The body that is the all in all (the only source) of dharma must be protected with efforts; just as water oozes down from the mountain, so dharma springs from the body .
śarīraṃ dharmasarvasvaṃ rakṣaṇīyaṃ prayatnataḥ |
śarīrātsravate dharmaḥ parvatātsalilaṃ yathā |
Śaṅkhalikhita 17.63cd (Kane IV: 127)
Early Brahmanical religious life was not possible without the nexus of humans and animals. Humans and non-humans co-constructed the religious world. My focus for this chapter is on the ways in which animal bodies articulated and altered humans’ religious, legal, and social statuses. 1 Previous studies on animals and religion have emphasized vegetarianism, the moral treatment of animals, and whether animals have souls (Rosen 1987; Singer 1975; Francis and Norman 1978; Jaini 1987; Badham 1998; Waldau 2000). Building on this research, I address animal bodies’ direct involvement in Hindu ritual, animals’ effect on ritual purity, and the ontological status of humans and non-humans as expressed in religious texts. One of animal studies’ most frequent questions concerns the human–animal distinction, which philosophers have historically explored using anthropocentric criteria. Inquiry into this distinction was not a priority for religious authors in ancient India, yet animals regularly appear in Dharmaśāstra and other religious texts from South Asia. Examining Dharmaśāstra can illuminate ideologies and social realities of animals and people in Hindu religious history, in part because Dharmaśāstra writers detailed rules and specifications for actions involving animals alongside or in lieu of humans.
Giorgio Agamben’s work on animals and humans asserts that our relations with the divine depend on the darker relations that “separate” us from the animal, meaning our anthropocentrizing notions and behavior (2004: 16). Conversely, I suggest that our relations with other animals depend on our relations with the divine. People in Brahmanical societies performed ritual practices—often utilizing animals or their bodies—to negotiate their statuses in relation to the divine and deceased. Some Hindu rites and practices made use of animal bodies in order to purify humans and their spaces, to link the human sphere to otherworldly or divine realms, and to mitigate negative karma before rebirth, to name a few examples. Hindu legal literature details these ritual practices and draws the mutual constitution of humans and animals as religious, legal, and social bodies. The epigram from Śaṅkhalikhita above points to the body as the primary locus of dharma ’s enactment (in this context, dharma encompasses both normative duties and the more abstract virtue and religious merit resulting from the performance of practices and the execution of one’s duties). Therefore, a study of the embodiment of dharma can reveal the related roles of non-human and human animal bodies. I focus on domestic cattle and Indian antelopes, both significant species in India’s socio-religious history. Cows frequently appear in the same passages as Brahmins (e.g., gobrāhmaṇāḥ , “cows and Brahmins”), the bull is a recurring symbol of dharma , and the blackbuck (antelope), utilized in Brahmanical ritual, is a symbol of yajña , sacrifice.
In this chapter, I incorporate theory from recent continental philosophers (some posthumanist) who reject anthropocentric priorities and have considered the question of the animal. I bring these insights to bear on India-specific material and particularly dharma literature. I discuss four topics, starting with (i) animals’ utility in early Hindu ritual and in conceiving of ideologies. (ii) I address how animal bodies constitute rituals and ritual space, as well as the dharmic status of some animals and their products. (iii) I highlight that animals are an extension of the human body according to some legal texts. This facet of animal embodiment leads to an understanding of (iv) human and animal bodies as co-constituted in Dharmaśāstra ideology. Both types of beings are moral and soteriological constructs, and Dharmaśāstra texts describe practices involving shared human/animal socio-religious bodies.
Especially noteworthy for animal studies is the permeability of species in Indian ideologies of karma and rebirth, existing since ca. mid first millennium bce . In this context, species distinction concerns the category formation of beings as moral or soteriological entities, not the Linnaean understanding of species. This permeability of types of being from birth to birth (animal to human and sometimes to divine) contrasts with the impermeable categories familiar in the West, which separate gods from humans from other animals, and so on.
