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

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      Naked Adamites from Bernard Picart, Ceremonies et Coutumes Religieuses de Tous Les Peuples du Monde

      Hindu vegetarianism, as it was presented in the travelogues, had started to exert serious moral pressure on the conscience of Western Christians and Tryon rode this wave as far as it would go. His enthusiasm for the Brahmins peaked in his astonishing Transcript Of Several Letters From Averroes … Also Several Letters from Pythagoras to the King of India (1695), in which he had the nerve to fake an archival discovery of correspondence by Pythagoras and Averröes, the twelfth-century Spanish Islamic philosopher. Tryon appears to have seriously intended to convince the world that Pythagoras, Averröes and the Indian Brahmins were all believers in the same divinely ordained vegetarian philosophy. So amusingly successful was his sham that the Sowle family reprinted it in the eighteenth century alongside The Upright Lives of the Heathen, but the work has more recently lain unidentified in library vaults.⁵³

      The Transcript climaxes in a dramatic reconstruction of Pythagoras’ visit to the court of the Indian King, where he is ordered to defend his vegetarian philosophy against the cavils of the (as yet unconverted) Brahmins. The King has summonsed Pythagoras for illicitly spreading this new-fangled unorthodox doctrine of vegetarianism.⁵⁴ The King and the Brahmins throw at Pythagoras the same anti-vegetarian arguments that Tryon’s contemporaries used against him, such as the God-given dominion over the animals and the heroic valour of hunting. But Pythagoras eventually wins the day, and thus India is converted to his doctrines.⁵⁵

      By making Pythagoras the original founder of Hinduism it may seem as if Tryon was imposing Western philosophy onto the East. But as it was to Hinduism that he turned to reconstruct Pythagoreanism – with the help of the Indian travelogues – Tryon was actually imposing what he knew of Eastern philosophy onto the West.

      The travelogues, of course, are full of Orientalist projections – all European accounts of Hinduism were informed by the writers’ Neoplatonist and Christian preconceptions – but they did also represent some genuine elements of Indian culture. At the very least, their report that there were people in India who taught and practised the principle of non-violence to all creatures was true. Were it not for the material existence of vegetarians in India, Thomas Tryon would never have developed his opinions and he certainly would not have been able to convey them with such clarity.

      The vegetarian institutions Tryon’s Pythagoras establishes in India come straight out of the Indian travelogues: animal hospitals,⁵⁶ the practice of saving animals destined for slaughter,⁵⁷ and special reverence for the cow on account of its usefulness.⁵⁸ Like the travel writers, Tryon’s Pythagoras links pacifism and vegetarianism; he endorses the protection of vermin to clarify the total ban on violence and even institutes the taboo over sharing eating vessels with non-vegetarians.⁵⁹ He also recommends dubious practices such as the caste system⁶⁰ and the prohibition of widow remarriage.⁶¹ These doctrines formed the backbone of Tryon’s own edicts, some of which he set forth as commandments for his followers, including the veiling of women after the age of seven.⁶² He seems to have gathered some adherents around him, and may have been responsible for converting Robert Cook, the landowning ‘Pythagorean philosopher’ associated with the Quakers who ‘neither eat fish, flesh, milk, butter, &c. nor drank any kind of fermented liquor, nor wore woollen clothes, or any other produce of animal, but linen’, because, as he explained in 1691, his conscience told him ‘I ought not to kill.’⁶³ In other words, as far as he was able, Tryon established a Brahminic vegetarian community in London.

      It was with the help of Indian culture that Tryon freed himself from Christianity’s anthropocentric value system and made a leap into another moral dimension. In the Transcript he did this with the figure of the Indian King. Dismissing the welfare of humans, the Indian King turns to the issue of animal rights, summarising it in starker terms than anyone in seventeenth-century England. Any argument against maltreating animals, he said, ‘must proceed, either because they have a natural Right of being exempted from our Power, or from some mutual Contract and Stipulation agreed betwixt Man and them … if … the former, we must acknowledge our present Practise to be an Invasion; if the latter, Injustice’.⁶⁴ The idea that humans could make social contracts with animals had usually been discussed – by Thomas Hobbes among others – with derision.⁶⁵ The idea that animals had any right to be exempted from human power was an unorthodoxy of incomparable audacity. Animals were there for man’s use; the most they could expect, according to Christian religious and philosophical legislators, as John Locke put it, was an exemption from cruel abuse. Tryon’s Pythagoras, by contrast, argues that even without considering animal rights, it is vain to think that man ‘has Right, because he has Power to Oppress’.⁶⁶ In this Tryon was answering Hobbes who had argued in 1651 that humans had rights over animals solely because they had the power to exert it (or ‘might makes right’).⁶⁷

      In complete contrast to the norms of his society, Tryon came firmly down on the side of attributing to animals a right to their lives regardless of human interests. He lobbied Parliament to defend the ‘Rights and Properties of the helpless innocent creatures, who have no Advocates in this World’.СКАЧАТЬ