Brahman began as the power of Vedic chants and became ultimate reality
In the oldest Vedic hymns, brahman meant something like the force packed into sacred words and ritual formulas. Over centuries the idea swelled into the source, sustainer and final resting place of the entire universe, and, in one bold Upanishadic teaching, identical with the self inside every person.
The Sanskrit word is a neuter noun from a root meaning to swell, expand or grow, and it should not be confused with the masculine Brahma, the creator god of the Hindu trinity, or with brahmin, a priest. Being grammatically neither male nor female, Brahman carries a more impersonal feel than a god. The term turns up in hundreds of Vedic hymns, including the Samhitas, the most ancient stratum of that literature, which scholars place late in the second millennium BCE.
Scholars trace a gradual abstraction. Jan Gonda argued that no single Western word can capture its shades of meaning, and that in the most ancient verses it referred to the power inherent in the sounds and formulas of the Vedas, though never only that. Gavin Flood describes its growth into the essence of the universe, the foundation of all phenomena and the truth of a person beyond surface differences. Barbara Holdrege identifies four Vedic themes: Brahman as the Word, as creative knowledge, as creation itself and as a body of tradition.
In the Upanishads, Brahman becomes the unchanging primordial reality that brings the universe into being, sustains it and finally draws it back in. It is both the smallest particle and the infinite whole, both a personal Lord and a presence within every being. It cannot be perceived by the senses, but the texts hold that it can be realised through deep self-knowledge, leading to liberation. The Shandilya doctrine in the Chandogya Upanishad, one of the oldest, declares that this whole universe is Brahman and that the self in one's heart, greater than the earth and sky, is that same Brahman.
Later schools split over that equation. Advaita Vedanta holds that Brahman and the individual self, or Atman, are one substance, so all existence shares a spiritual unity. Dualist Dvaita Vedanta keeps them distinct. The philologist Paul Deussen noticed similar ideas surfacing centuries later in the third-century Neoplatonist Plotinus.
Source: Brahman
