Sanatana Dharma : Animal Sacrifice in the name of God. Animal sacrifice is the ritual killing and offering of an animal to appease or maintain favour with a divine agency. Such forms of sacrifice are practised within many religions around the world and have appeared historically in almost all cultures, including those of the Sumerians, Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, Germanics, Celts, Aztecs, and Mayans. All or only part of a sacrificial animal may be offered, especially in the context of ritual slaughter. Remnants of ancient animal sacrifice can also be found in various contemporary practices, the kapparos and shechita of Judaism and ḏabīḥah of Islam.... Agni, who maintains the order of the universe and the inner faculties of the human body, makes the ox (pingala nadi, the human masculine-aggressive current) and the cow (ida nadi, the feminine passive-emotional current) his tools and bears the soma-delight (attainable in the sahasrara chakra) on his back (to distribute it to the seekers). As a whole, it maintains, the hymn is speaking to the aspirant about deeply mystical practices. No doubt the literal translation starts Agni whose food is the ox and the barren cow... but this is not correct according to the context of the hymn. The Agamas do not prescribe animal sacrifice. How is it that one set of revelations (Agamas) do not speak of animal sacrifice, while another set of revelations (Vedas) from the same Lord could? The Rig Veda itself states that the Veda mantras should be understood against the background of the Agamas. The two sets of scriptures complement each other. We are not saying that sacrifices were not conducted externally. The grains, vegetables, plants, sweets and other such items the Vedas enjoin us to sacrifice should be considered representative of the animals. It was never the actual animals that were intended to be sacrificed. It was in this way that the Vedic yajnas were conducted in the earlier periods, before the Brahmanas and Aranyakas were written. Certain Vedic pandits took the literal meaning and wrote treatises prescribing the sacrifice of actual animals. Unfortunately, their writings were widely read, and genuine yajnas came to be considered a lesser form of worship. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad established that the Vedic sacrifices are intended to be spiritual, that they do not involve the killing of animals. In fact, many Upanishads were the result of sages efforts to expose the spiritual side of the Vedic yajnas, to be performed internally.
Posted on: Fri, 25 Apr 2014 18:33:41 +0000
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