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

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