[Die Weisheit der Brahminen]
Translation from German by Robert Hutwohl[1]
“God descended to see the world with your eyes;
You shall suck the sacrificial fragrance from him with pure senses.
He is the one who looks and feels and thinks and speaks in you,
Therefore what you look, feel, think and speak, be divine light.”
F. Rückert.
Except for the six senses that man has in common with animals, namely touch, hearing, sight, smell and taste, and the instinct, through which the animal, even without having enjoyed any education, recognizes what its nature provides for its nourishment and reproduction man possesses a seventh sense, namely the ability to recognize truth directly and without circumlocution, and the lowest level at which this activity reveals itself as a sense of truth is intuition, or spiritual perception. It is asserted that of primeval times, when the world was still in its infancy, and both it and man were of a much finer ethereal constitution, before the present gross material condensation took place, our senses were more spiritual in nature, and therefore more apt to to perceive spiritual things than in our time, when the inner spiritual eye closed to the same proportion as the physical eye directed its energies to the outside and materially opened. Intuition is a holdover from that time, and whoever has some of that spiritual sight left, it will not have escaped him right now, as the Indian sages have prophesied for thousands of years, a new era of intelligence is beginning and new flower buds are beginning to open on the tree of knowledge. A spiritual air is blowing from the East, and it seems as if what Schopenhauer foresaw when he said: “Indian wisdom will flow back to Europe and fundamentally transform our knowledge and thinking will now come true.” (Welt als Wille und Vorstellung [World as Will and Imagination])
It hardly needs to be mentioned that the “East,” from which one’s own knowledge of the truth springs, is the light side of the human mind; but also geographically, Europe received its wisdom teachings from the East, from Asia, the cradle of the human race, and especially from India, the birthplace of all great religious systems.[2] In that formerly distant East, but now closer to us, the higher spiritual nature of man was first recognized when the “wild west” was still populated by humanoid animals. Even now the world, satiated with the nourishment which a perverted “materialism” forced upon it ad nauseam, has again turned its eyes to India and, thanks to the efforts of the “Theosophical Society,” treasure troves have been opened there, of which even our “Orientalists” and linguists had no idea.
Two nations are eminently suited which, by their very nature, are suited to approach the spiritual riches of the East and to make use of these treasures; namely, the Germans,[3] because of their Aryan descent and mystical disposition, and the North Americans, because of their cosmopolitan nature, which knows no national or class prejudices, but takes upon good where it finds it.
The first among these nations to attract attention when speaking of India are the Brahmins, whose way of thinking is so exquisitely described in F. Rückert’s poetic work, The Wisdom of the Brahmins. The Brahmins, or, as the name implies, the Successors of Good (from Brahma, the Good), are the appointed custodians of the mysteries of the Indian religion, in the same sense that the Christian mystics have custody of the mysteries of the religion of Christianity, insofar as these secrets are not comprehensible to materially minded masses and are also not suitable for their assessment. However, not all who bear the title Brahmins are Sons of Light, just as not everyone who has been clothed in priestly robes is a saint among us; but the caste of the Brahmins as such is that of the priests and sages and scholars in India, whose task it is to teach, and for this purpose above all to come to their own knowledge of the truth.
According to an ancient tradition in the oldest Indian books, the Upanishads, originally the race entrusted with spiritual leadership was not the Brahmins but the royal sages of Rājanya or the Kschatthriya [Kṣatriya] (warriors). After the great battle that took place five thousand years ago between the Kauravas and Pandavas [Pāṇḍavas] (see Bhagavad Gītā), in which many Kschatthriya princes fell, the sacred books and traditions gradually passed entirely into the hands of the Brahmins. They sought not only to carry out the precepts contained therein in the spirit, but also to express the same obedience outwardly in every detail of the trembling, and therefore established definite rules for everything and everything, as a result of which the whole life of a Brahmin is, so to speak, of a scientific one religion is interwoven. Religion takes possession of him before he is born, it tells him daily what he must do and what not to do, and does not leave him even after death, because after his body has been burned to ashes on the pyre, the Schradda [Śrāddha] ceremony, his astral body is freed from the impurity that still binds him to earth, and sacrifices are made to his manes for nine generations.
