Embodiment of Dharma in Animals

This chapter explores animal involvement in Hindu ritual and ideology as described in Dharmaśāstra, investigating how and why descriptions and enactments of dharma require and utilize animal bodies. In accounting for animals in Hindu ritual, one observes that animals embody dharma, both literally (materially, in ritual) and figuratively. At times, animals are an extension of one’s own physical body, as property, reasserting the permeability of “animal” and “human” in Hindu ideology. Further, humans may “become animal” during penance or in a karmic rebirth. While bodies are socially constructed and enacted, animals are also the social products of Hindu ritual and thought: for example, the cow. In exploring how humans have constructed their religious world using various animal bodies, we find that these bodies articulate dharma and create and restore religious merit for humans, indicating that animals sometimes mediate human relations with the divine.