Vedic Index of Names and Subjects v2.c4.s7.274

v2.c4.s7.274

The passage is a late one, and the high place of the Kṣatriya is to some extent accounted for by this fact. It is clear that in the course of time the Vaiśya fell more and more in position with the hardening of the divisions of caste. Weber⁷⁵ shows reason for believing that the Vājapeya sacrifice, a festival of which a chariot race forms an integral part,⁷⁶ was, as the Śāṅkhāyana Śrauta Sūtra⁷⁷ says, once a sacrifice for a Vaiśya, as well as for a priest or king. But the king, too, had to suffer diminution of his influence at the hands of the priest: the Taittirīya texts⁷⁸ show that the Vājapeya was originally a lesser sacrifice which, in the case of a king, was followed by the Rājasūya, or consecration of him as an overlord of lesser kings, and in that of the Brahmin by the Bṛhaspatisava, a festival celebrated on his appointment as a royal Purohita. But the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa⁷⁹ exalts the Vājapeya, in which a priest could be the sacrificer, over the Rājasūya, from which he was excluded, and identifies it with the Bṛhaspatisava, a clear piece of juggling in the interests of the priestly pretensions. But we must not overestimate the value of such passages, or the exaltation of the Purohita in the later books of the Śatapatha and Aitareya Brāhmaṇas as evidence of a real growth in the priestly power: these books represent the views of the priests of what their own powers should be, and to some extent were in the Madhyadeśa. Another side of the picture is presented in the Pāli literature,⁸⁰ which, belonging to a later period than the Vedic, undoubtedly underestimates the position of the priests; while the Epic,⁸¹ more nearly contemporaneous with the later Vedic period, displays, despite all priestly redaction, the temporal superiority of the nobility in clear light.