The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c7.s2.6

c7.s2.6

The ritualists' enterprise was a bold attempt at forcing a way out into outer-worldly freedom and life untainted by death and destruction. They could not revolutionize the hard facts of reality, nor did they try. They tried instead to create a separate world, the ideally ordered world of rationalized sacrifice. Obviously the two spheres are irredeemably contradictory; the important point, however, is that in this way the ideal of freedom and life without death could be stated clearly and held out as a promise to man. Henceforth reality had to be formulated and justified with reference to this ideal.