Killing ritually and beyond

The problem of killing in general and Vedic ritual killing in particular has been highly debated in ancient India. The main stakeholders in this debate are the Sāṃkhya-Yoga philosophers on one hand, who hold that the virtue following from Vedic ritual killing is adulterated by some amount of demerit; on the other hand, it is the Mīmāṃsā philosophers, who while generally agreeing about the genesis of malefic result from such Vedic bewitchment rituals as the Śyena sacrifice and trying to justify Vedic ritual killings like the Agnīṣomīya animal sacrifice, differ significantly with regard to the method of such justification. In this paper, an attempt has been made to show the changing face of such defence of Vedic ritual-killing as attempted by Kumārilabhaṭṭa and also by the Prābhākara sub-school of Mīmāṃsā as reported in Bhaṭṭa Jayanta’s Nyāyamañjarī. I will also refer to the points made in this regard by the Advaita Vedānta philosopher, Appayya Dīkṣita, in his Parimala commentary, the Viśiṣṭādvaita philosopher, Rāmānuja, in his Śrībhāṣya and Gītābhāṣya and also the grammarian-philosopher, Kauṇḍabhaṭṭa, in his Bṛhadvaiyākaraṇabhūṣaṇa and try to show how the staunch rational defence of Vedic ritual killing originally attempted by the Mīmāṃsā philosophers has slowly been made secondary to, if not totally replaced by, an external defence based almost exclusively on citation of Vedic, Smṛti and Purāṇa texts. Although Houben (1999) has noted some of the defence patterns described in this paper, and quite rightly concluded that the Brahminical defence became more and more ‘traditionalized’ than ‘rationalized’, and also how even within the traditionalization approach there are many sub-varieties, yet he does not analyse how these are related to each other and also their relative advantages and disadvantages in the manner in which this paper does. More specifically it does not deal with the views of Appayyadīkṣita and Kauṇḍabhaṭṭa at length, but mentions them in passing. Further, Houben does not discuss Appayya’s view in relation to the two Mīmāṃsā critiques of Kumārila and Jayanta’s Prābhākara and Kauṇḍabhaṭṭa’s view in relation to Rāmānuja’s. It will also be shown by a brief reference to a specific historical lecture delivered in 1935 by Gurupada Hāldāra, a famous scholar of Sanskrit philosophy and one of the greatest votaries of Tāntrika religious practices of Bengal, how such defences provided the common meeting point of Vaiṣṇavism and Tāntrism and attempts at gaining socio-religious acceptability in the undivided Bengal of the third decade of twentieth century at least at the ideological level.