Animal Sacrifices (was Re: [Advaita-l] Web-sites related to advaita)

[S Jayanarayanan]

--- Ramakrishnan Balasubramanian <rama.balasubramanian at gmail.com>
wrote:

[..]

> > Note that the smArtas (in your original posting) *did* finally use
> > vegetarian substitutes in the Vedic YaGYa. If using vegetarian
> > substitutes were altogether prohibited in the context of a Vedic
> > YaGYas, how and why did such a vaidIka YaGYa take place with the
> > sanction of the smArtas at all? Going by your above statements, the
> > smArtas should have unequivocally not participated in such a
> "wrongly
> > performed" Vedic YaGYa in the first place!
> 
> I have no idea why they did anything like that. You'll have to ask
> them. Perhaps, they did not want any controversy. Of course,
> nambuudiris are also technically not smaarthas.

AFAIK, "smArta" only refers to a follower of smR^iti. Is there some
specific reason why the Namboothiris are not followers of the smR^itis?

And according to the namboothiri.com website:
http://www.namboothiri.com/articles/bhattathiris.htm
"Smaartha Bhattathiris: In olden days, certain families specialised in
conducting trials and bringing out the evidences from the mouth of the
culprit, if a Namboothiri (man or woman) committed sins in social life.
They conducted trials only on Namboothiris...The process of trial was
called "Jaathi Saasyam" or "Smaartha Vichaaram", and the expert
conducting it was called Smaarthan or Smaartha Bhattathiri. Here, the
term Bhattathiri is synonymous to "expert Namboothiri"."

-Kartik

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