The Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India. Tristram Stuart

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      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 deisticСКАЧАТЬ