Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c7.s1.t3.64

c7.s1.t3.64

Together with Mâra, we find in the Buddhist texts very frequently mentioned another spiritual being, the conception of whom had likewise been first formed in the later Vedic age, Brahman. The god Brahman's figure is an outcome of that idea of the Brahma, the development of which has occupied our attention in a previous passage. It is exceedingly characteristic of the influence which the most abstract speculation of the schools exercised in India over the notions of the people generally, that the Brahma, the colourless, formless absolutum, has become an important element in the popular faith; of course, not without the thought in its original purity having been modified or, more accurately speaking, lost sight of. The thing in the abstract would have been rather too unconcrete a god even for the Indians. So the neuter personified itself, and became masculine; the Brahma turned into the god Brahman, the "progenitor of all worlds," the first-born among beings.