An extraordinary event takes place every day at
exactly 12:30 PM outside a Hindu temple on a mountain near Mahabalipuram
in southern India. About 27 minutes after noon as a Hindu priest
carries outside a pot of sacred food called prasadam, which is offered
to the god Shiva who is worshipped at the temple, two dots appear
in the sky. As they get larger, one can see that they are two white
eagles. When the priest puts some of the prasadam in his hand, the
eagles swoop down and seize the food. The eagles have been doing
exactly the same thing at exactly the same time each day for as
long as anybody can remember. After their meal the eagles fly around
to the other side of the mountain and wipe their beaks on rocks,
a ritual they have been practicing for centuries, as evidenced by
the deep indentations in the rocks. The Puranas tell a story about
two followers of Shiva whose fate is to be reincarnated lifetime
after lifetime as eagles. "So," says Steve Rosen, the Jewish intellectual-turned-Hindu
scholar who told Rynn Berry the story, "there is evidence that something
has been going on here for a long, long time."
This story is one of the pleasures that await
the reader of Berry's fascinating new book, Food for the Gods. Based
on extensive reading, research, and travel, the book is a collection
of the author's readable, erudite essays (he does his own translations
of ancient Greek and Latin texts) and his interviews with leading
vegetarian religious thinkers around the world (vegetarian recipes
from the various religions are included in the back of the book).
Places Berry visited for the book include a Krishna temple and vegetarian
church in London, the Oxford home of theologian Andrew Linzey, the
Swantinath Jain temple in Bombay, the Ching Chung Koon Taoist temple
in Hong Kong, and a monastery on Lantau Island in China where he
spent several nights as a guest of the monks of the Po Lin Temple.
In a less exotic locale closer to home--Queens--the
author interviewed Dr. Robert Kole about Judaism. Since Kole, a
Shakespearean scholar who teaches Renaissance literature at Queens
College, is a raw foodist, pots and pans did not sit on top of his
kitchen stove. "Books were neatly piled on gas burners," writes
Berry, "and when I opened the oven, I beheld a veritable literary
feast."
In Philadelphia Berry interviewed Dr. Rehana Hamid,
daughter of a Jewish mother and Muslim father, who grew up in New
York City and today is a devout vegetarian Sufi who worships in
the Bawa Muhaiyaddeen mosque while operating a thriving chiropractic
center and in her spare time reading the Torah in Hebrew.
The four eastern ahimsa-based "vegetarian" religions
(Jainism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism) the author covers in the
first half of the book have a commitment to the sanctity of all
life that is very different from the attitude of western religions,
whose prohibition against killing is nowhere near the top of the
list of religious injunctions (it's the sixth of the Ten Commandments),
and it only applies to human beings anyway. The second part of the
book covers the "religions of the book"--Judaism, Christianity (Roman
Catholicism and Protestantism, not Eastern Orthodoxy), and Islam,
religions in which vegetarianism has for the most part been marginalized
or excluded. (In the recently published After Noah: Animals and
the Liberation of Theology Dan Cohn-Sherbok and Andrew Linzey call
on Judaism and Christianity to reject humanocentrism and reclaim
lost traditions that respect and celebrate all of creation.)
The Jains are clearly the heroes of Berry's book,
and well they should be. In India many Jains rescue animals from
slaughterhouses, and Jain priests carry whisk brooms with which
to sweep out of harm's way insects that might otherwise be stepped
on. Jains also maintain special shelters called PINJARPOLS for injured
and defenseless animals. "We take care of stray cows, pigs, goats,
sheep, birds and insects," says Muni Nandibhushan Vijayji, the Jain
monk whom Berry interviewed in Bombay. Nor do Jains eat root vegetables
which grow underground, such as potatoes, carrots, and radishes,
because of the tiny organisms attached to them. "It is a cardinal
Jain precept that one should never kill any form of life," explains
Vijayji. "Our stomach is not a burial ground for dead bodies."
The book sparkles with the author's supple, graceful
prose. For example, after he opens his essay on Hinduism with a
comment about the waves of conquerors who have invaded India through
the centuries (Aryans, Scythians, Persians, Greeks, Huns, Mongols,
Muslims, British), Berry writes: "These truculent, flesh-gorging
tribes, with their patriarchal customs and their war-like gods,
descended on India like a lion springing onto the back of an elephant.
Sinking its pitiless teeth and claws into the pachyderm, the lion
draws blood, but it isn't long before the elephant heaves its shoulders
and sends the lion sprawling. Eventually, that's what India does
to its conquerors: it is mauled by them, to be sure, but after a
few generations it usually ends up absorbing them or shrugging them
off."
The book concludes with The Order of the Cross,
a little known church in London founded in 1904 by the Reverend
John Todd Ferrier. The church, which maintains that Jesus ("the
Master") was a vegetarian, has adopted several ethical features
from the eastern religions, such as reincarnation, karma, and compassion
for animals.
Ferrier was one of the first modern clergymen
to champion the rights of animals. In The Season of the Christ-mass
he strongly criticized the way the modern world celebrates Christmas:
"Whilst the Heavens are feasted on the bread and wine of great spiritual
and Divine elements of which Eternal Life is constituted, and the
real Shepherd on the plains listens to the joy and gladness expressed
in the heavenly songs, the great cities, the towns, the villages,
and even the outlaying lonely places are filled with the cries of
creatures as these are slaughtered in order to provide piquant meals
with which to satisfy the barbaric tastes of the still unredeemed
humanity."
As the only Christian church in existence which
requires its members to take a vegetarian vow, the Order of the
Cross shines like a beacon in the vast darkness of carnivorous Christendom.
The book ends with the hope that other churches will see the light
and go and do likewise.
[Copies of the book may be ordered directly from
the author ($19.95 plus $3.00 postage) at 159 Eastern Parkway, Suite
2H Brooklyn, NY 11238.]
© Copyright 1998 by Charles Patterson
Charles Patterson is the author of Eating Disorders,
The Civil Rights Movement, The Oxford 50th Anniversary Book of the
United Nations, and a forthcoming book on animals and the Holocaust.
Food for the Gods
