Brahman

The single most persistent confusion in English writing on Hinduism is between Brahman, the impersonal absolute, and Brahma, the four-headed creator god. The words share a root and a first syllable, and there they part.

• Brahman is neuter, is not a person, is not worshipped, has almost no iconography, and is the subject of the Upanishads and of Vedanta.
• Brahma is masculine, is a deity of the Puranic pantheon, is depicted and named in myth, and is by a wide margin the least worshipped of the great gods, with almost no temples of his own.

A third relative, brahmin, the priestly class, and brahmana, the ritual texts, come from the same field of meaning, the sacred power of the formula and those who handle it. Keeping the four apart is the first thing to get right, because the doctrine of Brahman says the opposite of what it seems to if the word is read as the god.

Having distinguished Brahman from the deity Brahma, the more substantial question the short disambiguation entry leaves untouched is what Brahman itself is said to be, and the central distinction Vedanta draws is between nirguna Brahman, without qualities, and saguna Brahman, with qualities.

Nirguna Brahman is Brahman considered in itself, prior to any attribute or relation: not merely without bad qualities but without qualities of any kind, since any positive attribute would, on the strict Advaita reading, introduce a distinction that would compromise its absolute unity. This is the Brahman approached through negation, the method of neti neti discussed elsewhere in this collection, and through formulas like sat-chit-ananda that point toward rather than describe. Saguna Brahman is the same reality as it appears to ordinary experience and devotion, a personal creator and object of worship, associated in different traditions with Vishnu, Shiva or the Goddess as the qualified form under which the ultimate is approached.

Shankara's Advaita treats nirguna Brahman as the final truth and saguna Brahman as a provisional accommodation, useful for minds not yet ready for the unqualified truth but ultimately transcended once liberating knowledge is attained. The theistic Vedanta schools reverse the emphasis: Ramanuja's Vishishtadvaita and Madhva's Dvaita hold that the qualified, personal Brahman is the final reality, and that Advaita's nirguna Brahman is at best a misleading abstraction from what a personal God actually is. The distinction restates the central and unresolved argument among the Vedanta schools that recurs throughout this collection: whether ultimate reality is a person to be loved or an absolute to be realized.