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Updated: May 25, 2025
It did not enter into their heads to conceive or to desire the addition of a vast Indian empire to the appanages of the English crown. They cared little for the conflicting creeds of India, for Brahmanism and Buddhism and Jainism and Hinduism and the sects of Islam.
Nor if our rule and our civilization are to prevail must we be unmindful of our own responsibility or forget that our presence and the influences we brought with us first stirred the waters. The part played by Brahmanism in Indian unrest is far more conspicuous in some parts of India than in others, and for reasons which are generally not far to seek.
A Brahman who has thus mortified his body by these modes is exalted into the divine essence. This was the early creed of the Brahman before corruption set in. And in these things we see a striking resemblance to the doctrines of Buddha. Had there been no corruption of Brahmanism, there would have been no Buddhism; for the principles of Buddhism, were those of early Brahmanism.
Now, some men take the prerogative in the manufacture of religion, and there evolve Brahmanism, Jainism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, and Zoroastrianism, all inspired, all supernatural, and with their myriads of followers who believed and still believe that theirs is the only true creed.
In non-essentials Brahmanism soon found it expedient to relax the rigour of caste obligations, as for instance to meet the hard case of young Hindus who could not travel across the "black water" to Europe for their studies without breaking caste, or indeed travel even in their own country in railways and river steamers without incurring the pollution of bodily contact with the "untouchable" castes.
Its lessons have never tended to the essential selfishness of asceticism, which is so prominent a feature in Brahmanism and Buddhism, and from which Christianity and Islamism have not been exempt. Its injunction has never been, "Leave the world to itself that you may save your own soul," but rather, "Do your duty in the world that you may be happier and the world be better."
And it must be confessed that in many respects this doctrine is inferior to the Vedantic, which emphasizes the spiritual character, and the divine origin and destiny, of the soul. The doctrine of Liberation, or of Redemption, as found in the Bhagavad Gita, is a strange combination of all the ways which Brahmanism has inculcated through its many schools, with other ways here added.
Finally, Swedenborg borrowed from Magianism, Brahmanism, Buddhism, and Christian mysticism all the truth and divine beauty that those four great religious books hold in common, and added to them a doctrine, a basis of reasoning, that may be termed mathematical.
That the whole world-process is nothing but an illusion, a confused and troubled dream passing over the mind of Brahma, who himself alone is real, this is the cardinal doctrine of Brahmanism, from which Buddhism also, as we shall see, sets out.
But whereas the pantheism of the Smârtas grew out of the feeling that the many gods of tradition must all be one, the pantheism of the Vishnuites was not evolved out of pre-buddhist Brahmanism and is due to the conviction that the one God must be everything.
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