The Vedic Sacrifice and Social Welfare

By T. G. ARAVAMUTHAN, M.A., B.L.

Hindu social organisation and the principles underlying it are as sorely misunderstood by unreflecting Hindus as by foreigners: the former have now little in common with the ideals which impelled their ancient forbears, and the latter cannot see how a way of life other than their own could be rational or worth living. The idea of social service as a technique of social relations is of recent origin in the West. It is a device for rubbing out the sharp angularities of class distinctions, or for facilitating political infiltration among peoples a great way off. But large numbers of Hindus accept it as among the revelations of a golden age, the light of which they see journeying from the West to the East.

Ancient Hindu society was divided into grades by graded disciplines. A four-fold division of society, the aggregate of house-holders,–three groups, each with certain disciplines cast in a ritual mould (symbolising the embedded idea), and one group, with virtually the same discipline but free from the ritual setting, reflected a four-fold gradation of severity in the discipline. The severest discipline lay on the Brahmana house-holder. He was assigned no means of livelihood except what was given to him voluntarily by those who went to him to learn the way of the higher life; he was enjoined not to lay by ever food grain for longer than the needs of three days and to keep on making offerings in the domestic fire, thrice a day, of substances which exhausted virtually all that he could have had by way of income. The discipline of a lesser degree of severity lay on the Kshatriya, in the gradations of his groups, high or low; he had to take upon himself the burden of protecting society from anti-social elements, both internal and external, and of relieving social distress, receiving a small fee therefor. The higher Kshatriya, baron or chieftain, had now and again to deplete such wealth as was accumulating with him in periodical offerings in fire, the chief offering being the Soma which was so scarce and difficult to procure that it could not be obtained except at preposterously high price. The highest Kshatriya, king or emperor, had to perform the great Asvamedha sacrifice–a sacrifice in fire–once every four years, which drained him of what he could have put by in the intervening years; or he had to conclude the Rajasuya sacrifice (another sacrifice in fire) with divesting himself of every vestige of property. Less severe was the impact of the discipline on the Vaisya, who, with his wealth of land, of cattle and of trade, had, for daily duty, the obligations of unstinted charity, and, for periodical duties, the obligation of performing sacrifices in fire which kept depleting him of accumulations of wealth. These three–the ‘twice-born’–disciplined thus in desirelessness, to the accompaniment of symbolic rituals, were enabled to enter on and persist in the discipline through the exertions of the ‘once-born’–Sudras, who laboured for the production of ‘consumers’ goods’ and in the rendering of personal services,–a course of life which meant that the ‘once-born’ had to sacrifice themselves so that the ‘twice-born’ may immediately take over the fruits of their labours and offer those fruits in sacrifice, virtually in fire and in charity to the destitute. The vendor of Soma was subjected to great contumely for preferring to make a fortune by the sale of the Soma to offering it in sacrifice.

The prime principle of life of the Vedic people, in all their four orders, turns out thus to be ruthless extinguishment of desires, made practicable by a complete sacrifice of all possessions.

The severe discouragement of desires in general, and of acquisition and of retention of property in particular, prevented society stratifying itself into classes marked off by gradations in wealth or into groups divided by varieties in desires. Man did not stand divided from man by barriers to mutual goodwill and love. The better nature of man had full play and man found joy in giving himself to brother man in unstinted labour and love.

The most striking feature of the sacrifice of the ‘twice-born’ is that it was in fire. The objects were offered in fire so that they were completely consumed. The offering in fire is the most efficient mode of making the offering an irrevocable one: what is offered in puja might come back in part at least to the offerer. What is offered in fire does not survive: the flames render the offering irretrievable.

Vedic culture has demanded, thus, of everyone in every station of life, master or serf, that he shall keep himself free from attachments and from desire, leading a life in which he shall have as little of property and possessions as is possible in a world of temptations to wants and desires. Every one had to keep on divesting himself of everything in the nature of property as soon as it threatened to accumulate in his hands. The divestiture would not be final if the things offered could come back to the sacrificer on the conclusion of the ritual as they would, at least in part, on the performance of puja. Nor would it be to the sacrificer’s purpose if he offered the things up to a brother man: he could not saddle that other with property, the mainspring of desire, when he was divesting himself of ethical encumbrances for ethical deliverance. Only an offering in fire which wholly consumes what is thrown into it and leaves nothing behind for being salvaged is a true offering. The sacrifice in fire was, thus, inevitable as a ritual to whoso was prepared, day after day, to live a life of renunciation, readily destroying his possessions so that they could not be temptations either to himself or to his neighbours.

