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Animal Rights History Timeline » [BCE-CE] Antiquity » Manu

Manu

Laws of Manu

[ca 500-200 BCE] The Laws of Manu, translated by George Buhler, Vol. 25 of The Sacred Books of the East (Oxford, 1884);Online at Sacret-Texts.com).

Although the Laws of Manu or Manava Dharma Shastra did not denounce meat eating or sacrifice as sinful, does conclude that the only way to obtain "great rewards" including "endless" (5:46), "heavenly bliss" (5:48) and freedom from disease is by "abstaining entirely from the use of meat" which is both "cruel" and "disgusting" (5:49). Manu's laws also condemn those who permit slaughter, as well as those who buy, sell, cook, serve or eat meat, acknowledging them as responsible for the slaughter as the one who actually killed the animal (5:51).

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Thought composed between 200 AD and 200 BC, scholars now agree that the Manava Dharma-sastra is an "amplified recast in verse of a Dharma-sutra, no longer extant, that may have been in existence as early as 500 B.C.," credited by the Brahmins themselves with "divine origin and a remote antiquity…it's reputed author is Manu, the mythical survivor of the Flood and father of the human race…who learned it himself from the self-existent Brahma, it authorship purport to be divine. "—Catholic Encyclopedia, 1910 ed., s.v. "Manu, The Laws of"

Internet Indian History Sourcebook