The outside is the covering and protection of the inside. The outer religion is the shell in which the true inner core is destined to develop. But if the whole spirit and life force is used on the shell and the core of the truth about it is forgotten, then the outside becomes the enemy of the inside and knowledge is nipped in the bud. So we see it daily in modern Christianity, and so we find it partly among the Brahmins. Over the desire to carry out all the prescribed ceremonies with the utmost precision, “worship” sank to a meaningless ceremonial, the spirit of clergy grew, priestly self-conceit grew large and strived for political rule, for worldly power and wealth, and in the same degree as oneself the Brahmins seized state power in order to strengthen their tyrannical rule over the spirits, they themselves lost the key to the sanctuary in which the treasures of true knowledge are kept. But just as there were and still are great men among the Christians, in spite of the Church, so there were then, as now, true wise men among the Brahmins; not “church despisers,” but those who have outgrown the outward church and come into the spirit of truth. It is through these that the ancient wisdom of the Brahmins has come down to us unadulterated.
The greatest of these disciples of wisdom in comparatively recent times was Sankaracharya [Śaṅkarācārya], the sage of southern India. It is difficult to determine when he lived, but according to the traditions of the Shringiri [Śṛngēri], who were his successors and who formed the core of enlightened Brahminism, he is said to have lived about two thousand years ago. A few centuries before him, the memory of the ancient Brahmin wisdom in India had been refreshed by Gautama Buddha’s teachings, and many even believe that Sankaracharya was an incarnation of Gautamas, who reappeared on earth to complete the work he had begun to complete.[4]
It behooved India to do what others might have done beyond the Himalayas; namely, to preserve for the whole world that wisdom and “occult science” unadulterated and in its original purity, which springs from the knowledge of eternal truth, as also the most ordinary and uninformed person intuitively feels in his heart, which only a highly developed mind, illuminated by the light of knowledge, can understand intellectually.
The original Brahmins were white in color. At least one of the oldest Indian books says, “The color of the brahmin is white”; and there is reason to believe that this saying is not to be taken only allegorically. The disciples whom Sankaracharya chose were chosen from Brahmin families in southern India whose complexion was dark. This Brahmin “order,” like the original Christians (the Essenes), formed a closed society to which entry became increasingly difficult over time, and it is likely that by the time of Sankara all publicity was excluded, so that an explanation of the deeper mysteries became only available to the initiated. Shankara strove to bring the Brahmins of India back from their outward appearances and ceremonies to the true spirit of their religion. He translated the Upanishads[5] into a more intelligible form and idiom, and sought to awaken the spirit of them in his followers. The light with which he illuminated the ancient traditions revealed the true meaning of the ancient symbols, and the explanations which he gave have been handed down among the Smarta [Smārta] Brahmins, their spiritual chiefs lived at Shringiri Math, in the gorges of southern India.
Centuries passed; then the followers of Mohammed came to fight the “infidels” with fire and sword. Like a swarm of locusts they swept across the plains, destroying where they could, the symbols of a religion they did not understand, and raging especially against the Brahmins, who thereby became only more closed to their religious mysteries. But when there was more tolerance under the Indian king Akbar in the sixteenth century, the Brahmins forgot the injustice done to them and taught their Mohammedan brothers the basics of the general religion of humanity and love of the highest (theosophy). Soon after, Akbar’s successor, Prince Dara Shukoh [Dara Shikoh], received permission from the Brahmins to translate part of the Upanishads into Persian. This Persian translation was discovered by Anquetil Duperron [Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron] around 1640 and translated into Latin by him. This Latin translation (called Oupnekhat — the Book of Secrets) [Oupnek’hat[6]] came into Schopenhauer’s hands and became the cornerstone of his philosophy. He himself says about it:
“How deeply he is moved by that spirit who, through diligent reading, has become fluent in the Persian-Latin of this incomparable book! How each line is so full of serious, definite, and consistently coherent meaning! And deep, original, sublime thoughts emerge from every page, while a high and sacred earnestness hovers over the whole thing. Everything here breathes Indian air and original, nature-related existence. And oh, how the spirit is here washed clean of all early inoculated Jewish superstition, and of all this early philosophy! It is the most instructive and uplifting reading possible in the world (excluding the original text); it has been the consolation of my life, and will be upon that of my death.”
(Parerga II, page 427.)
But not only Schopenhauer drew his philosophy from the Vedas. Nor is there any truth to be found in the whole Bible that cannot be explained and understood by the Upanishads, so that if the Bible is not composed of fragments of the Vedas, as some claim, it may be assumed that it is sprang from the same spirit.
Under Dara Schuko’s [Dara Shikoh’s] brother, the fanatical Aurungzeb [Aurangzeb], the Brahmins had much to endure, and even more of the foolish self-conceit of European nations, among whom the Portuguese excelled in blind destructiveness. The most beautiful monuments in the cave temples of the Indians, with their mutilations, still testify to the crudeness of Portuguese ignorance, which at that time sought to snatch their secrets from the Brahmins by the well-known means of the Inquisition and by auto-da-fés.