This discipline of life it is that is attested to by the Rg-Veda, the earliest document testifying to the earliest known way of life of the Hindus. The innumerable prayers in it are for long life, offspring, wealth and power. But, the long life is for protracted service to the gods, the progeny is for that service being continued through the endless ages and the wealth and the power are for incitements to efforts to overcome the temptations of possessions. When the sacrificers prayed. “May Dravinodas give us riches that may be heard of”, they did not seek the riches for themselves; they declared. “We ask them for the gods.” The sacrificers

receive the riches and sacrifice them to the gods.

This cult of renunciation, formulated in the earliest days of Vedic culture when possessions were not spectacularly great, became the basis of complex sacrifices when material culture advanced and wealth increased. While only one or two goats formed the offering in the early days, great numbers of cattle of every description came to be offered in fire, in holocausts, with the increase in material possessions. Apparently, the temptations of economic prosperity loosened the grip of the cult of renunciation, and, gradually, disposed the common man to feel exasperated at what appeared to him the wanton destruction of the valuable products of a Nature which, in India, was not only kind but also bountiful. Apparently, too, the paradox of taking life in the spirit of Ahimsa, to which we shall refer presently, was not being understood. Reactions such as these must have been responsible for emphasis being shifted to another technique of renunciation. Sri Krishna, claiming to be the very Vedas, declared that there is little need for the sacrificial ritual and the slaying of animals if man lives a life in which he has no desire for the fruits of his acts. This is renunciation–sacrifice–in the spirit of Ahimsa and there is no taking of life and no destruction of property which suffered to exist, is not permitted to rouse desire with its blandishments.

If the Buddha is to be treated as a protagonist of Ahimsa it will be only in virtue of his opposition to the taking of life in sacrifices, and notwithstanding that he allowed his followers, and himself, the pleasures of the taste of flesh. If the founder of Jainism is to be included among the advocates of Ahimsa, it will be only in virtue of his caveat having extended to the extinguishment of life for any purpose, and notwithstanding that he approved of the surrender of human life by modes of suicide which involved protracted pain and suffering.

It is in the spirit of renunciation of desires that, in later times, the great Harsha of Kanouj kept giving away, periodically, all that he had come by in the intervening periods, making gifts of them all to the deserving, at great convocations called Mokshas, or Maha-Moksha-Parishats. His was the spirit of the performer of the Rajasuya of old, though Buddhism it is that gets the credit for it in the pages of Yuan-Chwang and in the screeds of modern scholars in their ignorance of tradition. Sharp is the contrast between the spirit in which while Sri Krishna, deprecating desire, called on man to lead an active life, and that other in which the Buddha, condemning desire, called for a retreat from active life; but the difference means little to us to whom welfare spells compelling desires and mounting wants.

Thus the principle of Vedic sacrifices is the renunciation of every desire and the offering up of everything that could be desired,–large or small, paltry or precious, perishing or permanent. The abandonment of even the impulse to live was a logical sequence: love of one’s own life is the worst of desires. To the logical necessity so reached, and to the emotional urge in the same direction by which it must have been accompanied, has to be attributed the vogue of Sanyasa,–the formal adoption of a life of renunciation. For a stabilisation in its onerous code, there was not only an abandonment of wife, children and property, and all the desires and attachments from which they spring and to which they give rise, but even a surrender of the will to live, symbolised, even on entering into Sanyasa, by an anticipatory enactment of the ritual following on physical death. The Sanyasi continues to live, not because of a desire to live, but because the clock has not yet ticked off all the seconds of his life time.

The logic of the theory could not be escaped by even the gods who, according to Rg- Vedic thought, are creatures of desires. The gods too have to submit themselves to the rule of renunciation. They too have to sacrifice, they generate sacrifice, they sit contemplating the place of sacrifice. They augment the sacrifice. They have, indeed, to sacrifice with sacrifice. The gods make one or other of themselves the offering and immolate themselves in fire (following the principle of the code of Sanyasa adopted by man for himself). If Purusha, because of the absoluteness of his power, is not to turn into a baleful being, but is to function beneficially, he has to extinguish in himself the very desire to continue and to function: he has to get himself dismembered.

Animals could not, therefore, be exempt from the operation of the logic of the theory of the burnt offering. Animals may not be spared from destruction, if it is needed for renunciation of property and for nullification of desire,–so long as they could be desired and owned. The offering of animals in the sacrificial fire is, therefore, an inevitable corollary to the Vedic sacrificer’s ethical code of offering up irretrievably his possessions of every kind. He took it that the sacrificing of the animals–the inflicting of pain on them in the process of sacrificing–is of considerably less gravity than the retention of property. That sometimes the offerings were of large numbers of animals was due, not to the sacrificer being heartless, but to his cattle-wealth being large.

