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“For the ṛṣis of the Veda nothing seems certain: neither human life, nor the sunrise, nor the falling of the waters.³³⁵ This is why most of the hymns of the Ṛg Veda follow one single pattern: the god invoked is reminded of the charitable undertaking that he once performed in favor of some other cosmic or sacrificial figure and, during the last two verses, he is implored to perform that same undertaking once again at dawn that day, since protection is generally being sought from the anxiety that goes with the absence of the prop during the night.”

J. C. Heesterman

“To the Vedic thinker the whole universe was constantly moving between the two poles—of birth and death, integration and disintegration, ascension and descent—which by their interaction occasion the cyclical rhythm of the cosmos.³³⁶ In this world of floating forms there are no hard and fast lines; conceptually different entities and notions interchange with bewildering ease. All things, entities, notions, powers are connected with each other. Nevertheless, this world is not the chaos it seems to be at first sight. The point at issue for the Vedic thinker is not to disentangle and differentiate conceptually different entities and notions but to realize, to know, their connections (bandhu). In the course of this process the connections converged more and more and in the end, as is shown in the upaniṣad texts, the intrinsic coherence of the universe was formulated in the ultimate connection tat tvam asi [this you are]. In principle this identification of man with the cosmos is present in ritualistic thought. The place of sacrifice is by virtue of the code of connections identical with the cosmos: the three fires are the three divisions of space, the course of the sacrifice represents the year. On the place of the sacrifice the cosmic drama of death and rebirth, integration and disintegration, ascension and descent, is acted out and, reversely, through the same code of connections brought to bear on the macrocosm. In the center of this sacrificial world stands the sacrificer for whose benefit the cosmic processes are set in motion by the ritualists, who know the connections. Thus the whole world is centered upon the sacrificer, who ‘becomes all this’ and represents in his person the cosmic drama.”

Louis Dumont, in a memorable essay of 1959, recognized the saṃnyāsin, the Indian “renouncer,” as being the first example of the individual, in a sense that, after many experiences, has reached the present-day West. But, perhaps out of an excessive respect for Weber’s theory of ideal types, Dumont’s essay strongly emphasized the contrast between saṃnyāsin and brahmin, content even to see that contrast endorsed by what are today classic images of them: on the one hand “the emaciated figure of the saṃnyāsin, with his bowl, his stick and his orange robe”; on the other “the brahmin, whom we might characterize as he is seen on the northern gateway of the Great Stupa of Sanchi (Vessantara Jātaka), a figure with a protruding belly who displays an inimitable blend of arrogance and greed.”³³⁷ What clearer, more radical contrast could there be? But how much is that image of the brahmin due to the malevolent priests of Cecil B. De Mille, and to the urging of the kaliyuga? If we go back to the evolution of the Vedic sacrifice, everything in that tangle is once again called into question; the transition and the contrast no longer seem so sharp. In the end, the saṃnyāsin might appear to us as the extreme outcome of the Vedic sacrifice, imbued with all its lymph, harbinger of events unprecedented—first of these Buddhism—but which can only be understood by entering and losing oneself once again “in the forests and ravines of the sacrifice.”³³⁸