Hindu Polity: A Constitutional History of India in Hindu Times c42.14

c42.14

§ 290. With the class of men in hermitage and post-hermitage stages of life, we should count the Vṛittastha Brahmin. Nobody can pretend to understand Hindu history without realizing the true social value of the teaching, studying, thinking and sacrificing Brahmin. With a culture of intellect ever developing, from generation to generation, he had grown into a leviathan of brain. That leviathan would have eaten up Hindu Society and burst up himself, but for the self-denying ordinance of poverty. He would engage not in what would bring him wealth. The little wealth he required for his sustenance, he would beg of the Society he had undertaken to serve. He thus became the true aristocrat of Hindu Society, with the differentia peculiar to him in the whole world: that he was the aristocrat-plus-poverty. By the vow of poverty he secured for him an imperishable intellectual existence rooted in independence of spirit and consciousness of virtuous superiority. The race in which he grew stood loyally by him, nourishing and maintaining that leviathan of brain and virtue.