The god Brahma (Brahman)
But this incomprehensible, unconscious, passionless Brahma is not the Brahma of the popular faith. The masses and even the philosophers themselves must have something more concrete. So this impersonal, neuter Brahma is conceived as giving existence to the personal, masculine God Brahma (Brahman), “the progenitor of all worlds, the first-born among beings.”[227]
It is very necessary for the student of Brahmanic ethics to keep in mind the distinction between the uncreated, unconditioned, impersonal Brahma and the created, conditioned, personal Brahma, since there is here laid the foundation of a double goal for rational moral striving: the goal of the ascetic whose ultimate aim is deliverance from individual existence and absorption into the absolute, unchangeable, impersonal Brahma, which means a state of eternal unconsciousness—dreamless sleep; and the goal of the multitude, whose hope and aim is blissful, though temporary, union with the personal Brahma in the heaven of the mortal, conditioned gods.[228]
The system of castes
The ethical evolution in India was also profoundly influenced by a prehistoric event, namely, the subjection of the original non-Aryan population of the land by an intruding Aryan people. As a result of the long and bitter struggle the two races became separated by a sharp line of race prejudice and hatred. The dark-skinned natives were reduced to a state of servitude or dependence upon their conquerors. Intermarriages between the two races were strictly prohibited, and thus the population of the conquered districts of the peninsula became divided into two sharply defined classes. These constituted a model upon which Indian society was framed. Other classes were formed, and these gradually hardened into castes, that is, into classes between which marriages were prohibited. Four great castes arose: namely, priests or Brahmans, warriors and rulers, peasants and merchants, and sudras. Below these castes were the pariahs, or outcasts, made up of the most degraded of the natives. As time passed, still other divisions were formed, every occupation coming to constitute the basis of a new caste, till society was stratified like a geologic deposit.
Religion came in to consecrate this division of the people into privileged and nonprivileged classes.[229] The sacred scriptures declare that the Brahmans sprang from the mouth of Brahma, the warriors from his arms, the peasants and traders from his thighs, and the sudras from his feet.[230]
No institution known among men ever exercised a more fateful and sinister influence upon morality than this caste system has exercised upon the morality of the peoples of India. The rooted belief and dogma of the natural inequality of men has made Brahmanic ethics a thing of grades and classes, and has thus rendered impossible the evolution of a true morality, which requires for its basis genuine sentiments of equality and brotherhood.
The doctrine of transmigration
We easily realize the importance for morality of a belief in a life after death. But a belief in preëxistence may exert an even greater influence upon the moral code of a people than a belief in post-existence.[231] Now the morality of the Hindus has been molded by both these doctrines, for according to the teachings of Brahmanism a man has lived through many lives before his “birth,” and may wander through “ten thousand millions of existences” after death has freed him from his present body.[232] The class and the condition into which he is born here on earth is believed to be determined by the sum total of his merits or demerits earned in preceding existences. As a result of sin he may in his next birth be reborn in a lower caste, or may be imprisoned in some animal or vegetable form. He may pass a thousand times through the bodies of spiders, snakes, and lizards, and hundreds of times through the forms of grasses, shrubs, and creepers. And all this experience may come after the soul has passed through dreadful and innumerable hells for vast cycles of years.[233]
This transmigration theory was framed by the thinkers of India to explain among other things the seemingly unjust inequalities of human life.[234] It afforded an explanation why one man should be born a Brahman and another a sudra, one born in a hovel and another in a palace, by conceiving the place of every person born into the world as being determined by the manner of his life in former existences.[235]