The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c9.20

c9.20

Though the brāhmaṇa texts consider the blame to refer to faults in the execution of the liturgy and ritual procedure, the reviler's utterances refer to acts of violence.²⁵ Violence is not a peculiarity of the mahāvrata. In fact, sacrifice generally turns on the act of violence, on death, by which its opposite, life, is to be won. Since the classical ritual was based on the breakup of the antithesis (the essential antithesis being life-death), it had to stress life and eliminate death (or at least eliminate it from the place of sacrifice). Actual, violent death was replaced, as I have argued elsewhere, by the nonviolent ritual error, to be avoided or expiated in a "technical" way.²⁶ What is of interest to us is that the antithesis of life and death, albeit under the guise of ritual correctness and error, is not only verbalized, but acted out by the two parties, as in the case of the brahmodya.