THE BRAHMIN, HISTORICALLY

In his biography of Ramakrishna, Christopher Isherwood explains that in India the ideal has always been to obtain knowledge of the Atman, the divine nature within humans, through direct experience. 

That such knowledge can actually be obtained by any individual, that the Atman can really be known in the sense of self-knowledge, is the fundamental proposition of Vedanta.

It is not towards any religious body, such as a Church, as in the West, but towards the individual seer, the knower of the Atman, that the community, in its own struggles to gain enlightenment, depends.  The Brahmin was this knower.

The Brahmin was more than just a priest.  According to the Bhagavad Gita, he needed to be the mystic of the community, the person through whom the community’s contact with the spiritual was maintained.

How can the Atman be known?  By meditation, and by self-disciplines which open the eye of the spirit, the eye of the Atman.  Such was the discipline of the Brahmin. 

The faith of the Brahmin needed to be based on specific self-knowledge, not simply on good intentions.  He might be a scholar and interpreter of sacred books, but his interpretations had to be grounded in his own experience, rather than in the academic knowledge of former commentators.