Analyzing dharma in animal terms might surprise some, especially in light of the Hitopadeśa ’s statement: “Eating, sleeping, fear, and sex are the same for humans as for animals; human’s chief distinction is dharma . Without dharma , humans are no different from animals.” 2 The Hitopadeśa contrasts “animals” with “humans” in order to explore whether animals can acquire merit (punya ) as well as humans can or can only expend it. The Hitopadeśa ’s distinction of animal versus human concords with the standard anthropocentric legal theory of past and present, which traditionally considers only humans as legal subjects. As Joanna Bourke has described the phenomenon, “[i]t is law that distinguishes between the most basic existence shared by people and animals ([basic] life or zoe ) and full personhood within the polis or political community (meaning[ful] life or bios )” (2011: 131). Like Bourke, I take issue with structures that categorically grant legal personhood only to select groups of humans. Such legal structures ignore liminal beings with other sorts of participation in the legal world and social community. Classical Indian texts complicate the dichotomy implicit in the Hitopadeśa verse. Padmanabh Jaini rejects the notion of humans as homologous with dharma and animals as lacking dharma (1987: 176). He acknowledges that the modern Indian mindset might differentiate humans from animals, using man’s moral conscience of dharma , but Jaini argues that early Buddhist, Jain, and Brahmanical narrative texts belie this moral distinction. These texts instead suggest that non-human animals, at times, embody dharma better than human animals can (Jaini 1987: 169). Furthermore, the prescriptive legal literature often presents rules for humans to realize the performance of dharma by means of animals.
The legal authors often chose to frame dharma in animal terms, and not only because of the metaphorical potential of animals, which Lévi-Strauss termed “bonnes à penser ” (1963: 89). Animals are “good to think (with)” because the variety of relationships and characteristics in the animal world aids our understanding of social structures and other associative frameworks, what Lévi-Strauss termed “external analogies” (1963: 78). For an Indic example of such an association, a dharmic king is like a bull in that both king and bull preside, watch over, and protect the “herd,” whether human or bovine (Couture 2006: 73–4). Animals also materialize our “internal homologies”; ideas and relations conceived in the mind take animal form, manifesting in empirically observable ways (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 89). In this latter sense, animals are especially useful in giving body to religious abstractions such as sin and atonement, transmigration, or dharma . In a śrāddha ritual (see Chapter 16 ) that involves the release of a bull following a man’s death, the bull embodies the mental construct of dharma , giving it physical form. The bull also transports the deceased’s dharma from his human body after cremation, allowing it to release or “spring” from his material body.
But animals do not only give physical presence to human speculations of the mind; humans and animals share a common world. The authors of Dharmaśāstra described their own territory of Āryāvarta, where proper dharma was practiced and followed (sadācāra ), as coterminous with the Indian antelope’s natural habitat (Kane II: 15). Human practitioners of dharma and the blackbuck cohabited a shared world. Why would this dharmically perfect realm of ritual practice be the same as the blackbuck’s range? The animal became equated with the perfect enactment of dharma owing to the antelope’s bodily role in ritual sacrifice and hence proper dharma . 3 Viśvarūpa, commenting Yājñavalkya’s Dharmaśāstra 1.2, expressed the homology of the antelope with the sacrifice and dharma using a Śvetāśvatara prose passage: “Sacrifice became a black antelope and wandered over the earth; dharma followed it in its wanderings” (Kane II: 15). 4 Various Brahmanical rituals utilized antelope skin, including the upanayana initiation rite (see Chapters 6 and 7 ), in which a strip of antelope skin is attached to the sacred thread tied around the initiate, and the darśapūrṇamāsa sacrifice, the twice-monthly śrāddha in which the adhvaryu priest uses the skin to husk and bruise the ritual grain (Kane II: 1026–7). The dhenudāna rite also made use of antelope skins as simulacra of an actual mother cow and calf, illustrating the antelope’s fungibility in the ritual economy. In this rite, a small antelope skin placed over a larger one holds monetary, material, or food gifts (Kane II: 880). The skins represent the cow and her calf, which were originally gifted in such acts; they physically stand in for other animal bodies in the rite. In all of these cases, the antelope body facilitated ritual enactment. So, the animal took on symbolic representations useful to humans by bodily representing sacrifice and dharma . The antelope was also the literal embodiment of sacrifice: the animal’s body physically contained dharmic practitioners (held to ritual by their upanayana thread) and it contained ritual offerings.
