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A Series of Lessons on the Inner Teachings of the Philosophies and Religions of India1316
rise of the worship of Vishnu and Shiva has been described and the various
influences operating in the development having been noticed. The third
class, or Abstract Monists, are comparatively few in number, and are those
people who refuse to acknowledge the need of names of personification
of Brahman, and who maintain a philosophical religion based upon Pure
Reason, with Brahman, that, or The Absolute as their object of veneration,
love, and meditation.
The worship of Brahman, the personification of the Creative Principle in
the Hindu Trinity, has almost disappeared as a separate form of religion.
Brahma, as the Creative Principle in the Trinity, or as the Personification,
of Brahman, is considered too much of an abstraction to be the object of
love and worship, and is generally passed by in favor of either Vishnu or
Shiva, often being held to be really in the nature of a Demiurge, or Creative
Agent of either of these two great Deities, particularly in the case of those
Vishnuites who attribute to Krishna, in his highest conception, the nature of
Brahman or that. It is true that, nominally, the Hindu Treaty is spoken of as
existing and ruling the religious conception of India, but in reality it is not
so, and the two great classes of the modern Hindu Religion have practically
discarded the Trinity, and have substituted the worship of Vishnu or Shiva,
as the case may be. Brahma is still seen in the temples, in the shape of
his images with their red bodies and several heads, all of which is merely
symbolic of course,—but as an object of worship he has faded from view,
being outclassed by the other two conceptions of Deity. And, accordingly,
let us now pass on to a consideration of the two great classes or divisions of
the Hindu Religions of to-day (1) the Vishnu worshipers, or Vaishnavas; and
(2) the Shiva worshipers or Shaivas, including the Shaktas.
The Vaishnavas.
The Vaishnavas are those Hindus who worship the Supreme Being
under the name of Vishnu, the second person of the Hindu Trinity, or the
Preserving Principle of Deity. We have spoken in our last lesson of the rise