Sacrifice / Offering (Yajña)

Yajña is sacrifice — the central act of Vedic religion, in which offerings are made (classically into a consecrated fire) to sustain the order of the world and bind together the human, ancestral, and divine realms. It is the very arena of Mīmāṃsā, the school devoted to the science of ritual. Over time the idea was profoundly interiorized: the Upaniṣads and the Gītā reinterpret sacrifice as the offering of the breath, the senses, knowledge, or one's very action — so that a life rightly lived becomes itself a continual sacrifice.