Other animals embodied dharma in its ideological framing. At one extreme, the perfect embodiment of dharma was conceived as a four-legged bull, while, at the other extreme, the vision of dharmic chaos was the anarchic ocean of fish in the “big fish eats little fish” scenario, the matsyanyāya , “law of the fish.” 5 The Law Code of Manu (MDh 8.16), the Mahābhārata (Vanaparvan 3.188.10–3.188.12), the Viṣṇupurāṇa , and the Matsyapurāṇa (Couture 2006: 72) all express the ideal embodiment of dharma as a bull. The emphasis on the whole body, with all four legs, assures the maintenance of stability in dharma ’s structure, which in turn structured Brahmanical society. Interestingly, while the bull embodies dharma and the body produces dharma (which springs from it, per Śaṅkha’s opening citation), dharma actually survives the body after death: “Dharma is truly the bull…Dharma is the only friend who follows a man even in death; for all else perishes along with the body” (MDh 8.16–8.17). 6 During life, the body is the vessel for dharma (in the sense of proper religious performance and behavior), as the medium for the physical enactment of dharma . After death, this dharma entirely converts into nontangible religious merit that does not require a body. Nonetheless, the performance and maintenance of dharma during life entail a physical body. As a result, bodily performativity creates dharmic products, including soteriological products like religious merit.
Evidence also suggests that Dharmaśāstra writers understood their world, as well as what needed to be done, by means of animal standards. Some measurements are expressed in animal terms, such as making grain piṇḍa balls for śrāddhas (remembrance rituals that “feed” deceased family members) that could fit in a two-year-old calf’s mouth or that are the size of a hen’s egg (in Skandapurāṇa 7.1.206.41 and elsewhere; Kane IV: 478). Here, animal terms aided ritual practitioners’ application of dharmic rules and social practices.
Dharmaśāstra writers found animals necessary for contextualizing dharma because they considered that humans and animals together formed the overall social structure. Consider the gobrāhmaṇa , the social construct of both cows and Brahmins, as constituents of society. Harm done to either was a serious crime, and acts involving either often possessed similar structural and legal value in Brahmanical society. Texts suggest that animals and humans were co-constitutive in socio-religious practices such as penances for dharmic benefit: for example, drinking pañcagavya (the five products of the cow) in order to absolve a person of petty theft (MDh 11.166). Some rituals involved both human and non-human bodies, such as the release of a bull at a śrāddha for a deceased family member. Such ritual performances created other productions over time, sometimes soteriological products, such as residual dharma after bodily death.
Per Pascal Eitler, approaching history as body history, including animals’ constitutive part in it, entails studying the changing production of bodies—how bodies are produced and what is produced by bodies that are socially constructed in certain ways (2014: 271–4). Eitler has suggested that we include not only “what humans do with and make out of animals, but also what they do with and make out of themselves in the context of human-animal relations” (2014: 273). In ancient India, a human criminal’s body underwent modification when punished for theft; the criminal’s forehead was branded with the image of a dog’s foot (MDh 9.237). In this case, the dog’s figurative body aided the production of an altered human body, a socially corrected body.
Animal products such as the cow’s pañcagavya also modify human bodies when ritually consumed. One consumes pañcagavya , a concoction of cow’s milk, ghee or butter, yogurt, urine, and dung, either for medicinal or ritual purposes, as well as it being utilized for purification and for the consecration of structures or deities. The cow’s bodily products bring about the production of socially and soteriologically altered human bodies, sites, and divine images. The cow’s purificatory role extends beyond her bodily products and includes her acts and mere presence. Whereas the presence of other animals (dogs, camels, pigs, etc.) can be polluting, one can purify an area of land by smearing it with cow dung (BDh 1.9.11) or by “letting cows stay in it” (MDh 5.124). 7 Clearly, the cow does affect the bodies of individuals and the ritual purity of social and religious spaces.
