Early Monastic Buddhism v1.c5.s2.19

v1.c5.s2.19

In the early *Ṛgvedic* days, according to the *Sutta Nipāta*, the objects of offering consisted of rice, ghee, beds and clothes which the *Brāhmaṇas*, who were generally *brahmacārins* engaged in study and meditation, had to collect by begging. Later on, the offering of animals in a sacrifice came into vogue and it was certainly a fine reasoning, as we find it in the account of the *Sutta Nipāta*, that in the days when cows were treated as wealth like gold, they came to be included among the objects of offering, and perhaps it was this idea that prompted the *Brāhmaṇas* of a very early period to introduce the system of offering cows in a sacrifice. With the lapse of time the original idea passed out of people's minds but cows continued to be sacrificed, bringing in its train the system of killing all sorts of beings in a sacrifice. The *Pāli* texts abound in references to such prevalence of animal sacrifices, against which Buddha raised his voice of protest,² but it is a matter of note that Buddha was not alone or the first in suggesting the various objects of offering in a sacrifice in an descending scale from animals to barley³ but that a similar suggestion is also to be found in the *Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa*, one of the late works of the *Brāhmaṇa* period. It runs thus: "At first the gods offered up a man as the victim. When he was offered up, the sacrificial essence went out of him. It entered into a horse; they offered up the horse.” In this way the horse was replaced by the ox, the ox by the goat, and the goat by barley and rice.¹