Yajna is a Sanskrit word that means “sacrifice”.
The basic religious act in the oldest stratum of Indian religion
was a fire sacrifice.
The Brahmana literature elaborates on this worship of sacrifice
in considerable detail, portraying sacrifice as the mechanism by which the
cosmos came into existence.
The sacrifice required highly skilled priestly technicians
(rtvij), who were in charge of singing portions of the Rg, Sama, and Yajur
Vedas, as well as creating and keeping the holy fire at the center of the
sacrificial activity.
This sacrificial ritual was focused on burning items in a
holy fire, which was thought to be the deity Agni, so that Agni might deliver
the sacrifices to the other gods.
These ceremonies were so intricate and costly that they soon
fell out of favor; by the turn of the common period, there was also a lot of
skepticism regarding the animal sacrifices that were formerly a big element of
many of these rites.
These old ceremonies are no longer practiced, but the term
yajna may now be used to any ceremony involving the holy fire, especially one
conducted by a brahmin for a patron.
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