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THE NEW MEANING OF SACRIFICE

While the Upanishadic thinkers turned to new concepts of religion, they did not abandon the old ritual forms, but transformed what had been actual physical acts into symbolic representations. One of the best examples of this is the elaborate allegorization of the Horse Sacrifice, the greatest of the Vedic rituals. Involving large numbers of priests and great preparations, it exemplified the extreme development of external ritual. Basically, it was the act whereby a king proclaimed his intention to become a "world ruler," or, more prosaically, to extend his territory, and the horse represented such qualities as virility, power, and majesty. To the Upanishadic thinker, the significance of the sacrifice was in the identities he saw between the great sacrificial animal and the cosmos. Through this process of symbolic identification the sage moved towards a statement of the unity of the disparate parts of the universe and also linked his meditations with the sacrificial ritual, whose power and potency had long been accepted as a fundamental feature of existence.

Dawn verily is the head of the sacrificial horse. The sun is his eye; the wind, his breath; the universal sacrificial fire, his open mouth; the year is the body (atman) of the sacrificial horse. The sky is his back; the atmosphere, his belly; the earth, his underbelly; the directions, his flanks; the intermediate directions, his ribs; the seasons, his limbs; the months and half-months, his joints; days and nights, his feet; the stars, his bones; the clouds, his flesh. Sand is the food in his stomach; rivers, his entrails; mountains, his liver and lungs; plants and trees, his hair; the rising sun, his forepart; the setting sun, his hindpart. When he yawns, then it lightnings; when he shakes himself, then it thunders; when he urinates, then it rains. Speech (vac) is actually his neighing (vac).

(from Brihad Aranyaka, I:1:1)