the path for the late eighteenth-century Orientalism of Sir William Jones.39 Some travellers were even bold enough to legitimise Indian customs by pointing out similarities with their own culture. In 1515, a Florentine envoy wrote from Cochin to tell Giuliano de Medici that he had encountered vegetarians who ‘do not feed upon anything that contains blood, nor do they permit among them that any injury be done to any living thing, like our Leonardo da Vinci’.40 Da Vinci – who was himself rumoured to have travelled in the Orient – had spent decades ranting against cruelty to animals and deploring how man had made himself their ‘sepulchre’, despite the plentiful vegetable food provided by nature. Like the Hindus, he even lamented that eating eggs deprived future beings of life. Contemporaries related how da Vinci used to buy caged birds to set them free – an act of charity long associated with Pythagoras, and a habit now being remarked upon by European travellers in India.41

Renaissance Neoplatonists had developed a method of syncretising the various pagan philosophies from Greece, Rome and Egypt and decoding them to find the hidden truths that lay behind their fantastic exterior. Some teachings of paganism were thus made compatible with Christianity. When new information became available on Indian ‘gentiles’ (or ‘Gentoos’ as they were often called), it was partially incorporated into this ready-made framework. But the Indians stood out, for unlike other bygone pagan peoples, they still existed. To some, this made them more threatening, but to anyone predisposed to learn from ancient Eastern sages, it made the Indians particularly sensational. Europeans were familiar with the vegetarian teachings of Pythagoras, and they had the biblical story of Eden engraved upon their hearts. But the Indian vegetarians stimulated an unparalleled renewal of interest, and the constant flow of varied reports about them encouraged a constant reappraisal of their significance. Europeans did project their own preconceptions onto Indian vegetarianism, but some tenets from Indian philosophy still managed to enter Europeans’ consciousness. Indian culture exerted a powerful influence which altered Western understanding of the religious and ethical issues raised by the practice of abstaining from meat.

At the tail end of the fifteenth century, after years of trying to open the sea route to India, the Portuguese sea-captain Vasco da Gama and his crew limped round the Cape of Good Hope, and flopped – bedraggled and empty-handed – onto the Western coast of India. Da Gama’s mission had a commercial goal: to find a means of importing Indian spices without using the expensive Muslim-dominated land route. But King Manuel of Portugal had also allegedly threatened da Gama that on pain of death he was not to return until he found the legendary Christian King of India, the perennial ‘Prester John’. Almost the first people da Gama’s men met on their arrival were dreadlocked Indians who seemed willing to worship the Portuguese images of the Virgin Mary, possibly seeing in the baby Christ a counterpart of their own baby Krishna. The Portuguese rejoiced at having linked up with their long-lost Christian brothers, and after an initial hesitation about the odd Indian ‘churches’, in a gush of enthusiasm, they knelt down and prayed in the Hindu temples.

The Portuguese soon realised that these ‘Christians’ were not entirely ordinary. They not only ‘ate no beef’, but when da Gama and his men arrived at the Calicut court for dinner they found that – in startling contrast to the lavish banquets of European royalty – the King ‘eats neither meat nor fish nor anything that has been killed, nor do his barons, courtiers, or other persons of quality, for they say that Jesus Christ said in his law that he who kills shall die’. While the Portuguese remained under the delusion that the Indians were Christian, they were more than willing to integrate local vegetarianism into the biblical commandment against killing, and noted with amazement that it was actually perfectly possible for humans to live without eating meat.42

But da Gama and his men gradually realised that they had been mistaken about the Indians’ Christianity and they became less tolerant about their vegetarian foibles. By this time, the other major European powers were eyeing with envy the Portuguese monopoly on Indian trade. At the end of the sixteenth century the Dutch finally muscled in on the game by sending armed galleons to back up their trading ventures. The British followed hot on their heels, promising the Great Mughal an alliance with Queen Elizabeth. They came in search of riches, but they knew there was also a market back home for tales of wonder and adventure, and each nation produced its own scribe of India.