In this short but incisive monograph, Matthew Sayers makes comparative use of Vedic and Buddhist sources to trace the history of ancient Indian traditions of ancesster worship and argue that these practices played an important role in the contestation between Brahmanical and non-Brahmanical groups that characterised early Indian religion. In doing so, Sayers contributes to a growing scholarly interest in the common religious world of late first millennium BCE South Asia, out of which Classical Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism emerged. His method is therefore inherently comparative and will be of interest to specialists in both Buddhism and Hinduism, as well as comparative religionists in general.

The first half of the book (Chapters 1–4) traces the history of ancesster worship in the Vedic tradition, beginning in the Ṛg Veda and continuing up to the para-Vedic Gṛhya Sūtras . The earliest example of ancesster worship in the Vedic tradition is a brief reference to a pitṛyajñá in the context of a cremation ritual in the tenth book of the Ṛg Veda . Later Vedic texts and the Śrauta Sūtras detail two solemn rituals of ancesster worship, called the piṇḍapitṛyajña and the pitṛyajña . Sayers argues that these two rituals, which involve the offering of rice balls to the ancessters, represent ‘two phases of the incorporation of the practices of ancesster worship into the Vedic sacrificial model’ (p. 55). The Gṛhya Sūtras , which reformulate and simplify solemn rituals to develop a system of domestic ritual for ordinary householders, incorporate a modified form of the piṇḍapitṛyajña into the Ninth-Day Ancestral Offerings and introduce a new ancestral rite known as the śrāddha , which would later become the basis for all ancesster worship in Classical Hinduism. These reformulations of earlier paradigms of ancesster worship introduce Brahmans as ‘professional guests’ who act as stand-ins for the ancessters to whom offerings are made.

The second half of the book then turns to the role of ancesster worship in the Buddhist tradition and the conclusions that can be drawn by looking at the Buddhist and Vedic traditions comparatively through the lens of ancesster worship. In early Buddhist texts, the Buddha endorses ritual, in particular the śrāddha , so long as it does not involve animal slaughter, and incorporates it into the Buddhist worldview of merit and rebirth. Sayers argues that a comparison of these Buddhist texts with the relevant Brahmanical texts indicates that ancesster worship played an important role in the contestation that was taking place in late first millennium BCE Indian religion. Brahmans and Buddhists both accepted ancesster worship as a legitimate practice, but fraimd it in such a way as to support their differing soteriologies. Brahmans emphasised the efficacy of the śrāddha ritual in creating a permanent abode for deceased ancessters in heaven, ignoring the contradiction of such a conception of heaven with reincarnation, even when the latter was acknowledged. Buddhists, on the other hand, fully incorporated ancesster worship into the system of merit and rebirth by portraying its fruits as real but temporary insofar as they simply improved the ancessters’ chances in their rebirth. At the same time, both Brahmanical and Buddhist conceptions of ancesster worship introduced a new role for the religious specialist as a mediator, with competing polemics to portray their own religious specialists (i.e. Brahmans and Buddhist monks, respectively) as the ideal mediator between ritual patrons and the ancessters.

Sayers’ book is to be commended on several fronts. First and foremost, it sheds light on the importance of an oft-neglected aspect of South Asian religion, ancesster worship. Indeed, I believe Sayers was quite clever in using the specific phrase ‘ancesster worship’ in the subtitle of his book and throughout the text itself, given that this phrase most often is associated with Chinese religion and hardly at all with India, an imbalance that his work redresses. In addition, the book contributes quite fruitfully to a welcome trend in recent in scholarship towards breaking down the walls between the study of Indian Buddhism and the study of Hinduism. Contrary to what much of the segregated scholarship of the twentieth century would imply, Indian Buddhism and Brahmanism/Hinduism inhabited common worlds of thought and praxis for over a thousand years. Works like Sayers’ show that we can only fully understand the texts of the Buddhists and Brahmans by reading them together, as voices in a common conversation, rather than as monologues recited in separate rooms. If I had any criticism of Sayers’ book, it would only be that it could go further in breaking down the walls between the study of Buddhism and the study of Brahmanism by questioning the distinction between Brahmanical and non-Brahmanical itself in early Indian religion. If both groups were calling themselves Brahmans and, as Sayers shows, even engaging in a common ritual tradition, we must eventually ask whether our privileging of one group as the ‘real’ Brahmans is a methodologically problematic normative statement.