sparaig <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: --- In
[email protected], TurquoiseB <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> --- In [email protected], "llundrub" <llundrub@> wrote:
> >
> > So I know yagyas are the way of heyam dukam anagatam etc,
> > but what are the mechanics exactly? I mean, do the devas
> > just dig it so much that we do ceremonies that they shower
> > blessings? So they are not altruistic? They will only help
> > those who sacrifice? What are the mechanics? Are they moral?
> > If you only sacrificed exactly so much do you only get
> > exactly so much back? Or is the quality of the priest
> > important? If you have a huge and expensive yagya with a
> > shitty pundit is it not as good as a poor yagya with a great
> > pundit? And so on... Is it not only karma really? The amount
> > of energy put into the aspect of creation through ritual?
In 1988 I was on campus on a course for a month and I absolutely hammered
Bevan on the issue of Yagyas. "If aYagya is not a religious, tit-for-tat,
ritualistic performance, then what, in the history of religions, is?" He
reassured me with the party line that any "deities" invoked thereby were after
all in reality only names (symbols, I suppose, or representations) of "laws of
nature ." But I persisted, and even began quoting the Gita commentary; but
Bevan then just ran away (to Annapurna, I think). Interestingly, these were
the same quotations I had underlined as an M.I.U. student more than ten years
earlier: at that time more than one M.I.U. faculty member responded to my
queries with a "Duh, what's a Yagya?" The best answer I got in '88 was from
Geoffery Wells (who I interruped in his office right when he had his nose deep
inside a paperback Sanskrit dictionary): "But after all," he retaliated, "no
one is proposing we start doing Yagyas."
The sad irony here is that I really believe in the ME: I guess I have always
been looking for answers in a straightforward, pretty simpleminded way.
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