One might also consider animals as social products themselves, produced according to societal and religious needs and demands. 8 The cow is a prime lens through which to observe this religio-social construction of animals in South Asia—by examining the changing appreciation of her bodily acts and her social role over time. The cow’s development as part of Brahmanical ideology shifted toward a progressively more “sacred” organism. This was brought about by the societal and ritual demands placed on the cow’s body, by the effects produced by the cow’s body, and by late modern Hindu discourses (D.N. Jha 2002). Such discourses and the cow’s own performativity gradually resulted in the animal’s “reconstruction” (Eitler 2014: 271) as an ideal, socially constructed animal—the proverbial “sacred cow.”
The cow offers an illustration of humans’ social alteration of an animal, yet there are other ways to explore historically shifting priorities of human and non-human bodies and their production(s). In Vedic and post-Vedic religious practices, animal bodies were sometimes subjected to societal demands in animal sacrifice. Before the Common Era, this typically meant the sacrifice of a male goat (in the paśubandha ) but also of a barren cow (in the anubandhyā ). Human priests and patrons (yajamānas ) and animals to be slaughtered co-constituted these bodily performances (Kane II: 1116–31 and 1200–1). Animal sacrifice eventually fell out of practice, owing to religio-social pressures from both within and without the Brahmanical religious structure. These pressures resulted in the development of nonviolent modes of sacrifice and religious practice—other modes of gifting, japa, pūjā , expressions of bhakti , and meditation as interiorized sacrifice. All of these placed heightened emphasis on the human individual’s body or mind/body organism. These later practices became new ritual productions involving the human body as the locus.
The shift away from animal sacrifice is one example of kalivarjya , something that was previously practiced and that is no longer followed in the present Hindu epoch, the Kaliyuga (Kane V: 1267–9). Some kalivarjya practices are historically significant for animal studies in that we can observe changing attitudes regarding the moral status of animals and shifting human–animal relations. Regardless, most bodily practices described in this section are also karmic processes that an individual performs in order to carry out one’s dharma or to create or restore dharmic merit of the sort that “springs from the body.”
There is another way to envision animal bodies alongside human bodies in Dharmaśāstra, since the liminality of bodies does not always follow species boundaries. In the core text of Hindu law, Manu designates wealth, including non-monetized property (i.e., house, land, cattle), as one more locus of the body for inflicting punishment: “Manu…has proclaimed ten places upon which punishment may be inflicted…They are: genitals, stomach, tongue, and hands; feet are the fifth; and then, eyes, nose, ears, wealth, and body” (MDh 8.124–8.125). One’s possessions (wealth, cattle, etc.) are part of the closed set of body parts upon which dharmic correction could be inflicted, meaning property was an extension of the body, as suggested by Olivelle (2011: 33). Punishment inflicted on one’s wealth could affect one’s sheep, goats, or work oxen as part of one’s own body. A human who performed illegal actions (often through the medium of the body) and who chose not to perform penance might end up bearing the marks of his bodily acts on his own body, as the visible, social dimension of his punishment (e.g., branding; Olivelle 2011: 34). But punishment could also be carried out using an animal that was the criminal’s property. Seizing non-fixed assets such as cattle, in varying numbers according to the severity of a crime, was more convenient than taking a portion of a house as a fine. Such punishment effectively transferred the site of enactment from the criminal’s body onto the animal’s body. The body’s boundaries do not occur where one species ends and another begins, but instead overlap.
This larger view of embodiment within Dharmaśāstra means that animals ideologically formed part of many humans’ bodies, or at least humans who were wealthy enough to possess cattle. This notion is not so farfetched, as, until recently, domestic cattle sometimes virtually shared living spaces with families in India, either below or in front of the living quarters. Livestock were frequently considered members of the family, owing to their being the family’s means of welfare. One philosophical ramification of this broader idea of embodiment is that the historical Hindu conception of human embodiment encompassed (a human’s) animal embodiment, making the animal–human distinction even less metaphysically relevant. In any case, the animal– human distinction was blurred in Hindu ideology, in which human animals and non-human animals alike passed into other animal or human species in subsequent births, dependent on karmic acts performed in a lifetime.
