The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c11.38

c11.38

The ritual texts, then, are not concerned with the real world which surrounds them. The historical realities they refer to are those of a hallowed heroic past that the ritual meant to overcome and to replace with its own perfectly ordered world. Our texts therefore will not tell us about the historical conditions of the Axial Age. But they do tell us what, in their perspective, triggered the axial movement, namely the self-destructive violence of the warrior's sacrifice, whose emblem was the chariot. Though it lived on in the imagination of the epic, agonistic sacrifice was deprived of its value and legitimacy by the ritualists' achievement. This enables us to understand why the ritual texts faithfully preserved the fossilized but telling remnants of the heroic world they rejected, while neglecting their own actual surroundings. The conspicuous neglect of the latter therefore need not by itself prove an early date for our texts. The reason for their archaic nature is that the *śrauta* ritual was created out of the dismembered ruins of the warrior's sacrifice and therefore remained tied to its disembodied memory.