Buddhism says to give up attachments of all kinds. A multitude of other religions have a piece of this elephant: give up something you value, often by killing it. It could be cattle, or birds, or other people, willing or not. All of this is a gross perversion of the original idea of dispatching the delusion of self, and with it personal suffering. We have, naturally, no evidence of prehistoric teachings by those who understood attachment in any way, nor of their decline and perversion into ritual murder to appease Gods or bring good luck, or to have servants in the afterlife. Nevertheless I claim that we have sufficient evidence to infer it.
I will not review this whole sorry history. But I will go into some of the more instructive examples about attachment, and just mention the Thuggees, devotees of Kali who murdered/sacrificed solitary travelers in India until suppressed by the British. We get the English word “thug” from them.
