The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c11.13

c11.13

Essential to sacrifice is the immolatory act of violence and destruction. Even if the element of death is minimized, it remains a violent attempt at gaining access to the other world. At this point, as already mentioned, sacrifice collided with the Hindu value of *ahiṃsā*. The euphemisms for expressing the act of immolation—such as *saṃjñapana*, "making (the victim) consent"—highlight the utter gravity of the sacrificial enterprise. Rather than establishing and guaranteeing order, sacrifice overthrows order by the violent irruption of the sacred. The place of sacrifice is a battleground where one must risk life and goods in the uncertain hope of winning access to the other world. Thus the gods fought their rivals, the asuras, on the place of sacrifice, and so must man. Kurukṣetra, the epic battlefield of the *Mahābhārata*, is the gods' place of sacrifice. The ritual brāhmaṇa texts abound in references to their violently agonistic procedures. But, significantly, these brief, lemma-like statements are not considered to have a founding authority. Not being by themselves authoritative rules for the execution of the ritual, they are qualified as *arthavāda*, nonauthoritative explanation.¹³ They are the scattered and fossilized remnants of a lost and discredited world.