What is a Brahman?

Dravidian polytheistic fertility religion and the early Aryan Vedic polytheistic religion laid the foundations of what later became Hinduism. While the earliest Vedas were blatantly polytheistic and devoted to rituals and sacrifice, the later Vedas showed a movement toward pantheism (from the word "pan," meaning "everything," and "theos," meaning "God"). According to pantheism, God did not create the world; God is the world, along with everything in it.

Although the earlier Hindu scriptures had mentioned many gods, the highest goal, according to the later Vedic literature, was union with Brahma, the impersonal absolute. The priests of Brahma became known as the Brahmins, who performed the ritual duties for the community, which were demanded in the early Vedic writings to appease the many gods. The Brahmins also maintained a monopoly on the higher truths of pantheistic Brahmanism. Brahmins grew more and more powerful until they became the highest social class.

A more difficult way to achieve moksha is the path of knowledge (inana), which includes self‑renunciation and meditation on the supreme pantheistic reality of Hinduism. This very aesthetic path is open to men only in the highest castes, and it is described in the Upanishads, a series of philosophical treatises composed beginning around 600 B.C. The Upaninshad texts teach that the world as we experience it is mere maya (illusion) and that Brahma is the only thing that really exists and has meaning.

The path of knowledge most often includes the practice of yoga (yoking, or union). Yoga is the attempt to control one's consciousness through bodily posture, breath control and concentration, to the extent that one comes to understand experientially that one's true self, one's undying soul (atman), is identical with Brahma. This leads to the famous Hindu saying, "Aham asmi Brahma" ("I am Brahma").

"Hegel and his disciples, of which Strauss is one, say: God Almighty, the Creator, must reveal Himself, go out of life, — being the subject, become His object. They say, this world is the personification of God, His second Person, and there is no other revelation. The creation of the world out of nothing we believe, they say; but it must be rightly understood. Nothing is not nothing; nothing means that which was nothing, namely, God, before His manifestation or effusion in the world. What do the Hindus reason in regard to the same subject? They speculate on the nature of God: whether He is nothing, or everything; whether He is gunman or nirgun; with qualities or attributes, or without; whether He can reveal Himself, or not. The Brahmins and Hindus know no other God but the world. A transcendental, pure, and holy God they can form no notion of.

If we turn for a moment to secular writers we find that this notion of an otiose god largely obtained in the East, in India. Among the Hindus, their "Supreme" was so wrapped up in his own perfections as to commit the charge of this world to inferior deities, and therefore in his relation to men and things above in eternal sleep. This was their "Brahm" who in his primary state is a being without qualities or attributes, without intellect, without consciousness, without intelligence! A being without these is an impossibility. The Supreme is, The absolute NOTHING!! But Brahm awakes to consciousness, (how such a nonentity could is a marvel), and then he becomes omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and exclaims "I am!!!" And this is where the vaunted intellect of man leads us when it prys into the regions above mere matter. Western philosophy does not travel by the same route, but its last stage is not less absurd. For if the Hindu, in his mythological journey back to the Original Cause of all, arrives at eternal sleep; confusion, or chaos, with the eternity of matter is the Ultima Thule of the Pagan west, where was found no other solution of the problem of good and evil as seen in the present condition of creation, than that each is eternal and was ever in conflict.

Historians say that idolatry as a system was carried from Egypt to India after the age of Joseph, or about the year B.C. 1635, or a little later. That afterwards the same organised system spread from the north east of Asia to the north west of Europe, and prevailed throughout this region before B.C. 542. The Hindu doctrine of Brahm seems to confirm this. God's assertion of Himself as "I am" could never have been conceived by fallen man, and it must have been carried to India from the land where that name was first declared. Those who have examined Hindu mythology assert that its fundamental doctrine is one God. (What kind of God it is we have just seen). If so, then there is the fact of God's revelation of Himself as the One God, to the Gentile world; the responsibility of the idolater in presence of this revelation, and the perversion of this truth by man, under the power of Satan. Divergent in detail and development as this system became in different countries, its identity as to source is also seen in that time is reckoned by weeks and days, and that the days of the week are consecrated to the same or similar gods.*

In heathenism, where these activities are attributed to subordinate energies, the one original God was mere abstract, inert godhead - abstract existence.

In India, sole existence, sometimes springing into activity of thought and desire, all which became creation, including the gods, and was Maia, or Illusion, and returning into abstract godhead again, when Brahm's occasional activity ceased.

Page 373. 'The idea which the Aryans of India sought to express under the names Brahman and Atman, the Aryans of Europe strove to signify by the name Wuotan. That idea centred in the conception of Will as a power which brought all things into being and preserves them in it, of a will which followed man wherever he could go, and from which there was no escape, which was present alike in the heavens above and in the depths beneath, an energy incessantly operating and making itself felt in the multiplication as well as in the sustaining of life. Obviously there was no one thing in the physical world which more vividly answered to such a conception than the wind, as the breath of the great Ether, the moving power which purifies the air. Thus the Hindu Brahman denoted originally the active and propulsive force in creation, and this conception was still more strictly set forth under the name Atman, the breath or spirit which becomes the atmosphere of the Greeks and the athem of the Germans.' It is astonishing he does not see that this is pantheism. But I suspect his knowledge of Hindooism is very second-hand. He knew no Brahm as distinct from Brahma before.

In the East, Ultimate Reality is thought of as attainable within each individual by realizing intuitively that the "self" is Divine, or at least part of the Divine. God is, for the most part, seen as an impersonal, unifying force who takes no personal interest in individuals. The idea of a creator having authority over the universe and making universal moral demands is, by and large, rejected.

The Hindu inquirer wished that God might not be impersonal. What did he mean by the word, “impersonal”? Did he mean what is so commonly believed in heathen lands that the only expression of God is seen in creation, in nature, in material things; that God is in everything—mountains, rivers, animals, birds, men—in another word, pantheism? If so there could be no appeal. Nature in such a case must take its course, and the yearning of the human soul left unsatisfied.

Regarding God and Jesus Christ: Hindus do not believe in a personal, loving God, but in Brahma, a formless, abstract, eternal being without attributes, who was the beginning of all things."' They believe that Jesus is not God but just one of many incarnations, or avatars, of V'shnu. Christians believe that God is an eternal, personal, spiritual Being in three persons ‑ Father, Son and Holy Spirit (see Matt. 3:13‑17; 28:19; 2 Cor. 13:14). Jesus Christ is God as well as sinless man and He died for our redemption (see John 1: 13,14; 1 Pet. 2:24). Regarding sin and salvation: Hindus call sin "utter illusion" because they believe all material reality is illusory. They seek deliverance from samsara, the endless cycle of death and rebirth, through union with Brahma, which is achieved through devotion, meditation, good works and self‑control. Christians believe that sin is prideful rebellion that leads to eternal separation from God after living only one life, not many (see Rom. 3:23; Heb. 9:27) and that salvation is gained only through believing in the sacrificial death and resurrection of Jesus Christ (see Rom. 3:24; 1 Cor. 15:3).

For Hindus, the great spiritual challenge is that the soul, or atman, is separated from Brahma (Ultimate Reality) and trapped in samsara, the seemingly endless process of being reincarnated over and over. Moksha, which is liberation from samsara and reunion with Brahma, is the goal. In Hinduism, there are basically three paths to moksha: the path of works (dharma), the path of knowledge (inana) and the path of passionate devotion (bbakti).