Chapter 18
People came to Videha from far and wide to seek Yajnyawalkya's advice on problems of ethics, on their personal dilemmas, but mostly on the questions of the relevance and the efficacy of the ritual of sacrifice. He answered them. Born and brought up as he was in the tradition of pedantry, he answered them by rote.
It did not take him long to realize that he was thus posing a threat to the power of Ashwala, the royal priest and officiator of the ritual of sacrifice for Janaka.
Yajnyawalkya had almost assumed the image of the High Priest of the ritual of sacrifice as mentioned and prescribed in the Vedas. But there was also a heretic in him whose presence, though unnoticed by the masses, did not escape the attention of the learned. He had caused a rupture in the placid, complacent priestly empire with his erratic utterances which were conveniently interpreted as irresponsible outbursts of a half-baked intellect. Yajnyawalkya's words drove them to a fury. It was difficult to judge whether their irascibility was genuine or whether it served to conceal the vacuity of their own minds. They made sly, fugitive attacks but evaded the responsibility of confrontation.
Yajnyawalkya sometimes felt stupefied by the immensity of the fraud perpetrated by the sanction of tradition and patronage by kings. Unwillingly, he found himself participating in it.
Throngs of people waited to consult him on the right kind of sacrifice and the procedure stipulated for it in the scriptures. Sacrificial rituals were there to fulfill all their desires if the sacrifice was initiated by the right priest in the right way. That was what they were given to believe.
The rich came because they wanted to perpetuate their wealth. They took their wealth for granted because the scriptures told them it was their reward for the merit accumulated by them in their past incarnations. The poor came, guilty and ashamed of their poverty. It was a blind procession in the direction of something that Yajnyawalkya feared to see.
He could see Time imperceptibly moving behind them all.
People came to Videha from far and wide to seek Yajnyawalkya's advice on problems of ethics, on their personal dilemmas, but mostly on the questions of the relevance and the efficacy of the ritual of sacrifice. He answered them. Born and brought up as he was in the tradition of pedantry, he answered them by rote.
It did not take him long to realize that he was thus posing a threat to the power of Ashwala, the royal priest and officiator of the ritual of sacrifice for Janaka.
Yajnyawalkya had almost assumed the image of the High Priest of the ritual of sacrifice as mentioned and prescribed in the Vedas. But there was also a heretic in him whose presence, though unnoticed by the masses, did not escape the attention of the learned. He had caused a rupture in the placid, complacent priestly empire with his erratic utterances which were conveniently interpreted as irresponsible outbursts of a half-baked intellect. Yajnyawalkya's words drove them to a fury. It was difficult to judge whether their irascibility was genuine or whether it served to conceal the vacuity of their own minds. They made sly, fugitive attacks but evaded the responsibility of confrontation.
Yajnyawalkya sometimes felt stupefied by the immensity of the fraud perpetrated by the sanction of tradition and patronage by kings. Unwillingly, he found himself participating in it.
Throngs of people waited to consult him on the right kind of sacrifice and the procedure stipulated for it in the scriptures. Sacrificial rituals were there to fulfill all their desires if the sacrifice was initiated by the right priest in the right way. That was what they were given to believe.
The rich came because they wanted to perpetuate their wealth. They took their wealth for granted because the scriptures told them it was their reward for the merit accumulated by them in their past incarnations. The poor came, guilty and ashamed of their poverty. It was a blind procession in the direction of something that Yajnyawalkya feared to see.
He could see Time imperceptibly moving behind them all.
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