Rhinoceros toes, manu V.17-18, and the development of the Dharma system.

• Author: Jamison, Stephanie W.
• Position: Ancient manuscript regarding consumption of five-toed creatures

A widespread provision in the dharma texts (MDS V. 18, GDS 17.27, BDS 1.5.12.5, ApDS 1.5.17.37, VDS XIV. 47, ViSmr 51.6, Yajn. I.177) forbids the eating of the flesh of 'five-nailed' (pancanakha), i.e., 'five-toed' animals, save for a restricted group: porcupines, hedgehogs, monitor lizards, hares, tortoises - and often rhinoceroses (khadga). Of the texts just cited, only Vasistha and Yajnavalkya do not include the rhinoceros on their five-nailed lists. I give two versions of the ones that do:

GDS 17.27

Five-nailed (animals) (are not to be eaten), except for the hedgehog, hare, porcupine, monitor, lizard, rhinoceros, and tortoise.

MDS V.17-18

One should not eat solitary (animals) and unknown beasts and birds, even those indicated as among the edible, (nor) all five-nailed (animals).(1)

(But) they proclaim as edible the porcupine, hedgehog, monitor lizard, rhinoceros, tortoise, and hare among the five-nailed - as also animals with one row of teeth, except for camels.

Despite its widespread representation in the dharma texts, the rhinoceros seems to be a secondary addition to this list, as Heinrich Luders pointed out exactly ninety years ago in an article devoted to exactly this dietary provision ("Eine indische Speiseregel,' ZDMG 61 [1907]: 641-44). A standard list of five edible five-nailed animals, i.e., this same list minus the rhino, is rather surprisingly common in a variety of ancient Indian text-types, in the fixed and memorable expression panca pancanakha bhaksyah "five five-nailed ones are edible."(2)

Consider a few of the contexts in which this expression occurs.(3) Both epics contain episodes in which a character is warned against eating the meat of a non-conforming five-nailed creature: a dog in MBh XII. 139.66, a monkey in R IV. 17.33-35. In the latter passage the monkey Valin, just fatally wounded by Rama, taunts him for killing a five-nailed creature he cannot eat, with exact legalistic phraseology:

R IV. 17.34-35

"Five five-nailed (creatures) can be eaten by brahmins and ksatriyas: hedgehog, porcupine, monitor lizard, hare, and tortoise as fifth."

My skin and bones, o king, the wise do not touch; (my) flesh is inedible. Lo, I am a five-toed [i.e., forbidden] creature slain.

Similar passages are found in the Karma Purana(4) and in Pali, in the Mahasutasomajatika (no. 537), where a king is abjured not to eat human flesh, again with a quotation from the law:

Jat 537(58)

"Five five-nailed ones are to be eaten by a knowledge-able Ksatriya."

O king, you eat what is not to be eaten. Therefore you are adharmic.

Equally interesting is the extent to which this exact expression, panca pancanakha bhaksyah, has penetrated ancient Indian scholasticism - as a meta-example, if you will, to illustrate scholarly means of presentation and interpretation. In the grammatical tradition Patanjali uses the phrase in the introduction to the Mahabhasya (I.1.1 [p. 5 in Kielhorn]) when debating the question whether it is better to give correct grammatical forms for emulation, allowing the incorrect ones to be inferred and avoided - or to forbid incorrect forms, allowing the correct ones to be inferred and employed. The "five five-nailed" provision illustrates the former possibility: with the five pronounced edible, all other five-nailed creatures can be assumed to be forbidden.

MBhas I.1.1

When it is said "Five five-nailed may be eaten," from that one understands that the others may not be eaten.

Similarly in darsana contexts, the "five five-nailed" is a standard Mimamsa example of a parisamkhya-vidhi, an injunction involving an exhaustive enumeration, the force of which is not in the enumeration itself, but in the implication of exclusion, in effect forbidding what is absent from the list, introduced by the phrase "yatha panca pancanakhah. . ."(6)

It is worth pausing for a moment to consider the curious fact that the older, rhinoceros-free versions of the five-nailed provision are found almost exclusively in non-dharma texts, while the updated version with rhinoceros is found across the dharma sutras and sastras but hardly elsewhere.(7) This situation conforms to the linguistic principle that archaisms are preserved on the margin, that is, in those texts that borrow categories from other areas, while innovations occur in the center, in those texts where the categories are principally elaborated - a principle that can be applied to both geographical dialects and to analogic changes in a grammatical system (Kurylowicz's famous Fourth Law of Analogy).(8) The implications of this for the study of the development of the dharmic system in ancient India are fairly important: if we are looking for older legal material, we may do well to look at quotations and employments of dharmic prescriptions exactly in non-dharmic contexts, even when these texts are chronologically younger than the dharma texts proper.(9)

From the wide use in a variety of Sanskrit contexts of just this fixed formula panca pancanakha bhaksyah, I think we must infer not only that the original dharmic provision contained only five animals but also that this was a closed set, not an expandable list that happened to include only five animals to begin with. So the inclusion of a sixth animal in most of the dharma texts (and the resulting necessary deletion of the first panca from the verbal formula) seems to me a puzzle that needs explanation. In fact, we can see the change almost as it happens. An intermediate stage between the closed set and the expanded list is found in a somewhat incoherent compromise in BDS, which ends the provision with the canonical phrase panca pancanakhah - having first enumerated six animals, the last of which, the rhinoceros, is immediately deleted:(10)

BDS 1.5.12.5

Five five-toed animals may be eaten, the porcupine, the monitor lizard, the hare, the hedgehog, the tortoise and the rhinoceros, except the rhinoceros.(11)

As I noted, Luders already saw that the restricted list of five animals was the older situation, but he did not attempt to explain how the list came to be expanded as it did. He merely suggested that the expanded list found in the various dharma texts reflected "local custom" (p. 642). But if this were the case, we might expect different versions of the expanded list according to locality, whereas the rhinoceros is the only item usually added.(12)

Moreover, the rhinoceros is in uneasy company here. For one thing, it is simply out of scale with the rest of the small- to medium-sized animals. For another, rhinoceroses have only three toes.(13) Now one may consider this last fact to be irrelevant. An ancient Indian jurist might be expected to have little opportunity to observe these beasts, and if he should encounter one, he would probably have other things on his mind than examining its feet. However, I have found over the years that ancient Indian natural history can be remarkably accurate, and that if we take it literally, it can often illuminate the texts in which it is embedded.(14) So, I think we need an explanation not only of why one particular animal was inserted into the closed set of the five five-toed, but why that very animal is one that has only...