Despite all this, when some Europeans (William Jones, Thomas Coleman, etc.) came to India a hundred years ago with the intention of getting knowledge from the Brahmins, they were received by them with the greatest courtesy and communicated so much to them in the most liberal way than they could grasp. This laid the first foundation stone for “oriental research” in Europe, which, as could be foreseen in a material age, was much more concerned with the investigation of empty forms than with the knowledge of the spirit of words. Only after the “Theosophical Society” which had arisen in the United States had taken its central seat in India and the best classes among the Brahmins joined it,[7] did a real search for those spiritual treasures begin, which even the most linguistically proficient philologist cannot comprehend if he doesn’t have the key. Much of the wisdom of the Brahmins has thus become available to us, not merely to satisfy our scientific curiosity, but to put it to practical use by acting in accordance with a higher and nobler view of the world.
Notes
[1] The Wisdom of the Brahmans. [Die Weisheit der Brahminen. Franz Hartmann, M.D. Lotusblüten 3, no. 20 (May 1893), 313-325] {This article was reformatted from the original, but with the content unchanged other than fixing minor typos. Translation from the German by Robert Hutwohl, ©2025}
[2] {R.H.—This is a half-truth. Dr. Hartmann is referring here, only to the 5th Root-race, of which its 1st sub-race was the Aryan. But C. W. Leadbeater says that 1st sub-race actually migrated out from the Gobi area after the fifth sub-race (Teutonic) went out around 20,000 b.c. The Teutonic during the early phase, consisted of the Germans and east Europeans, Serbians, Croatioans, Bosnians and Russians. But of course civilization goes much further back: To Atlantis and even further back, to the Lemurian from whence humans acquired mind, which is the bridge between the higher triad and the low quaternary. This is taught in the Hindu writings, exoterically. The student need Theosophy to explain and understand this.}
[3] {R.H.—Who were the root stock for the 5th sub-race of the 5th Root Race? This is the Teutonic, of which the Germanic was a main component.
[4] {R.H.—All this is cloudy and at the time of Dr. Hartmann’s writing, other than the below 1910 book, nothing was available. Gautama Buddha real birth: 643 b.c.e. [7th century b.c.e.] Gautama Buddha’s nirvāṇa at 563 b.c.e., Gautama’s mahāparinirvāṇa and death: 543 b.c.e. [6th century b.c.e.] at 100 years old, based on esoteric records. Further, Śaṅkarācārya used the astral body (kāma-rūpa?) of Lord Buddha, which is why dates for Śaṅkarācārya are unclear and Śaṅkarācārya’s association with Gautama Buddha. See T. Subba Row’s article, “Śrī Śaṅkarācārya’s Date and Doctrine”: In: Esoteric Writings of T. Subba Row, Adyar, Madras, India, 1980, pp. 20-51 and: Rajaram Tookaram, Esoteric Writings by T. Subba Row. Published by The Theosophical Publishing House, Adyar, Madras, India, 1910, pp. 140-162 and the numerous Śaṅkara entries in: T. Subba Row Collected Writings. Vol. 2. Compiled and Annotated by Henk Spierenburg. Point Loma Publications, Inc., San Diego, CA, 2001}
[5] {R.H.—Some of the original Śaṅkara translations and commentaries are in dispute, because they were actually authored by further but not the original Śaṅkara, as “Śaṅkara” is also an office-holder with the same name serving as the heads of Maṭhams. This tradition has been ongoing since the original Śaṅkara. See David Reigle’s paper on this.
[6] {R.H.—Oupnek’hat, id est, Secretum tegendum : opus ipsa in India rarissimum, continens antiquam et arcanam, seu theologicam et philosophicam, doctrinam, è quatuor sacris Indorum libris, Rak Beid, Djedjr Beid, Sam Beid, Athrban Beid, excerptam : ad verbum, e Persico idiomate, Samskreticis vocabulis intermixto, in Latinum conversum : dissertationibus et annotationibus, difficiliora explanantibus, illustratum. Typis et impensis fratrum Levrault ; Apud eosd. bibliopolas, Argentorati, Parisiis, 1801}
[7] {R.H.—Such as the great esotericist, a Smārta Brahmin, Tallapragada Subba Row (b. July 6, 1856, d. June 24, 1890 (aged 33). It was Subba Row who convinced H. P. Blavatsky and Col. Henry Olcott to make Adyar at Madras, India, their permanent home for the Theosophical Society. Previously, it was not until Subba Row met Blavatsky and Olcott, that he began relating the most occult and metaphysical philosophy. Prior to that, no one knew he had any knowledge thereof. Subba Row was also thence forward, able to recite any passage from the Bhagavad Gītā and Upaniṣads. It is said, upon meeting Blavatsky and Olcott, his memories from previous lives became active.}