Sacrifice as action and actions as sacrifices: the role of breath in the internalisation of sacrificial action in the Vedic Brahmanas

Over the last hundred years different attempts have been made to explain why sacrifices have had such a prominent place within many religious traditions. Such theories of sacrifice are sometimes part of a more general theory of (religious) rituals, or a theory of religion in general. In most cases, actual sacrifices are thus explained through recourse to their position within a more general category. The opposite is, however, sometimes the case, i.e. a theory of one sacrificial tradition is extended to cover all sacrifices, or even ritual in general. The aim of the following discussion is to delineate some central issues that are important for the analysis of the references to breath in the Vedic correspondences. First of all, a working definition of ritual correspondence will be given and then a short discussion of the nature of the correspondences will follow. Thereafter, a general presentation of the different notions of breath and three different sorts of ritual internalisation will be made. The last section of the paper will concentrate on the relation between the breaths and the self (ātman), as this is expressed in a few tex-tual passages. These discussions will provide a basis for a more comprehensive study of the role of the breaths in the internalisation of sacrifice in Vedic ritual theology.