Lecture 7: Ancient India—Sacred Cows and Ayurveda
class, should logically be strict vegetarians. In fact, they still
sacrifi ced cows and ate meat at this point. Aryans also introduced something else crucial to understanding
their ideas about food, and that is a caste system. Whatever caste
you were born into, you were stuck in forever. The ultimate result
was many different ways of eating from region to region and,
importantly, from caste to caste. In 600 B.C., there was a period of great social unrest; there were
widespread famine, drought, and wars throughout India. It seemed
to people that the Aryan gods were failing, and the Brahmans began
to be the object of suspicion and anger. According to one theory,
the Brahmans decided to reinvent themselves to survive, so they
began to add new sacred writings that explained food prohibitions
in detail—particularly to denote who could eat with whom, but
also to forbid cow eating. They came forward as ascetic, celibate,
and vegetarian. The most important part of their reform effort was to make cows
sacred and inviolable. In the Upanishad (about 800 B.C.), a clear
idea of the transmigration of souls develops so that all beings are
reincarnated according to their actions on Earth—whether they
have good or bad karma. The Brahman priests decided that cows
are the highest creature you can come back as; as a result, eating
cows or even mistreating them is forbidden. Some of the other food prohibitions are recorded in the Dharma-
sutra, which was cast into written form in the 6th century B.C. There
are all sorts of prohibitions against accepting food from people of
a different caste, prohibitions against meat from specifi c types of
animals, and prohibitions against certain vegetables (such as garlic,
leeks, onions, mushrooms, and turnips). These dietary ideals are only for the Brahmans. People of lower
castes only observe these rules during certain holidays or are
allowed to eat some meats. People of the lowest caste, the