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Updated: June 8, 2025
Brahminism through centuries of isolation, has assimilated many extraneous heathen rites, and wild superstitions have overlaid the original creed.
It is a mass of earnest "abysmal nonsense," an olla-podrida of theological whimsicalities, a saintly jumble of pious staff made up if we may borrow an idea of Hebraism, Persian Dualism, Brahminism, Buddhistic apotheosis, heterodox and orthodox Christianity, Mohammedanism, Drusism, Freemasonry, Methodism, Swedenborgianism, Mesmerism, and Spirit- rapping.
"It is a pity he should be a priest of so absurd a faith. Do you know anything about Buddhism? In that respect they are like the followers of Brahma. It is doubtful, indeed, which is the older faith of the two whether Brahminism is a corruption of Buddhism, or whether Buddhism is an attempt to restore Brahminism to its original purity.
Brahminism and Buddhism countenance it still more decidedly, and even go to the length of absolutely prohibiting the slaughter of animals. The Jews, on the other hand, esteemed the pastoral life as the noblest, and the Hebrew historian very naturally represented it as protected and consecrated by the blessing of Jehovah, while agriculture was declared to have been imposed on man as a punishment.
But wherever Hindu blood circulates, not in India only, but all through the islands of the Malay Archipelago, as far as the Philippines, the betel nut is an indispensable ingredient of any life that is worth living. Mohammedanism forbids spirits and Brahminism condemns all things that intoxicate or stupefy, but the betel nut is like the cup that cheers yet not inebriates.
Keeping himself to the strict letter of this law, the Hindu imagines that his food is polluted when it receives a little protracted notice from the stranger. And yet, Brahminism has been, even at the beginning of its second birth, a purely monotheistic religion, recognizing only one infinite and indivisible God.
When we speak of Hinduism or Brahminism as a religion, however, it is only a conventional use of a term, because it is not a religion in the sense that we are accustomed to apply that word. In all other creeds there is an element of ethics; morality, purity, justice and faith in men, but none of these qualities is taught by the Brahmins.
This is Brahminism; but the other great form of Oriental religion has carried the same fair symbol with it. One of the Bibles of the Buddhists is named "The White Lotus of the Good Laer." A pious Nepaulese bowed in reverence before a vase of lilies which perfumed the study of Sir William Jones.
Of later barbarous usages also, such as the widow's sacrificing herself on the funeral pile of her departed husband, there was as yet no trace; and in the heroic poetry, as yet not disfigured by later Brahminical alterations and additions, the heroes Krishna and Rama appear as types of courage and self-sacrifice, and not, as later, as avatars, or human incarnations, of the deity. b. Brahminism.
In religion, most of the Malays are Mohammedans, but the people of Bally and Lombok are still Brahmins, while the Dyaks and Battaks are of very primitive faiths. From remote times until 1478 Brahminism and Buddhism were the principal religions, but in that year the faith of Islam began to supersede them.
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