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

Чтение книги онлайн.

      Thomas Tryon by Robert White (1703)

      He thought that the Brahmins and Moses essentially followed the one ‘true Religion’, which is ‘the same in all places, and at all times’.²⁶ But whereas the Jews and Christians had corrupted their creed with schisms and wrathful appetites, the Brahmin priesthood – which stretched back millennia in a pure uninterrupted tradition – had preserved their sacred knowledge in its original form. Unenamoured of the malevolent Christian clergy of his own country, Tryon turned to the Brahmins and bowed down to them as the pre-eminent guardians of divine law.

      Among the very first works Tryon published was the extraordinary pamphlet, A Dialogue Between An East-Indian Brackmanny or Heathen-Philosopher, and a French Gentleman (1683).²⁷ Reversing the stereotype of civilised Europeans and barbaric Indians, Tryon’s Brahmin greets the Frenchman with ironic allusions to his acquisitive motives for venturing into India and questions him on the tenets and practices of Christians. The Brahmin’s enlightened philosophy, his virtuous temperance, and his unassailable respect for animal life win a moral victory over the depraved and murderous European.²⁸

      Merging his voice entirely with the Brahmin’s, Tryon rebuffs the arguments that had hitherto been used by others to denigrate Hinduism. He even defends the Indian practice of saving lice, for, as the Brahmin explains, if people were allowed to kill some animals they would soon believe they could go on to kill others ‘and so by degrees come to kill men’.²⁹ The ‘East-Indian Brackmanny’ was Tryon’s alter ego.³⁰ Although Tryon was trying to reconcile Indian vegetarianism to Judaeo-Christian beliefs, his ranking of Hindus above Christians was shocking and his anti-vegetarian enemy the Quaker controversialist John Field attacked him for having ‘at once Unchristianed (as much as he can) all Christendom’.³¹

      Abandoning some of the basic precepts of Christianity, Tryon espoused what he imagined to be the way of the Brahmins. Fusing the vegetarianism of his radical forebears with the Brahmins’ concrete example, he announced with excitement that they have for ‘many Ages … led peaceable and harmless Lives, in Unity and Amity with the whole Creation; shewing all kind of Friendship and Equality, not only to those of their own Species, but to all other Creatures’.³² They had achieved the very state that Robins, Crab, Winstanley and all the prelapsarians had dreamed of.

      The travel literature about India emphasised that the Hindu diet was based on an ethical treatment of animals (indeed, the establishment of fearless harmony between man and the animals through the practice of non-violence was an ideal lauded in Sanskrit scriptures).³³ As George Sandys had commented in his translation of Pythagoras’ speech in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1632), which Tryon read and quoted, the Indians had earned the trust of the animals by treating them with respect. Living in a social order reminiscent of the Golden Age, Sandys wrote excitedly, the Indians ‘are so farre from eating of what ever had life, that they will not kill so much as a flea; so that the birds of the aire, and beasts of the Forrest, without feare frequent their habitations, as their fellow Cittisens’.³⁴ Tryon came to see the fair treatment of animals as the key to the restoration of Paradise. Tryon’s Brahmin affirms that ‘we hurt not any thing, therefore nothing hurts us, but live in perfect Unity and Amity with all the numberless Inhabitants of the four Worlds.’³⁵ By relinquishing flesh the vegetarian Hindus had attained physical and mental vigour and undone the Fall: ‘We all drink Water, and the fragrant Herbs, wholsom Seeds, Fruits and Grains suffice us abundantly for Food,’ declares Tryon’s Brahmin, ‘so we in the midst of a tempestuous troublesom World live Calm, and as it were in Paradise.’³⁶

      Inspired by Pythagoras’ vegetarian conversion mission to India, Tryon began to imagine the state of ‘perfect Love, Concord, and Harmony’ he could institute in England – if only its citizens would convert to vegetarianism. Thinking of himself as a new Moses, or, even better, Pythagoras, Tryon told the English people that if they gave up eating meat like the Brahmins, they would achieve spiritual enlightenment, health and longevity, and their relationship with animals would transform from a state of perpetual war to one of Edenic peace.³⁷

      Tryon even looked to the Brahmins for a solution to the government’s religious intolerance, by which he and his dissenting compatriots were routinely persecuted. Since the introduction of the Clarendon Code (1661–5) unlicensed religious meetings had been forcibly broken up, 2,000 Puritan ministers had been dismissed, 500 Quakers had been killed and 15,000 others suffered a variety of other punishments. Even after the Toleration Act of 1689 the problem persisted; Tryon’s own publisher Andrew Sowle regularly had his printing shop smashed up and had even been threatened with death.³⁸ In arguments later echoed in John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) Tryon called for universal religious tolerance. He recommended that England introduce the Indian Mughal’s jezia system by which – as the Brahmin explains – anyone not adhering to the Islamic religion of the state simply paid an extra tax in return for ‘unquestioned Liberty for the Exercise of our Religion’.³⁹ Dissenters meanwhile should emulate the Brahmins, he added, for as vegetarian pacifists they would avoid persecution because ‘Governours would fear their Rising or Tumulting, no more than they do the Rebellion of Sheep, or Lambs, or an Insurrection of Robin Red-Brests’.⁴⁰ This was the pacifist philosophy of the Quakers and the Robins sect united with the vegetarian ahimsa of the Hindus and Jains.

      Tryon fantasised that the Brahmins in India were the counterparts of the Puritans, Dissenters and religious radicals at home; this comparison had been made before, though often on less favourable terms. Pantheism, nudism, communism, sexual deviance, frugality and even the belief in reincarnation were all characteristics which contemporaries associated with both the Indian holy men and the home-grown religious dissidents.⁴¹ In 1641 the Italian humanist Paganino Gaudenzio compared the vegetarian communist Pythagoreans and Brahmins with the Anabaptists.⁴² Strabo’s ancient Brahmins were pantheist apocalyptists and Alexander’s Dandamis declared that anyone who followed nature ‘would not be ashamed to go naked like himself, and live on frugal fare’.⁴³ Tryon himself was not inclined to nudism, but he did recommend the more socially acceptable practice of wearing as few clothes as possible.⁴⁴ But the resemblance to prelapsarian nudists was inescapable: ‘their Nakedness’, went one comparison of the Christian Adamite sect and the Indian fakirs in 1704, was their way of ‘restoring themselves to the State of Innocence’;⁴⁵ others, like Samuel Purchas, disbelieving their chastity, claimed that the Indian yogis were secretly just like the nudist orgiast ‘Illuminate Elders of the Familists, polluting themselves СКАЧАТЬ