The unity of religions Author:John Herman Randall Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill BRAHMANISM1 By A. V. Williams Jackson, Ph.d., L.H.D., LL.D. Professor of Indo-Iranian Languages, Columbia University Brahmanism, the most general te... more »rm for the Aryan religion of India, is the faith which, originating in prehistoric times, was developed and taught by the Brahman priests, the spiritual guides of the ancient land of the Indus and Ganges. There a people -is found that is distinctly religious, for one of the most striking characteristics of the Oriental, patent at once to every student and traveler, is his intense religious fervor and religious spirit. This term, Brahmanism, in its broadest sense—as we must employ it here—includes all the religions of India from the earliest times of Vedism, or the religion of the Vedas, through Brahmanism proper, where it was reduced under priestly functions to a mere schematic form, with the changes that came up after the rise of Buddhism and Jainism, down to the newer form of Hinduism, and so to the present time, when Brahman priests still give a leading and guiding hand in India's spiritual welfare. The religion of the Vedas, as representing Vedism, is presented to us in the sacred hymns of the Four Vedas, that were chanted in early times by the priests or seers. They were hymns glorifying and personifying the powers of nature; giving thanks, giving adoration, and giving prayer to those personified forces. It is interesting to see this form of natureworship, probably in its earliest andcrudest form a mere recognition of the forces revealed by nature, and to note that by degrees the ancient Hindus seem to have looked up from Nature unto Nature's God. Some of the hymns, to be sure, are merely anthropomorphic — perhaps better, humanistic — in their way and not distinctly spiritual; but others had attained a lofty hei...« less