In addition to executing punishment using an animal in lieu of the human agent of the crime, the inverse occurred in cases in which foraging cattle—one man’s property or extended body—destroyed agricultural land belonging to another. If the legal stipulations specifying the terrain’s fencing had been met, the bodily acts of animal consumers, extensions of the primarily human legal body, resulted in punishments inflicted on human bodies, with the livestock owner or herder bodily responsible for animal bodily acts (Kane III: 500–1). 9 Dharmaśāstra texts specified the social burdens placed on various parts of shared human–animal legal bodies. The type of crime and its severity determined where the burden would fall on a shared legal social body, whether on the “animal” part or the “human” part of it, just as some crimes were punishable on a certain body part, with the loss of a thumb or an ear. In cases affecting animals instead of humans (and vice versa), the religio-social status of humans and animals intermingled.
A legal body shared between human and animal(s) links to Donald Davis’s (2010: 89) description of the Hindu social self as “fractured” because of people’s multiple relations to things. This fracturing also expresses the complexities of embodied beings’ participation in karmic life. Interactions with the external world (other humans, animals, the environment, etc.) always have social, legal, and soteriological implications. A person’s bodily actions (as well as thoughts and speech, according to Manu’s ideology) create numerous fractured results—on body parts and parts of beings—as bodily productions and produced bodies. To illustrate this contingent, fragmented aspect of karma, consider when someone kills another person. The social, moral, and legal implications (i.e., the dharmic effect) of this act depend on many elements. If someone killed another person in order to protect cattle , this murderous act was not a criminal killing but rather a religio-legally permissible act, illustrating that the animals’ involvement changed the dharmic status of a human killer and his production. 10 Had the killing been intended to protect a different creature, the killer’s karma would have produced other fractured results of his involvement with the external world.
This fractured being appears in Manu’s final chapter—his discussion of karma—where he describes bhūtātman, the “elemental self” that performs action and engages in the external, physical world (MDh 12.12–12.15 and 5.109). The bhūtātman is the self (ātman ) constructed of bhūta (the gross elements [ether, air, water, fire, and earth], at times including the subtle elements of touch, taste, smell, sound, and sight). This suggests that bhūtātman encompasses the perceptual self that reacts and experiences, in other words, the living self or embodied life. This is not exclusively human. After all, all living beings, whether vegetable, animal, human, or divine, are called bhūta . Manu describes this active embodied self (MDh 12.12–12.15) just before his discussion of criminal actions and sins with corresponding rebirths in certain animal bodies (MDh 12.54–12.69), meaning that there are animal-embodied implications resulting from the fractured array of bhūtātman ’s human-embodied acts. In effect, it is a human’s elemental embodiment that experiences the tangible effects of karma.
Two points need highlighting in order to further our understanding of how human–animal embodiment is karmically constituted. First, souls embodied as humans may later be embodied as animals and vice versa, along with the physical fact that, after death, “another firm body [animal or otherwise] is produced for them from the same five elemental particles (mātra )” (emphasis added; MDh 12.16). Second, Manu explains the metaphysical redistribution of material elements at death and rebirth as co-constitutive with the psycho-spiritual elements of Mahat (=the Great, referring either to the intellect or to consciousness) and Kṣetrajña (the self) (Olivelle 2004c: 291–2). “These two—Mahat…and Kṣetrajña,…united with the elements (bhūta ), remain pervading the one who abides in creatures (bhūta ) both great and small. From his body innumerable forms stream forth, which constantly set in motion the creatures both great and small” (MDh 12.14–12.15). The same “material” and “spiritual” components are set in motion in an active karmic being, whether human or non-human. This explains some of the malleability of being, from human animal to non-human and so on. It also signals that the human–animal distinction is less germane, owing to the same co-constitution of all embodied beings.
