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Notes
Jātaka tales are part of the Pāli Canon’s Khuddakanikāya. According to Buddhist scholars, the Canon was formed around the third century BCE. These stories document the Buddha’s past lives, several of which were in animal form, before his birth as Shakyamuni Buddha.
J.A.B. van Buitenen (1975) provides a translation and the Pāli Canon references for the Sivirajācairyam (“The Feet of King Sivi”[=Śibi], pp. 198–199).
The story appears three times in the Mahābhārata, but ‘the oldest of versions seems to be the first one in the Vana–Parvan’ (Dange 1969, p. 312). I analyze this version in detail in this paper.
This version of the story migrates into Buddhism’s narratives and is depicted in Buddhist cave paintings. Perhaps two versions of the story—Indra as a blind man, and Indra and Agni as a Hawk and a Dove—were both part of Indian oral tradition.
Later illustrations of the Sivi Jataka, however, include the same motif of offering his flesh.
Sadasiv Ambadas Dange (1969) provided a broad survey of animal fables and tales.
Dange gives the opinion of the schools of Maxmuller (ibid., p. xxxvi.)
Stephanie Jamison (2009) observed, ‘that animal tales are used in education when it is directed at children and the uneducated rather that learned’ (as cited in Olivelle, 2013, p. 19).
Contemporary animal activists and eco-critics emphasize the role of stories in communicating the message of animal sentience.
Wendy Doniger (2005) creatively analyzed anthropomorphism (‘projecting human qualities upon animals’) and zoomorphism (imagining humans as animals) in ancient Indian and Western literature. She argued: ‘Anthropomorphism and zoomorphism are two different attempts to reduce otherness between humans and animals, to see the sameness underneath the difference. But sameness, just as difference, may lead to the inhuman treatment of both humans and nonhumans’ (p. 34). Philosophers such as DeGrazia (2007) explore the concept of “personhood” with respect to animals that demonstrate language and cognitive capcities.
Lance Nelson (2006) has argued conversely, insisting that despite the Hindu metaphysical notion of divine unity of the self, ‘Hindu theology and social thought present a view that is unapologetically hierarchical and anthropocentric’ (184). The Mahābhārata also plays both sides of the argument (underlying unity and hierarchy on the bases of action), but I see the animal tales as devices to disrupt this rooted anthropocentricism.
The Mahābhārata is a war epic, but it celebrates ahiṁsā (abstention from harm) and abhaya (complete assurance of fearlessness to living creatures) as highest virtues.
All the citations of English translation of the parable are taken from van Buitenen’s translation (Vol. 2, 1975), pp. 470–472.
Here, I draw on Vrinda Dalmiya’s article (2012) in which she classified King Yudhiṣṭhira as ‘a care ethical agent’ who rejects the offer of going to heaven for a dog in the Mahābhārata (pp. 7–28).
A prominent feminist ethicist Nel Nodding developed her ideas on ethics of care and emphasized the role of education in developing caring and loving people. See Sander-Staudt.
In Levinas’s ethics, the Dove attains a privileged status because the text has staged a ‘face-to-face’ encounter between it and the King. For Levinas (1985), seeing another’s face constitutes the most primal ethical scene—‘the face speaks to me and thereby invites me to relation’ and ‘the face is what forbids us to kill’ (p. 198 and 86). Since we are dependent on the Other for our own self-integration, the very perception of the Other’s face implies its request that we not kill it.
yadā samaṃ kapotena tava māṃsaṃ bhaven nṛpa tadā pradeyaṃ tan mahyaṃ sā me tuṣṭir bhaviṣyati. This is one of the most poignant points in the text. I provide this in the original Sanskrit to give a glimpse of the poetic nature of the text. It marks the climax of the ethical test.
In this sense, the Mahābhārata offers a striking parallel to Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Leibniz in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1992). Deleuze explores how the concept of the ‘fold,’ which can include and differentiate by enfolding and unfolding simultaneously, elides the binary of multiplicity and unity, allowing each to coexist. See especially, p.135 et seq.
In the Jātaka version of the parable, agency is given to a destitute and disabled man, and in the Mahābhārata to animals. In addition, a comprehensive volume, Bilimoria and Sridhar (2007), Indian Ethics: Classical Traditions and Contemporary Challenges: Vol. I, contains several essays that deal with various issues regarding animal ethics.
Jack Reynolds (2004) noted on Derrida’s theory of hospitality, ‘If we contemplate giving up everything that we seek to possess and call our own, then most of us can empathise with just how difficult enacting any absolute hospitality would be. Despite this, however, Derrida insists that the whole idea of hospitality depends upon such an altruistic concept and is inconceivable without it’ (177).
Kay Milton (2002) discussed the role of person-based identification: “those who advocate the moral right of nonhuman things, and seek a philosophical basis for such rights, do so by identifying what human beings, as archetypal persons, hold in common with other objects of concern. In the case of nonhuman animals, the important questions are whether they are sentient, can suffer pain, have the capacity for emotional experience’ (28). The stories in the Mahābhārata help humans imagine a ‘personhood’ in animals—a concept recent philosophers and activists have begun to argue through arguments and court cases, as when 2014 the court case on the behalf of select animals was filed in the New York’s Appellate Court by Steven Wise who was influenced by Peter Singer’s book, Animal Liberation (1975). Hegedus and Pennebaker (2014).
In the chapter, ‘The Tale of the Hawk and the Dove,’ Stephen Beyer (1974) takes this version of the tale from the Tibetan collection of the tales called The Wise Man the Fool. In this preface to the tale, Beyer writes, ‘The Buddhist borrowed many popular Indian forms to express their vision of exemplary virtue: animal fables and ancient tales of righteous kinds became stories of the prior births of the Buddha…’ (p.6). Undoubtedly, there was a cross-fertilization of Hindu and Buddhist fables of ethics. Historically, it is difficult to determine which of these versions came first or whether or not the version of the tale in the Mahābhārata was influenced by the Buddhist rendering of the tale.
In Alf Hiltebeitel’s (2010) words, ‘it is a “creature feeling” that extends “across the great divides”: of those of high and low standing’ (p. 81).
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Acknowledgments
I wish to thank the three anonymous Sophia reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. Also, my special thanks to Professor James Earl (University of Oregon) for his comments on numerous drafts of this paper, and I am grateful to Professor Purushottama Bilimoria (GTU, Berkeley, CA) for his support.
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Howard, V.R. Lessons from ‘The Hawk and the Dove’: Reflections on the Mahābhārata’s Animal Parables and Ethical Predicaments. SOPHIA 57, 119–131 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-016-0538-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-016-0538-9