Brahmans
group · 5 works · 16 mentions · 31 anchored passages
Brahman · a Brahman · the Brahmans · Brahman lawyers · Brahman priesthood · Brahman teacher · Brahman teachers · Brahmanical code-makers · Brahmanical expositors · Brahmanical families
in the texts
Dissertations on Early Law and Custom
Priestly caste and scholarly class responsible for composing and interpreting Hindu sacred law.
The literature is the gradual growth of schools of learned Brahmans, which are still found in India.
and next, that the customary rules, reduced to writing, have been very greatly altered by Brahmanical expositors, constantly in spirit, sometimes in tenor.
The Brahman alone teaches, but the entire youth of the three higher castes, Brahmans, Kshatriyas, and Vaisyas, come and sit at his feet to be instructed in sacred learning;
Stromata
Indian priestly philosophers repeatedly named among the barbarian sources of philosophy.
And Plato is plainly found always honouring the barbarians, remembering that both he and Pythagoras learned most of their doctrines, and the noblest, among the barbarians.
"All that has been said about nature by the ancients is said also among those who philosophize outside Greece — some things among the Indians by the Brahmans, and some in Syria by those called Jews.
At its head stood the prophets of the Egyptians, the Chaldeans among the Assyrians, the Druids among the Galatians, the Samanaeans among the Bactrians, the philosophers of the Celts, and the Magi of the Persians (who by their magic foretold the birth of the Saviour, coming into the land of Judaea led by a star), and among the Indians the gymnosophists, and other barbarian philosophers besides.
Orations
Ascetic philosophers among the Indians who reject worldly abundance to pursue a special spring of truth through bodily hardship, yet are dishonored by others.
But these things being such and so great goods existing, nevertheless there are men called Brahmans, who, bidding farewell to those rivers and the things flung down among them, turning aside, by themselves reason and reflect, having taken up marvellous toils for their bodies with no one compelling them and enduring grievous hardships.
the Indians, the Brahmans, surpassing in self-control and justice and in friendship with the divine, whence they know the things to come more than other men know the things present with them;
The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana
Priestly class referenced both as recipients of religious charity and as a moral authority on acceptable practices.
giving a thousand cows to different Brahmans;
Such means should only be used as are holy, acknowledged to be good, and approved of by Brahmans, and friends.
When a courtesan is requested by a friend, or is impelled by pity to have intercourse with a learned Brahman, a religious student, a sacrificer, a devotee, or an ascetic who may have all fallen in love with her, and who may be consequently at the point of death, by doing this she might either gain or lose religious merit, and therefore this is called a mixed doubt about the gain and loss of religious merit.
The Law of Torts
Hindu priestly caste referenced in an illustration of group defamation.
answers, “Not all Brahmans, but you say well as to those of the temple of Gandharvanagar.