Brahmana

General name for the second literary
stratum in the Vedas, the earliest and
most authoritative Hindu religious
texts. Although the composition of
these differing parts of the Veda is not
completely linear, the Brahmanas generally come after the hymns of praise to
the gods known as samhitas and precede the speculative texts known as the
Aranyakas and the Upanishads. In theory, each Veda has a Brahmana as an
appendix, which is intended to give further explanation of the Vedic rituals.
Although the Yajur Veda is the only one
for which this is actually true, this
understanding gives the Brahmanas
the authority of revealed scripture
(shruti) and thus makes them unquestionable. There are several different
Brahmanas, of which the most important are the Aiteraya Brahmana and
the Shatapatha Brahmana; the latter’s
tone and contents (including the Isha
Upanishad) clearly mark it as the most
recent of the Brahmanas.
The Brahmanas are primarily ritual
manuals, and they give exacting,
painstaking instructions for performing
these Vedic rituals. These texts indicate a
fundamental shift in religious practice,
from the earlier emphasis on sacrifice
as a means of invoking and pleasing the
Vedic gods to an importance on the
power of ritual itself. This new emphasis
makes the sacrificial priests the most
powerful people of all, since even the
gods themselves are subject to the rituals. The power of correctly performed
ritual paves the way for the Aranyakas
and the Upanishads, which asks more
speculative questions about the rituals
themselves. At times these differing
religious genres are juxtaposed—as in
the Shatapatha Brahmana, in which the
Isha Upanishad is embedded. Such juxtapositions indicate that although the
stress varied in differing types of texts,
there was some overlap during the time
they were composed.