Because of this fractured nature of dharmic bodies that perform different acts over time, social stratifications do not necessarily fall on clean divides between “animal” and “human.” These disjuncts do not separate the “animal” from the “human,” 11 but instead reveal the common composition, actions, and statuses of human and animal, what I call humans’ and animals’ co-constitution in karmic society. This is evident in legal texts’ categorization of beings, which does not correspond to Western species, genus, and family lines. Lower-caste peoples frequently appear in dharmic groups with “lesser” or smaller animals, such as dogs, crows, and insects. The penance for killing animals like crows or dogs was the same as for killing a human Śūdra, the lowest of the four classes (ĀpDh 1.25.13). If a dog died in a Brahmin’s house, it carried the same level of pollution and required the same kind of ritual purification as if a human Śūdra, patita (one who has fallen in caste), mleccha (an outcaste or foreigner), or caṇḍāla (an outcaste or mixed-caste person, perhaps) had died there (Kane IV: 321). If the dog is often equated with outcastes (White 1992), Brahmins’ ontological grouping with cows is equally prevalent. One must observe the same purity rules for someone who died while protecting a Brahmin or a cow (Kane IV: 305). 12
Both groupings—lesser animal with outcastes/low castes and cattle with Brahmins—are animal–human homologies based on ideological alliances. These animal–human equivalences are examples of Lévi-Strauss’ external analogies, as well as internal homologies. Vertical species stratification can indicate caste or class hierarchy (external analogy). Ideological species difference marks putative qualitative difference, as perceived within the historical Brahmanical structure (internal homology). Lévi-Strauss considered the latter to be observable, but these differences might only be discernable as praxis-based, designated social roles in Brahmanical society. I have no desire to reify any purported species or class-based differences, but Brahmanical speciesism and hierarchies of animal species certainly betrayed human social stratification (Smith 1994).
Regardless, the workings of karma and dharma meant that humans’ constitutive elements were the same as and often transferable into animals’ constitutive elements (Manu’s bhūta and mātra ). Further, Brahmanical social stratification equated at least some animals with certain groups of humans in ideologically serving homologies. The practical realities of these homologies translated into social, religious, and legal practices that intermingled animal and human, as, for example, purification rites to complete after a dog’s death. Rituals—the practical, social iterations of religious ideology—often expressed socio-religious ways of dealing with embodiment. These rituals frequently utilized animal bodies as a medium for expressing religiosity, integrating different types of beings.
The vṛṣotsarga , the release of a bull at the end of a śrāddha , exemplifies the ritual co-constitution of bodies in socio-religious performances, as described in ViDh 86.1–86.20 (Kane IV: 539–42). On the eleventh or twelfth day following a human male’s death, after his body has departed, a bull’s body is released from a cow pen, possibly symbolic of the soul’s successful release from the body. The bull is released with cows, and none is to be restrained or seized at any time. The two tropes—of the bull as embodiment of dharma and dharma as springing from the body—coalesce in this death rite. Dharma (the bull) springs from the body of the deceased human, since dharma is the only thing that survives one after death, per Manu’s declaration that “Dharma is truly the bull…Dharma is the only friend who follows a man even in death; for all else perishes along with the body” (MDh 8.16–8.17). Of course, dharma is not the only thing that survives one after death. One’s progeny—required in order to perform the śrāddha ritual—should survive as well. The use of a virile bull and multiple healthy young cows symbolizes the guarantee of future progeny, who are necessary for the repeated performance of śrāddhas that must follow this rite in order to ritually feed the deceased ancestors. The bull’s body links to the feeding of deceased ancestors in Viṣṇudharmottara 1.147.1–1.147.19: “Wherever a bull (let loose) exulting in his strength scratches (or digs up) the earth, that earth, becoming abundant food and water, waits upon the manes” (Kane IV: 541). A mantra recited into the bull’s ear, “the father of vatsas …” (originally from TS 3.3.9.2; Kane IV: 540), confirms the implication of progeny in this rite as well as the correlation of the deceased human male with the bull. Vatsa means “offspring, son, child,” as well as “calf,” a lexical merging of human and animal in this ritual enactment.
In the vṛṣotsarga , the animal body performs what the human no longer can in order to facilitate the human soul’s successful future in the semi-divine realm of deceased ancestors. While the bull is set free to go where he pleases, there are religio-social demands placed on him: before release, his flanks are branded with divine symbols of triśūla and conch, linking the spheres of animal, human, and divine on the animal body. This ritual production utilizes an animal body as the embodied perpetuation of dharma surviving a no-longer-embodied soul. 13 Animals and humans thus co-create the ritual performance. The rite’s products include an altered bull’s body and the creation of dharmic benefit and food for the deceased in the afterlife. All of these are the bull’s bodily production. The bull’s ritual participation and products help construct the human religious world.
