________________
270
Lord Mahåvira period has generally been interpreted as being composed in conformity to a similar chronologically linear model. This view would see the earliest texts, the Rigveda, hymns of praise and requests directed towards the gods of the Vedic pantheon, along with associated liturgical material, being followed by the Brahmanas, huge compilations concentrating in the main on the theory of the sacrifice as the main creative force in the universe. These were in turn succeeded by the Aranyakas, the esoteric ‘Forest Books' and the famous Upanishads which attempted through mystical speculation to convey the relation between man's innermost spiritual being and the universe as a whole.
The reality was in fact much more complex than such simple linearity of interpretation would suggest. Pastoralism and settled agriculture, for example, must in actuality have functioned together in tandem for some considerable time, while the Upanishads do not simply represent a more spiritual advance on the Brahmanas but are permeated with the ideology and symbols of the sacrificial ritual. Moreover, the beginning of large-scale urbanisation was in the main located in the east of India, originally regarded by Vedic literature as a marginal and impure region, rather than the western areas which represented the heartland of Vedic culture. Nonetheless, it was both the change attendant upon the shift away from less organised forms of economic life and the influence of Vedic ideology which provided the social and intellectual backdrop against which the two great easterners. Mahâvîra and his contemporary, the Buddha, moved.
The dominant mode of conceptualising the world in north India by the sixth century BCE was the product of the elaborate speculation conducted by members of the learned brahman class into the nature and function of ritual. The Vedic sacrifice, which usually but by no means always involved the killing of animals, was composed of a variety of elements which might be expected to occur in any extended form of ritual activity: priestly specialists, praise of divinities, the making of offerings, requests for divine favours, sacred language, sanctified space in which the rites are conducted and so on. More uniquely, the sacrifice was also regarded as providing the context for consideration of the nature of man's position in the universe. In the Brahmanas, the theorists of the sacrifice present ritual as a means of perpetuating life,
