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The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c6.s4: 10

The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c6.s4

Language
English

10

c6.s4.1

The development of brahminical theory, set off by the individualization of the ritual, did not stop at the point where the host-guest, protagonist-antagonist complementarity was fused into the single unit of yajamāna and officiants. It had to advance to its logical conclusion, that is, the interiorization of the ritual, which makes the officiants' services superfluous.⁷² In fact, the classical doctrine of ritual has already concentrated the ritual in the person of the single yajamāna. His prototype is the cosmic man, Prajāpati, who is at the same time the primordial sacrificer, victim, and officiant. Thus the classical doctrine implies—as we have already seen—that the yajamāna, through the knowledge of the equivalences, becomes the integral cosmos, realizing in himself, and thereby mastering, the cosmic alternation of life and death.

c6.s4.2

The interiorization of the ritual is made fully explicit in *Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka-Upaniṣad* 1. 4. 17 in the description of the completeness of the self (*ātman*), which is at the same time the completeness, the self-sufficiency, of the one who "knows thus": "(Thus is) his completeness (*kṛtsnatā*): mind (*manas*) is his self; voice his wife; breath (*prāṇa*) his offspring; the eye his human property because through the eye he becomes aware of it; the ear his divine (property) because he hears it with the ear; the self is his act, because he acts with the self. This is the fivefold sacrifice; fivefold is the victim, fivefold is man, fivefold is all this. All this he obtains, who knows thus." Thus one who "knows" the equivalences based on the number five resumes in himself the universe and performs in himself and by himself the sacrifice without any outside intervention.

c6.s4.3

It would seem to me that here we touch the principle of world renunciation, the emergence of which has been of crucial importance in the development of Indian religious thinking.⁷³ The renouncer can turn his back on the world because he is emancipated from the relations which govern it. He is a world unto himself, or rather, he has resumed the oppositions of the world in himself; there is no duality for him anymore.⁷⁴ "He sees himself (or, the self) in all creatures and all creatures in himself (or, in the self)."⁷⁵ He has resumed the sacrificial fires in himself,⁷⁶ and so he is able to perform the ritual in himself and by himself. Thus it is said of the renouncer: "After the *ādhāna*, the solemn installation of the (interior) fires, the five (sacrificial) fires are contained in the sacrificer: his prāṇa is the gārhapatya fire, his apāna the southern fire, his vyāna the āhavanīya, his udāna and samāna the sabhya and āvasathya fires; he offers only in the self." Our text calls this the *ātmayajña*,⁷⁷ the sacrifice in the self, an internal, mental sacrifice (*mānasa yajña*), which according to *Manu* 2. 85 is a thousand times more efficacious than the normal ritual.

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