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ship, who would not chant the vedic mantras and who were opposed to the Brahmavadins. The description is quite clear and it implies that the yatis were a group of ascetics quite opposed to sacrificial ritualism for which they were evidently punished and persecuted by the more dominant branch of the ritualistic Aryans The school of the yatis must have been at a certain period more influential and consequently more popular a fact indicated by the Brahmana literature, which speaks of the giving up of Indra worship and the Soma sacrifice for several years. It is very significant to note that the 1eason given for giving up the Indra worship and Soma sacrifice is the series of murders committed by Indra beginning with the slaughter of Vrithra ending with that of the yatis. Does it not suggest that at a certain period of the later Samhitas and at the early Brahmana period the antisacrificial school was more popular than the other which led to the discarding of Indra worship and of the consequent sacrificial ritualism? The same note of opposition is associated with the institution of the Vratyas The Vratyas are sometimes extoled for their virtues and very often condemned for their antisacrificial unconventionalism In an important book of the Atharvana Veda the traditional deities of the Vedic pantheon are made subordinate to him and they go about as his attendants. He is the greatest and the highest among the Gods and yet he is described as a wandering mendicant, an ascetic who has to occasionally visit a householder for his food, a description quite in keeping with later Jaina and Buddhistic accounts. A Jaina yati or Buddhistic bhikshu of a later period had to live mainly in the outskirts of his city and had to go in the streets of the city only during the time of meals and that too occasionally. The description of Vratya is almost identical with a wandering ascetic. He is one who has given up the traditional rituals of a Brahmin, the samskaras of a brahmacharin. In spite of this fact they are not considered as complete alien racially because the orthodox fold devised ceremonies as a sort of prayaschitta after the performance of which the Vratya could be taken back into the Brahmanical fold. This fact completely rejects the hypothesis suggested by some scholars that the Vratyas were some sort of abori
INTRODUCTION
| SR No. | 011119 |
| Book Title | Samayasara OR Nature of Self |
| Original Sutra Author | N/A |
| Author | A Chakravarti |
| Publisher | Bharatiya Gyanpith |
| Publication Year | 1950 |
| Total Pages | 406 |
| Language | English |
| Classification | Book_English |
| File Size | 38 MB |