Another series of terms are likewise a puzzle to the uninitiated.  To Westerns, the brahmans[33] are best known as the priests of the Hindus; more correctly, however, the name brahman signifies not the performer of priestly duties, but the caste that possesses a monopoly of the performance.  The brahman caste is the Hindu Tribe of Levi.  Every accepted Hindu priest is a brahman, although it is far from being the case that every brahman is a priest.  As a matter of fact, at the Census of 1901 it was found that the great majority of brahmans have turned aside from their traditional calling.  In Bengal proper, only about 16 per cent. of the brahmans were following priestly pursuits; in the Madras Presidency, 11.4 per cent.; and in the Bombay Presidency, 22 per cent.

[Sidenote:  Brahmanism.]

Brahmanism is being employed by a number of recent writers in place of the older Hinduism.  Sir Alfred Lyall uses Brahmanism in that sense; likewise Professor Menzies in his recent book, Brahmanism and Buddhism.  Sir Alfred Lyall’s employment of the term Brahmanism rather than Hinduism, is in keeping with his description of Hinduism, which he defines as the congeries of diverse local beliefs and practices that are held together by the employment of brahmans as priests.  The description is a true one; the term Brahmanism represents what is common to the Hindu castes and sects; it is their greatest common measure, as it were.  But yet the fact remains that Hindus speak of themselves as such, not as Brahmanists, and it is hopeless to try to supersede a current name.  Sir M. Monier Williams employs the term Brahmanism in a more limited and more legitimate sense.  Dividing the history of the Hindu religion into three periods, he calls them the stages of Vedism, Brahmanism, and Hinduism respectively.  The first is the period of the Vedas, or earliest sacred books; the second, of the Brahman philosophy, fundamentally pantheistic; the third is the period of “a confused tangle of divine personalities and incarnations.”  Sir M. Monier Williams’ standard work on the religion of the Hindus is “Brahmanism and Hinduism." “Hinduism,” he tells us, “is Brahmanism modified by the creeds and superstitions of Buddhists and non-Aryans of all kinds.”

[Sidenote:  Brahm[=a], Brahma.]

[Sidenote:  Br[=a]hmas]

We are not done with this confusing set of terms. Brahm[=a] is the first person of the Hindu divine triad—­the Creator—­who along with the other two persons of the triad, has proceeded from a divine essence, Brahma or Brahm.  Brahma is Godhead or Deity:  Brahm[=a], is a Deity, a divine person who has emanated from the Godhead, Brahma. Br[=a]hmas or theists, believers in Brahma, are a religious body that originated in Bengal in the nineteenth century.  Repudiating caste, idolatry, and transmigration, they are necessarily cut off from Hinduism.  The body is called the Br[=a]hma Sam[=a]j, that is, the Theistic Association.  Enough for the present; in their respective places these distinctions can be more fully gone into.