Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/314

 292 The Veneration of the Cow in India.

practice.*'^ Even when Buddhism became the state religion we constantly hear of butchers and slaughter-houses ; and in the folklore of that age, as well as in the collection of tales made by Somadeva, which are full of the spirit of Buddhism, similar evidence is forthcoming.^^ Thus we read in the Buddhist Jataka of Hindus observing the home worship of the cow, and at the same time of a Brahman who proposes to sacrifice a cow to Agni, the fire-god ; some tax-gatherers kill a calf to make a sword-sheath out of its skin ; peasants eat an ox in time of famine, all these practices being apparently usual and not subject to censure."*^ I am indebted to Mrs. Rhys Davids for a note on the position of the cow in Buddhist literature. She finds no evidence in the Pitakas that the animal was held in special regard by Brahmans, Buddhists, or any other class. She has so far come across no evidence showing the growth, subsidence, or recrudescence of cow-sanctity in the Pitakan literature. Buddhists and Jains would be no more averse to the slaying of cattle than that of any other creature.

At the same time, during the period marked by the decay of the early Brahmanism and the rise of Buddhism, we see the gradual rise of a humanitarian movement with the object of restricting or abolishing animal sacrifice. The origin of this movement is obscure. Some authorities have tried to connect it w'ith the rise of the doctrine of metempsychosis, which was as little known to the Vedic tribes as it was to the Iranians, appearing first in the Brahmana period.''^ At the same time, transformation into


 * E. W. Hopkins, The Religions of hidia, p. 365.

Translations, p. 360 ; Somadeva, Katha sarit sdgara (ed. C. H. Tawney), vol. i., pp. 227, 241.
 * ' T. W. Rhys Davids, Buddhist India, p. 93 ; H. C. Warren, Buddhism in

'''^ The Jataka (Cambridge Translation), vol. ii., p. 156; vol. i., p. 308; vol. v., p. 57 ; vol. ii., p. 94.

"A. Weber, The History of Indian Literature, p. 73; A. A. Macdonell, History of Sanskrit Literature, pp. 115, 223, 386, etseq.; A. Barth, o/>. cit., p. 78 ; M. Haug, op. cit., p. 15.