Do All Dogs Go to Heaven?

When I was younger, an animated movie teased the question: Do All Dogs Go to Heaven? It was a sweet story, but hard to rectify with the hard religious truth of my upbringing. If not even all humans go to heaven, those who are the crown of God’s creation, who cares much for the salvation of a filthy dog?

The Mahabharata seems to resemble those sentiments. In one of the more poignant stories, Yudhishthira refuses to take flight to heaven unless he is accompanied by a dog which has latched onto him. Just as it was an insult to be called a dog in Jewish culture (Jesus warns his followers not to give what is holy to dogs), so it appears Indra, king of the Hindu gods, feels much the same way.

In the Mahaprasthanika-parvan, he scolds Yudhishthira: “Give up this dog, a filthy impure creature!” But the protagonist resists, and his stubbornness to honor the dharma comes with reward at the end. The dog vanishes and where it was appears Dharma as a god, who commends Yudhishthira on his great compassion and calls him greatest in the kingdom of heaven. In reading this, I heard Job’s echoing words:

“Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him; I will surely defend my ways to his face.” Job 13:15

Of course, Job proved right. When God rebukes Job, he does so not by appealing to a covenant (Deuteronomic theology - people get what they deserve), but rather to creation, because it is precisely within creation where that wisdom is accessible (the book of Job being a form of Jewish wisdom literature).  God never reveals the meaning of his suffering  (because suffering at the hands of a deity is unjust), but appeals to nature—the very place where Job finds the origin of wisdom.

The dog, however, is not redeemed in any manner. One wonders if it had been taken up, whether it would have been redeemed without any formal doctrinal acceptance of God or creedal confession because such matters are beyond animals. But it reminds us how the gods throughout all religions have taken special care and interest in that which is beneath them. It takes Yudhishthira to remind Indra, just as it took Abram to remind YHWH in Sodom and Gomorrah that some filth is worth saving.

Thomas Aquinas liked to think that animals had souls, and recently the Roman Catholic pope has come out and proclaimed that we will find our beloved pets in heaven. But the compassion towards animals begins most directly in the Vedic Eastern tradition thousands of years ago, the importance of which can even be seen in the Buddha’s life, where in one anecdotal story, he offers himself to a starving lioness and her cubs as food before returning to Tusita.