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Updated: May 29, 2025
The prestige of the Brahmans is sufficient to make such recognition an honour, but it is also their interest and millennial habit to secure control of every important religious movement and to incorporate rather than suppress. And this incorporation is more than mere recognition: the parvenu god borrows something from the manners and attributes of the olympian society to which he is introduced.
They worship the Hindu gods, practise Hindu rites, and are imbued with the Hindu spirit. The Brahmans and Rajpoots are proud of their position, firm in maintaining it, and shrink from everything which would invalidate it.
Kunauj, lying east and south of Delhi, became some time afterwards the capital of a widely extended empire, which lasted, with vicissitudes, down to Muhammadan times. Benares is seen in the dim light of antiquity as a favourite abode of Brahmans, and as sacred on that account, but it does not appear that it ever was the seat of extended rule.
Again, Madame Blavatsky says that the best part of the Upanishads was taken out at the time Buddha was preaching; the Brahmans took it out, that he might not prove too clearly the truth of his teachings by appeals to their sacred books.
It is true that they have succeeded in imposing—or in identifying themselves with—a most exacting code of social, legal and religious prescriptions, but they have rarely aimed at temporal power or attempted to be more than viziers. At the ancient coronation ceremony the priest who presented the new ruler to his subjects said, "This is your King, O people: The King of us Brahmans is Soma ."
In spite of persecution by the Brahmans, these meetings became very popular and were even attended by the great Śivaji. His creed is the same as that of Nâmdev and finds expression in verses such as these. "This thy nature is beyond the grasp of mind or words, and therefore I have made love a measure. I measure the Endless by the measure of love: he is not to be truly measured otherwise.
Thus it will be seen that, while the religion of the Brahmans in its earliest, primitive stage was merely an ethnic faith and largely the echo of the spiritual yearning of the human soul, its development has neither added to its power nor broadened its horizon.
It is Indian but it grew up in some region outside Brahmanic influence and was accepted by the Brahmans as a permissible creed, but many legends in the Epics and Puranas indicate that there was hostility between the old-fashioned Brahmans and the worshippers of Râma, Krishna and Śiva before the alliance was made.
In brief, perceiving no limits to this emptiness, there is opened to the view boundless knowledge. Endowed with inward rest and peace, the idea of 'I' departs, and the object of 'I' clearly discriminating the non-existence of matter, this is the condition of immaterial life. Thus ascending above the Brahmans, deprived of every vestige of bodily existence, we still endure.
He who knows the meaning of this or that observance obtains his desires . Nor did the Brahmans resent criticism and discussion. India has always loved theological argument: it is the national passion.
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