Encapsulated in the evolution of Vedic sacrifice, like a sphere of maximum density, is much of what would later appear elsewhere, diluted over the centuries. The brahmin, who originally sustained the whole weight of impurity, becomes the immaculate specialist in silence, who intervenes only to correct the officiants’ errors. This is the passage that will be presented in the West, amid much philosophical clamor, as a transition from the tribal world of sacrifice to the world of law in the polis. For the Hindus, who were less overweening and less casual in getting rid of the world, it was merely a shift in ritual practices. But this passage created the conditions that led to the development of the figure of the saṃnyāsin, the renouncer who is the first to abandon the ritual scene.

For Dumont, this being who lives at the edge of society, this first “individual-outside-the-world” is the quintessential innovator of Indian thought, indeed “responsible for all the religious innovations that India has known.”³⁴⁴ He is the eccentric figure who will end up destroying every holistic framework from within, and will eventually become the “individual-in-the-world,” and thus the very model of modern Western man. Intricate, ironic routes. But, as Heesterman has shown, the saṃnyāsin certainly is not a figure who abruptly distances himself from the world of sacrifice and opposes it. On the contrary, the saṃnyāsin is the perfect result of the long, subtle, painful evolution of that world.

If the Vedic sacrifice is the most impressive, most coherent, most meticulous attempt to affirm the Whole of the world, the very rigorousness of this undertaking produces an overwhelming anxiety. The Vedic sacrifice proclaims itself in thousands of rules, in thousands of connections, in thousands of mythological details. But the more the texts build up, the more detailed the system of actions becomes, and the greater the sense of powerlessness and exhaustion. The sacrifice, which seeks to structure the world so as to make it habitable, tends to invade every fraction of time the world offers us. The foundation of sacrifice is desire, the desire for a result that is the world itself, but analysis reveals that desire inevitably constrains and suffocates, like the three membranes that threaten the newborn infant, like the excessive fullness of the undifferentiated, from which the sacrifice seeks to release us. In those three membranes cast off in the ceremony, those sacred remains of the sacrifice that contain the germ of the world in a future cycle, the brahmin ends up seeing the world itself. At that moment a further, dizzying possibility emerges: no longer constructing the world, but obtaining release from it. This is the origin of renunciation. Hidden in the forest, the brahmin turned saṃnyāsin will no longer attempt to establish the world, but will seek mokṣa, “release from the world.” The obscure birth of Buddhism emerges then as the last act in the evolution of Vedic sacrifice.

The decisive step is the renouncer’s choice not to eat animal flesh. The majesty of the sacrifice survives just as long as a creature is killed on the altar. If this doesn’t happen, the sacrifice is promptly transformed into moral law. But the peculiarity of the saṃnyāsin is that he renounces something—killing—even though he recognizes it as the foundation of order. His choice bears no trace of the Enlightenment rejection of the malign religio—as in Lucretius—but the decision to remain in an existence before life, which may eventually be transformed into an existence beyond life.