One yajña, Many Rituals

Abstract

Sacrifice is a keyword in religious studies. Yajña is a governing concept of Vedic literature. On the basis of the major theories of rituals that flourished between the 18th and the 19th centuries, yajña has been referred to as a perfect example of sacrificial pattern in Vedic tradition. However, while ‘sacrifice’ as a category has been widely discussed among scholars from different fields, the equivalence between ‘sacrifice’ and yajña has been tacitly assumed in the notion of ‘Vedic sacrifice’. Focusing on the rise of Indology as a discipline, this article explores the success of ‘sacrifice’ as a category in the history of scholarship in 18th- and 19th-century Europe. The main argument is that the equivalence between ‘sacrifice’ and yajña has developed at the crossroads between Indology and the socio-anthropological studies, while the Vedic notion of yajña is, indeed, strictly related to the semantic field that has developed around the root yaj-, of which it is proposed to maintain the etymological meaning “to honour, offer, dedicate”. As a result, it is suggested that the translation of yajña as ‘sacrifice’ may be rejected by three types of arguments: linguistic, theoretical, and historical.