23-7-1923 Talks with Sri Aurobindo
Disciple: I had a long discussion with X on vegetarian and non-vegetarian diet. His argument was that those who take non-vegetarian diet are people devoid of pity. Life is sacred and no one, who has not realized the Spirit in all forms of life, has the right to take meat.
My reply was: Many Madans and Christians who take non-vegetarian diet are not devoid of pity. Christ himself was not a vegetarian; – diet has little to do with pity or cruelty. Secondly, the Jains who are proverbially vegetarians are not less cruel. Your argument that vegetables being lower forms of life can be eaten but animals being higher forms should not be eaten is based upon an arbitrary assumption about the higher and the lower forms of life. It is a creation of human mind. All life is life.
Disciple: X would have taken fish if it had been a vegetable.
Sri Aurobindo: It is absurd to make food such an important thing in the spiritual life. It is a secondary matter whether one takes vegetarian or non-vegetarian diet, so far as the spiritual life is concerned. The real thing is equality or Samata. If that is there then it is immaterial whether one takes fish or vegetarian diet. Philosophically, it is meaningless to say this has more life and that has less.
Disciple: But the animals have more evolved life than the trees.
Sri Aurobindo: Not life but mind. Life is more manifest in the plant, in some respects, than even in man. Only, the mind is not evolved.
Disciple: The question is of vital repulsion. One can say he feels repulsion in killing an animal or he feels the animal nearer to him. But that would not prove that the plant when killed suffers less. It is only because man is not able to see the suffering of the plant that he feels the repulsion less, perhaps. All these things are due to Samskaras – previous, impressions. The plain fact is that one cannot live unless he takes some kind of life. All these arguments are only intellect trying to justify old Samskaras.
Disciple: You spoke of equality, Samata. Why should one establish equality in the Prana, the vital, before one does it in the mind?
Sri Aurobindo: Why should he not, if he can? It is not that one has to wait and establish equality on all planes at once, at a time.
Disciple: Is it necessary to wait till the yoga is perfect in order to take fish?
Sri Aurobindo: I do not understand why one should. Very few people realise the true meaning of Samata, equality. By Samata, equality, is meant a certain attitude of the whole being towards the world and its happenings. This world is full of so many things which are horrible and terrible. Samata means that one should be able to look at them from a certain poise without being perplexed or moved. It does not mean that one will go on killing others indiscriminately or out of a personal motive. That would be untruth. But it means that one must be able to look at things without being moved. What X calls "pity" is something quite different from "compassion" and both are different from Samata – equality. Samata is an attitude of the whole being. Pity and sentimentalism are results of nervous repulsion, some movement in the vital being. I myself, when I was young, could not read anything related to cruelty without feeling that repulsion and a feeling of hatred for those who practised it. I could not kill an insect, say, a bug or a mosquito. This was not because I believed in Ahimsa but because I had nervous repulsion. Later, even when I had no mental objection, I could not harm anything because the body rejected the act. When I was in jail I was subjected to all sorts of mental tortures for the first fifteen days. I had to look upon scenes of all kinds of suffering and then the nervous repulsion passed away.
Compassion is something different. It comes from Above. It is a state of sympathy for the suffering of man and the suffering that is on earth and there is an idea of helping it as far as one can, whenever one can in his own way. It is not like pity. It is like the Gods who look upon human suffering from above, unmoved. That compassion can also destroy and it destroys with compassion, – Daya, – as Durga does the Rakshasas, the hostile beings. There can be no pity there. Many times the Rakshasa may come and ask you to save him, he may even ask you to transform him – as some beings asked the Mother in her vision – by your spiritual power. If you try that, all the power goes to the Rakshasa and you may become powerless. When these vital beings incarnate in men then the compassion would not prevent you from killing them.
That the vegetable kingdom has got life is not something new to know and it is not necessary to acquire Samata to take fish. I used to take it when I was a child and when I had no Samata. What is required is: one should have no repulsion. As a matter of fact, I cannot take fish nowadays, but that means nothing. I give it to the cats all right.
When there is Samata then there comes Samarasatva – equal enjoyment – from everything – one gets the rasa, essential delight, from every kind of food. Even the food that we call badly cooked has a rasa of its own. But one can agree to a little bit of diplomacy. It is no use casting fish in the face of a Jain or forcing Smoke in the face of an orthodox Tamil Brahmin.
. Now you explain instead of grilling!
