From: kanga.caltech.edu!vidya (Vidyasankar Sundaresan)
Subject: Re: Hinduism and animal sacrifices
Originator: vidya@kanga
Organization: California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
Date: Wed, 2 Sep 1992 23:53:28 GMT

When will guys stop quibbling and look at Hinduism as it developed? True,  
the Vedas have hymns and passsages relating to animal sacrifice, but  
remember that (as someone pointed out earlier) the Vedas are very early  
literature and for all the lip service paid to its divine authorship, are  
not really followed to the letter. Does anyone on the net know that when  
Dr Frits Staal arranged to have an agnichayana yagna performed by the  
nambbodiris of Kerala, it was hailed as the first performance of that  
VEDIC ritual in many centuries? 

A second point to realise is that temples especially in South India are  
governed in their ritual more by the Agamas than by the Vedas. The famous  
temples devoted to the Goddesses (e.g. Madurai) all have sacrificial  
altars, called bali-pitha, where animal sacrifice is/was offered. However  
it is important to remember that the bali-pitha is an agamic requirement,  
not vedic. The priests of temples who follow their respective agamas  
(Sakta or Saiva or Vaishnava) do not accept that the Vedas are superior to  
the agamas, and they would feel insulted if anyone were to suggest to them  
that the temple rituals they perform are Vedic in nature.

Vedic religion, which is distinct in certain respects from temple religion  
has undergone major modifications in the course of history. Those who find  
great pleasure in quoting the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita to prove their  
point (which is not contested at all, by the way) will do well to realise  
that at least since the time of Adi Sankaracharya, and probably  
increasingly since the time of the Buddha, animal sacrifices have been  
discontinued in Vedic rituals. The offerings of rice, ghee, coconuts etc.,  
that you see in today's homas are supposed to be representative of all  
sacrificial objects. Surely we need to be more interested in what we as  
Hindus are doing today, and for the last one or two millenia, rather than  
what our pious ancestors did three or four millenia ago! 

For those interested in knowing the importance of Agamic ritual in  
temples, I would recommend a reading of the book "Servants of the  
Goddess", by C. J. Fuller of the London School of Economics. The book is a  
social anthropological survey of the priests of the Madurai Minakshi  
Temple. Those who are still skeptical of the role of the Vedas in temple  
ritual, can do no better than to mull over the following story. 

Sometime in the 1930's or 1940's, when the then Sankaracharya of Sringeri,  
Chandrasekhara Bharati visited Ramnad, he was anxious that the temples of  
the region should follow more Vedic procedures in their worship than the  
Agamic ones, and consequently modified them so that animal sacrifice was  
discontinued in that region. I'm prepared to give original references to  
back this. This tradition of a Sankaracharya modifying temple procedure is  
not recent. Again it goes back to the time of Adi Sankara. 

So again, if you come off your high pedestals of quoting and consider the  
history of Hinduism, you will find answers to every question you have been  
raising.

S.Vidyasankar
vidya@cco.caltech.edu