Chicken

I have provided a translation, with no critical apparatus. Sigla and annotations will follow when text fragments are published.
....
"All living things are movers or non movers.
All movers are either flyers or walkers.
All flyers are feathered.

All feathered movers ought to fly.
(There is no reason to be feathered and not to fly)

You might speak of injured birds. Defective birds.
But these are accidental reasons. By nature however, these birds would have flown if not injured. By virtue of being injured and incapable of flight, they are defective.
(Besides, if you run the argument through that some accidents are inevitable for nature to provide essential natures to things, then you are stating that you wish to ingest a defect. But you hold to the princip that effects mirror the causes--what is the price you would pay for ingesting defects? Ah, of course, you want a better reason not to eat flesh).

Chickens do not fly, but not for accidental reasons. They are inherently non flyers. They hop.

Rabbits hop. But are not feathered.

The argument is: anything that is a bird can fly; the chicken is a bird, but it does not fly.

Perhaps all birds do not fly?

This would be a tedious and inelegant assumption and imply that nature does not work efficiently. Nature is not a potter, trying out one pot after another, squishing some too much in the processs. Accidents have to have a principled ground, and you, my dear friend, have proposed no such principle that gives reason for principled deviations from categorial natures.

...

But you say that a chicken not being a bird, and hence not flying, is not tedious and inelegant? Does not your assumption lead to the thought that nature does not work efficiently, as you have the same proposition: some birds do not fly?

Not at all; my proposition is that the chicken is not a bird.

But it is not a rabbit, no more than the horned-rabbit is a rabbit.

I do not say that the chicken is a rabbit, or any non-feathered animal. A feathered animal is as bad as a feathered non-flying bird.

But then you are refuting yourself. Recall: all movers are either feathered or non-feathered. The chicken is a mover, albeit a hopper, and it is neither bird nor animal, hence neither feathered nor non-feathered. This is ridiculous.

You my friend, suffer from the conceit typical of Buddhists that all movers are animals. Can you not admit of movers that are not animals?

But I do not see how plants, even if we grant you their moving of their own power in search of nutriment, can be considered feathered?

Surely plants can be hairy. And is not more reasonable to suppose, that what we take to be feathers on the chicken are really the same sort of hairy appendages disguised to look like feathers?

Disguised? Surely. For this would allow us to eschew the mad potter hypothesis. Nature has provided for a plant to look like a feathered creature, and so a logical conundrum. It just could not make it fly. Which is to our point--have you ever heard of a flying plant?

And why should it look like a silly bird?

So that you Buddhists won't eat it.

But we do not eat it with fore-knowledge that some animal will be killed for us.

Yes, but you eat it all the same. I am trying to tell you that your justifications for eating it are not required. You can go on to eat it now, and request it.

But are you are Jain? No, no. But I still wouldn't eat something this silly looking.

...

Extracts from a recently discovered Carvaka manuscript on Ethics. Dated roughly to 11th century; it was found in Nepal, preserved by suspiciously well-fed looking monks.