The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c11.1

c11.1

It may seem at best idiosyncratic to connect ritualism with so dramatic a concept as Karl Jaspers's Axial Age. When ritualism, moreover, is hallowed by the antiquity and authority of the Veda, it would seem to be the very antithesis of anything revolutionary. Ritual is generally supposed to have gone on for ages past, and in the case of Vedic ritual, it goes on unchanged even in our time. Though subject to internal development, it has shown itself strangely impervious to the changes in its physical, social, intellectual, and religious surroundings, all of which would, moreover, seem to militate against its very survival. To make the case against Vedic ritual even worse, it is credited with the power to bring about all that one desires—health, progeny, wealth. It is, in other words, thoroughly magical and clearly at odds with all that the Axial Age stands for.