The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c17.17

c17.17

The motive behind this radical change was the rejection of the ultimately self-defeating conflict and violence that were the essence of the original sacrificial exchanges. To eliminate conflict and violence, the community had to be broken up and the parties separated. This, not ethnic "apartheid," is the reason why the *ārya* and *śūdra* varṇas had to be separated from each other. Originally both had taken part in the agonistic sacrificial festival as opposite parties—a situation preserved in an innocuous form in the Vedic *mahāvrata* ritual, where the two parties are still described as contending with each other for the "goods of life."³⁰ In contrast, the rationalized Vedic ritual excludes the opposite party and sets the sacrificer apart in a transcendent world of his own. The end result is the individual sacrificer performing unaided and unopposed the sacrificial ritual in himself and by himself; in short, he is the ideal brahmin, in this respect, no different from the renouncer.