Brahmin
ब्राह्मण brāhmaṇaThe first of the four varnas: the class of priests, teachers, and keepers of sacred learning and ritual. In the classical ideal the Brahmin's duty is study, teaching, and the guarding of knowledge, though in lived society Brahmin status became hereditary.
Where this term appears
- The caste system: what Hinduism says Essentials
Brahmins are the priests and teachers, keepers of learning and ritual.
- Who Was Adi Shankara? Philosophy
In that portrait he is born at Kaladi in Kerala to a Brahmin family, renounces the world as a boy, finds his teacher, writes his great commentaries young, tours all of India defeating rival philosophers in deba…
- Devas and Asuras Deities
The line that brahmins crossed, and what that proves If the deva-asura conflict were a matter of species, or of blood, nobody could change sides.
- Dharma, Karma and Rebirth Essentials
…eats it as a normative and idealizing work, a vision of the order its Brahmin authors wished for rather than a transcript of the one that existed, and its authority has been contested within the tradition for c…
- Eighty-five titles and no text: the Saura tantras and how a tradition disappears Lineages
… god: the Bhagavatas for Vishnu, the ash-wearing twice-born for Śiva, brahmins who know the mandala sequence for the Mothers, brahmins generally for Brahma, the Shakyas for the Buddha, the naked ones for the Ji…
- Hinduism and the Coming of Islam History
…manabad settlement, in which the conqueror is said to have reinstated Brahmins in office, levied the jizya , the poll tax on non-Muslims, and extended the status of protected subjects to Hindus and Buddhists, c…
- How many gods does Hinduism have? Deities
There is no single fixed number, and the widely repeated figure of 330 million gods rests on a mistranslation. The oldest texts speak of thirty-three gods, not…
- How the Vedas Were Preserved History
The scholar Frits Staal, studying the Nambudiri brahmins of Kerala, found what may be the most archaic recitation on earth, its gestures and tones a living fossil of how the Veda sounded in deep antiquity.