RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Bradshaw Brahmanism
III, to Mary, and to Queen Anne. He published a tragedy, The Rape, or the Innocent Imposters (London, 1692), a translation of the iEneid of Vergil (4 vols., 1726; now extremely rare), and
two volumes of sermons (1704-06); but is remembered chiefly for his share in the New Version of the Psalms of David, produced jointly by himself and Nahum Tate (q.v.).
I. Vedism, the Age of the Vedas and their Ancillary Literature. The People of the Vedas and their
Gods (§1). The Kig-Veda (§ 2).
BRAHMANISM.
The Sama- and Yajur- Vedas (§ 3). The Atharva-Veda (§ 4). II. Brahmanism and the Pantheism of the Upanishads. The Upanishads (§ 1).
The Six Orthodox Systems of Philosophy (§ 2). III. The Age of the Buddhistic and Jainistic Heresies.
Brahmanism is the orthodox religion of India, the most ancient of all Indo-Germanic faiths of which there is record. In itself the most catholic and elastic of cults, its test is the recognition of the divine authority of the Vedas; its outward sign is reverence for the gods, some of whom are comparatively late and foreign in origin; and, for the Brahmans, its end is emancipation from the sorrow of existence and the misery of reincarnation through reabsorption into the divine essence of the All-Soul.
Brahmanism may be divided into three periods: I. The Age of the Vedas and their Ancillary Literature; II. Brahmanism and the Pantheism of the Upanishads; III. The Age during which the Buddhistic and Jainistic Heresies Prevailed. The two phases which are included in the Brahmanistic counterreformation and rise of the Hindu sects, and modern Hinduism and the unitarian movements are treated under Hinduism (q.v.).
I. Vedism, the Age of the Vedas and their Ancillary Literature (the Brahmanas and Sutras — the former a sort of Hindu Talmud; the latter brief verses in technical language, a favorite form of expressing rules) : At a period of remote antiquity, possibly between 2000 and 1500 B.C., a section of the Indo-Germanic peoples known by various names, of which the most common are Indians and Aryans, broke off from the kindred Iranian stock and wandered southward and eastward through Afghanistan into the Punjab or the " Five Waters," in the extreme northwest of the Indian peninsula. Like the Iranians of Persia, they were i. The divided into the three classes of priests,
People of warriors, and husbandmen, whence the Vedas were to be formed later the three and their higher castes, and were a nomadic and Gods. agricultural people, filled with the joy of living, valiant in war, daring freebooters, hot in love and reveling in wine, almost everything, in short, that the later Hindus were not. Their gods were like themselves, concrete and strong: Surya, the bright deity of the sun; Indra, the blinding lightning which ushers in the rainy season; Agni, the god of fire; and Soma, the deified inspiration of strong drink and of the divine courage which it gives. Few are the deities which show the softer side of the early Aryan mind, such as Ushas, the goddess of the dawn, or Varuna, the god of the sky-ocean, who watches over all and even later in this period receives praises which almost savor of monotheism.
The beliefs of the Aryans of this period are contained in the Rig- Veda, a book of hymns, the earliest literary records of the Indo-Germanic race, to
which the most probable date assigned is 1500-
500 b.c. This Veda is divided into ten books
containing 1,022 hymns. Books ii-
2. The vii form the " family books," com-
Rig-Veda. posed by successive generations of
families of bards. Book ix is restricted
to the Soma hymns, while i and viii, and especially
x, the latest of all, are more diverse in contents
and authorship. Within this range of space and
time are represented many phases of religious
thought, ranging from crass polytheism through
intricate henotheism or syncretism to a quasi-
monotheism, or rather pantheism; varying from
earnest faith to incipient skepticism; touching,
too, on daily life as well as on worship and sacrifice.
It must not be supposed, however, that the faith of the Veda is naive or childlike. It is, on the contrary, quite developed and occasionally even corrupt. Many of the hymns were undoubtedly composed for the ritual, although it is scarcely possible to regard the entire collection as subservient to the liturgy. Untenable also is the theory of the French school which reduces the entire Rig- Veda to a mass of allegory, nor are the conclusions of the realistic school, which regards this Veda as entirely Indie and interprets it rationalistically, altogether free from criticism. To the elucidation of a collection so extended both in space and time no single method of interpretation is adequate. Naivete and mature thought, liturgy and hymnology, allegory and realism must each be recognized as occasion demands, must even be combined at times to give a true representation of the Vedic Hinduism.
The basis of the Vedic religion is nature-worship. Each element is deified, the fire as Agni, the dawn as Ushas, the sky as Varuna, and the lightning of the storm as Indra. A single object in nature may be represented by many gods, as when the sun is venerated under the names of Surya, " the glowing one"; Savitar, "the enlivener "; Bhaga, "the bestower of boons "; Pushan, " he who causeth to flourish "; and Vishnu, "the mighty one." While these names may represent the deity in different aspects, as do the Egyptian Ra and Turn, the gods of the rising and the setting sun, it must not be forgotten that variance in name and even in concept of the same divinity may have been in its origin mere local divergence in expression for one and the same god, for the Rig- Veda was composed by many minds, at many places, in many periods. Behind nature-worship doubtless lay the earlier phase of animism, although its traces are obscured in the Vedic texts. Still more scanty are the evidences of ancestor-worship, or the cult of ghosts,
Brahmanism