[Pramāṇa](https://indike.org/pramana/) › [Studies](https://indike.org/pramana/ins) › [Science, technology and education](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.science) › [Hindu Medicine](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.science.zimmer-1948) › c8.182 # Hindu Medicine c8.182 Hindu Medicine c8.182 - **Language:** English ### [c8.182](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.science.zimmer-1948.c8.182) A rice-growing civilization of a somewhat gentle, feminine character, favoring a maternal order, taught the masculine and war-like Aryan beef-eaters vegetarianism as the only diet proper for all higher spiritual pursuits; killing animals, harming living creatures, injuring even a malignant insect (himsā) were regarded as the worst of sins. Thus the eating of meat and the sacrifice of animals came to be depreciated. Butchers, even shoe-makers, working on the hideously unclean hides of poor slaughtered cattle, ranked as defiled, low-caste people. Hunting, though still indulged in by kings, was no general sport, as it is in other countries to this day. It remained the cruel and impure profession of hunting tribes in the wilderness, of aborigines in the backwoods, outside the compass of the respectable Hindu civilization and its village borders. Ancient pre-Aryan ethics, remodelled according to Buddhist teachings, and handed down from antiquity through the ascetic community of the Jainas, came again triumphantly to the fore with the spread of the Buddhist doctrine in the last centuries B. C. - [Previous: c8.181](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.science.zimmer-1948.c8.181) - [Next: c8.183](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.science.zimmer-1948.c8.183) - [Up: c8](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.science.zimmer-1948.c8) --- Source: [https://indike.org/pramana/ins.science.zimmer-1948.c8.182](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.science.zimmer-1948.c8.182) · Pramāṇa