The taking of animal life was much against the inclinations of the Rg-Vedic sacrificer. The strangling of the animal–there was no slitting of the throat–and the quartering of it were not for the taste of the flesh, only a tiny part of the victim being tasted as symbolical of communion with the deity to whom the offering was made. Neither the patron of the sacrifice nor the priest, coming near the victim when it had been cut and carved, crammed himself with the flesh nor smacked lips with relish of the juiciness of the morsels. The Rg-Vedic animal sacrifice, far from being a product of blood-lust, was a ritual regrettably necessitated by the imperative ethical urge to the denuding oneself irrevocably of all possessions, irrespective of their being animate or inanimate.

Patron and priest were oppressed by the heinousness of taking life. Believing that the tree suffers pain from the axe that cuts it down, they were sensitive to the taking of the ‘life’ of plants. In the ritual of the felling of a tree, for fashioning a sacrificial post from, a blade of grass, placed just where the axe was to fall, was bidden to protect the tree from the pain of the cutting; the axe was commanded not to cause harm to the tree. This could be no hypocritical play-acting over the dismembering of the tree, for the tree and its brethren are no accusers whose reproaches the sacrificer has to ward off. Not, a little uneasy was the sacrificer in mind over the apparent perversity of circumstances which compelled him, for the high purpose of attaining ethical eminence, to descend to the taking of life: that he looks for salves for the wounds of a conscience badly bruised by the rub of duty against duty speaks to the genuineness of his tenderness of spirit.

Parallel to the idea that man’s duty to make his sacrifice, all-inclusive does extend to the offering himself up in sacrifice was the notion that even beasts feel that they are under an obligation to give themselves up in an all-inclusive sacrifice and that, lacking the means of compassing that self-immolation, they are not loth to accept the opportunity given to them to be offered up in fire by the human sacrificer. Cows are said to offer their bodies to the gods.

The horse of the Asvamedba makes journey to the place of immolation with mind intent upon the gods, glad to be able to proceed to the presence of its father and mother in heaven. An address to the horse runs thus: “Let not your precious body (when being quartered) grieve you, for you are going verily (to the gods); let not the axe linger in your body; let not the zealous but unskillful (immolator), missing the members, mangle your limbs needlessly. Verily, in this death you do not die. Nor are you harmed, for by auspicious roads you go to the gods.”

The animal offering had no importance as such. The offerer’s aim was not the killing of life or the looking at the flow of blood, but the denuding himself completely of property that could keep coming back to him. His mind was dominated as much by the principle of Ahimsa as by that of the all-embracing renunciation. That the conflict in his mind resolved itself ultimately in a regretful preference for the inflicting of pain for the achieving of the all-inclusive renunciation, cannot sustain an imputation against him that he was averse to Ahimsa.

Ahimsa has, thus, to be accepted as an important factor in the Indian culture of even so early an age as that of the Rg-Veda. The history of the doctrine, and of the attempt of the Rg-Vedic people and the inheritors of their culture to live by that doctrine, may not be traced here for lack of space. It has a history in which place will be found for Atharvan, the Yadus, Kapila, Ghora Angirasa and Sri Krishna.

Capitalism and Marxism, the ’isms now contending for dominion, are foredoomed to failure as panacea for the ills of human society. Both of them are designed to satisfy, and even pamper, man’s desires, though each desire breeds further desires, each of which, in turn, breeds yet more desires. Few also are the desires of one man that could be satisfied without cutting into the range of another man’s desires. Such being the case, when even the legitimacy of the desires cannot be put into issue, the gravity of the disasters to society following on a sufferance of illegitimate desires need hardly be expatiated on. To neutralise the conflict of the desires of individuals has been the aim of religions. Buddhism, for instance, called for a withdrawal from the world. Christianity prescribed brotherhood and love. Islam emphasised charity. Society has made no progress: it stands rooted in its passions, evils and crimes. Does the real panacea lie in a reversion to the ideals and to the technique favoured in the Rg-Veda and adapted by Sri Krishna?

SELECT REFERENCES:

Rg-Veda: 1.15.8–1.162.15-21; 1.163.12-3–3.6,11: 3.8: 3.53.22–10.169.3.

Yajur-Veda (Taittiriya Samhita): 1.2.7; 1.3.5.

Atharva-Veda: 9.8.13-8; 12.3.31.

Manu: 4.2-8; 10.112.

Yajnavalkya: 1.128-9; 3.44.

Hiuen-Tsiang, Life: Chap.2 (end).

Hiuen-Tsiang, Travels (in S. Beal Budt. Recs. Of Wn. World. 1.214).

Back