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

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 in all filthinesse’.⁴⁶ As early as the sixteenth century, the Fardle of Facions assumed that puritanical Indian women still enjoyed going ‘buttoke banquetyng abrode’ (shagging other men).⁴⁷ This accusation of hypocritical debauchery was a common slur made against suspect religious cults in Europe.

      Tryon was not the first to try to turn the identification of Brahmins with puritanical Dissenters to advantage; others before him had seen the Brahmins as brothers-in-arms against a corrupt world. In 1671 the controversial Quaker George Keith and his co-author Benjamin Furly announced that the Brahmins were so virtuous that they ‘rise up in judgment against the Christians of this age, and fill their faces with shame and confusion’.⁴⁸ They borrowed illustrative stories from Sir Edward Bysshe’s version of Palladius,⁴⁹ and the Rotterdam Calvinist preacher Franciscus Ridderus whose writings anticipated Tryon’s by giving his Brahmin character ‘Barthrou Herri’ lengthy ‘Christlike’ sermons which he copied out of Rogerius’ Open Door.⁵⁰ In 1683 Andrew Sowle presented the Brahmins as ideal vegetarian pacifists in The Upright Lives of the Heathen, an English selection of Bysshe’s anthology of ancient writings, which Tryon may have helped produce (it ends by telling the reader to find out more in Tryon’s Brackmanny, on sale in Sowle’s shop for the bargain price of one penny).⁵¹ And in 1687 one anonymous author, having read the travelogues of Henry Lord and Edward Terry, went nearly as far as Tryon by lamenting that the Hindus set a great example by ‘extending their good Nature, Humanity and Pity, even to the very bruit Creatures’ while shameful Christians were ‘cruel and merciless towards our Beasts’.⁵²

      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