From Outer to Inner Sacrifice

After reading about Brahminic sacrifice in Kutadanta Sutta, I have become quite intrigued by the idea of sacrifice, and how it has shifted away from external forms into something that is internal. The meaning of sacrifice can change as a result, because it no longer involves using a display of violence to achieve a certain state of things. But does this entail that there is an inner violence instead? When we talk about sacrifice, do we always necessarily entail something that is violent?
   Violence always entails some struggle for survival, and I tend to believe that the Buddhist path does not really embrace or entail violent struggle in the same way that perhaps other religions do. For instance, in some religions such as Christianity, there is the notion of 'fighting the good fight' for God, and this usually entails a kind of dualistic struggle between good and evil, often co-existing within the same person. I notice that in texts such as the Upanishads in Hinduism, there is this same attempt to symbolize or allegorize the internal struggles of the heart with an external battlefield that one must fight in order to conquer unsavory elements within the self. Most Chan Buddhist teachings (and Zen, for that matter) don't seem to have this emphasis on fight or struggle, since the perspective of Chan is not to valorize one side of things and demonize another. As exciting as the movies and books happen to be about inner struggles and conquests, I think a Chan Buddhist might remind a person not to get too excited or attached to the feeling of struggle or 'conquest', since these will easily slide into cravings. In fact, with the prevalence of many violent movies in theatres, I am tempted to think that people might even be addicted to the feelings that come with struggling with adversity and conquering it.
   The ultimate struggle in life is the struggle to feel that one exists--and the ultimate way to feel one exists is to create a kind of opponent and then try to conquer that opponent in some way. Buddhism does away with the craving by suggesting that it is an aggregate, not an actual self feeling. In this way, one doesn't repress experiences but is able to observe and co-exist with the threatening feeling of non-existence, without shunning it or trying to fill it with something else.