Hinduism / by Monier Williams.

  • Monier Monier-Williams
Date:
1877
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hinduism / by Monier Williams. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Shalt thou still seize ; this shall remain thy own. He who through knowledge or religious acts Henceforth attains to immortality Shall first present his body, Death, to thee. ’ And again in the Taittiriya-brahmana,—( By means of the sacrifice the gods obtained heaven/ But a still more remarkable conception is that first found in the Purusha-sukta of the Rig-veda, already quoted, which represents the gods as sacrificing Purusha, the primeval Male, supposed to be coeval with the Creator. This idea is even more remarkably developed in the Tandya-brahmanas thus :— ‘ The lord of creatures (\prajd-pati) offered himself a sacrifice for the gods/ And again, in the Satapatha-brahmana, ‘ He who, knowing this, sacrifices with the Purusha-medha, or sacrifice of the primeval male, becomes everything/ Surely, in these mystical allusions to the sacrifice of a representative man, we may perceive traces of the original institution of sacrifice as a divinely-appointed ordinance typical of the one great voluntary sacrifice of the Son of God for the sins of the world.1 Whether they point to the actual sacrifice of human beings as part of the early Indo-Aryan system, admits of question. Doubtless the practice of human sacri- fice was eventually introduced ; and both children 1 Professor Banerjea (p. 204 of his * Arian Witness ’) thinks that it would not be easy to account for the genesis of such an idea, except on the assumption of some primitive tradition of the * Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.’
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