While a human might easily become an animal in rebirth, there are also instances in the legal literature in which humans “became animals” during life (of course, humans are already animals!). After committing a crime or sin, a person’s dharmic status might temporarily shift to a grouping with certain animals, and one might have to “become” the animal. A male adulterer who cheated on his wife had to perform penance by begging for alms from his neighbors with an ass’s skin on his back (hairy coat facing out) for six months, socially marking his contingent status so that the community would recognize his past act(s) (ĀpDh 1.28.19). Such a bodily performance absolved his human-embodied sin using animal body parts. This co-created human–animal performance eliminated karmic accrual. Moreover, ritually “becoming animal” within one’s lifetime averted karmic rebirth as an animal in the next life, so the animal bodily performance affected one’s future bodies. 14
Humans in ancient India did not only “become animals” while performing penance. As I detailed above, legal texts often described practices that resulted in shared socio-religious bodies: for example, one’s property—animals—as part of one’s own body. Since the physical body was the locus of dharma , embodiment was the karmic medium through which to articulate dharma , often through the performance of religious rites. These rites brought about dharma as bodily productions: for example, ritual purification that utilized animal bodies or products. Both animals and humans performed these rites together. In other contexts, thinking in animal terms facilitated measurements for and logistics of ritual practices that modified and constructed one’s dharma . Animals also aided in expressing the hierarchies and qualities of Brahmanical socio-religious strata, allowing humans to conceptualize and reassert their social structures. Finally, animals like the bull gave physical embodiment to abstract religious constructs for prescriptive, didactic, and ritual purposes. Overall, enactments of dharma required animal bodies and formed a nexus of animals and humans.
Given these many connections, are animals “weltarm ,” poor in their ability to “form the world,” as Martin Heidegger suggested? 15 Dharmaśāstra writers indicate that both human and non-human animals are “co -world-forming” and world sharing, sharing physical space (expressed by the blackbuck’s range), as well as social (living) and religious (ritual) space. The animal becomes human, or rather, is part of humans, in shared bodies of legal and socio-religious responsibility. Both also form the religio-social structure, partly constructed through ritual performance. Humans’ dharmic interaction with the world occurs in fractured arrays of animal and human involvements, often with human religious action responding to animal incidence, such as the death of a dog or the protection of cattle. Manu’s theoretical description of bhūtātman as “embodied being” confirms the joined nature that humans share with other animals; bhūtātman engages with the external world by means of his bhūtas , which are common with other animals’ bhūtas . Karmic fractures enacted in life do not separate human from animal 16 but rather karmically establish small components of an individual, sometimes with repercussions linking different bodies. The Law Code of Manu expresses one such repercussion as karmic rebirth into animal and human bodies.
In summary, socially determined dharmic groupings, observable in ritual practice and classical Hindu ideology, do not fall along human/non-human divides. Combinations of humans and animals in legal and religious practices substantiate the permeability of “animal” and “human” in the Brahmanical social world of the past. The fractured nature of a person’s karmic body (bhūtātman ) allows for porous, nondichotomous intersections of animal and human. The body, in general, expresses and articulates dharma , and animal bodies, in particular, distinguish and alter humans as religious, legal, and social beings. Animal embodiment has played a role in Brahmanical religious life that would not have been conceivable without this ritual nexus of humans and animals co-constructing the religious world.
Our ideas of Hindu ritual have traditionally not accounted for the presence of animals or their bodies, because we have mistakenly considered these animal components to be at most accessorial to human ritual actors. Yet Hindu conceptions of ritual sacrifice and religious ideals manifest as animals—yajña as the antelope and dharma as the bull. Moreover, without animal skins, fluids, and other forms of participation, there would oftentimes be no means through which to carry out the Hindu rituals that facilitate human relations with the divine. Animal involvement in ritual and ideology is significant in altering humans’ religio-legal (dharmic) status and in mediating human relations to the divine and to other worlds after death. Humans strive to maintain a certain position with the divine through the correct performance of each person’s dharma , often via ritual; animals or their bodies become participants in such ritual. Because animals facilitate ritual enactment, they establish and ensure humans’ relations with the gods, which, in turn, sustains the relationship of humans to animals, these vital creators and restorers of human religious merit. Ultimately, we humans have utilized animal bodies religiously in order to address our own embodiment and to address other beings around us, both embodied and divine.