BRAHMA

The word brahma provided Ven. Nānamoli with another challenge to his endeavour to achieve complete consistency. The word itself, going back to the Vedic period, originally meant holy power, the sacred power that sustains the cosmos and that was contacted through the prayers and rituals of the Vedas. Though the word retained its significance of "holy" or "sacred," by the Buddha's time it had undergone two distinct lines of development. One culminated in the conception of Brahman (neuter) as an impersonal absolute reality hidden behind and manifesting through the changing phenomena of the world. This conception is the keynote of the Upanishads, but the word brahma never appears in this sense in the Pali Canon. The other line of development culminated in the conception of Brahma (masculine singular) as an eternal personal God who creates and regulates the world. This conception was held by the brahmins as depicted in the Pali suttas. The Buddhists themselves asserted that Brahmā was not a single creator God but a collective name for several classes of high deities whose chiefs, forgetting that they are still transient beings in the grip of kamma, were prone to imagine themselves to be the omnipotent everlasting creator (see MN 49).

Ven. Nānamoli attempted to fulfil his guideline of consistency by rendering the word brahma in its various occurrences by "divine" or its cognates. Thus Brahmā the deity was rendered "the Divinity," brāhmana (= brahmin) was rendered "divine" (as a noun meaning a priestly theologian), and the expression brahmacariya, in which brahma functions as an adjective, was rendered "the Life Divine." The result of this experiment was again the sacrifice of clarity for the sake of consistency, even at the risk of generating misunderstanding, and therefore in the revisionary process I decided to treat these expressions in line with more conventional practices. Thus Brahmā and brahmin have been left untranslated (the latter word is probably already more familiar to modern readers than the archaic noun "divine"). The word brahma, as it appears in compounds, has usually been rendered "holy" - e.g., brahmacariya as "the holy life" except when it is used to signify total sexual abstinence, in which case it has been rendered in accordance with its intended meaning as "celibacy." The word "divine" has, however, been retained in the expression brahmavihāra, rendered "divine abode" (MN 83.6) with reference to the "immeasurable" meditations on lovingkindness, compassion, appreciative joy, and equanimity, which are the dwellings of the divinity Brahmā (MN 55.7) and the path to rebirth in the Brahma-world (MN 99.22).