The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c11.14

c11.14

This world was the world of the heroic age that the Indian epic, like Hesiod, places in the breach that divides our present world age from its predecessor—a mythic reminiscence, as it were, of an authentic axial crisis. Its warriors were constrained again and again to risk their all in the agonizing sacrificial contest. On one hand, the invitation to sacrifice is a challenge that the warrior cannot afford to refuse on pain of losing his honor.¹⁴ On the other hand, not being invited is a grave insult that may compel one to force his way in and challenge the host of the sacrificial festival.¹⁵ Better still than in the flat and dry allusions of the brāhmaṇa tests, the tragic predicament of the warrior ethos comes out in the epic, for example, when Yuddhiṣṭhira, who wants to renounce the insensate violence, is reminded that he is bound to stake again “the material sacrifice” (*dravyamayo yajñaḥ*) he has won in renewed sacrificial battle. For this, he is told, is the ever-lasting way of existence, the great “ten-chariot road” (*dāśarathaḥ panthā*).¹⁶