The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c11.26

c11.26

The result is two separate and fundamentally incompatible worlds: on the one hand, the break-away transcendence of rationally systematized but meaningless ritualism; on the other hand, an unreformed social world of conflict and ambivalence. Here, in the social world, all things are interconnected. It is a world that does not lack in numinous and magical meaning, but it knows itself to be cut off from ultimate value and legitimation and its arrangements to be contingent and reversible.