hindu thinking on the nature of reality and brahman

When I was in college I had a philosophy professor who always used the piece of chalk in his hand to illustrate the concept that he was teaching. I remember the particular brand of chalk - AN DU SEPTIC - because the professor always pointed out the indented letters on the side of the piece that he was holding and often voiced his mystification about what the brand-name meant. (He was a language philosopher). And it really was good chalk. When I became a graduate student and began to teach, I used the same brand of chalk and it was far superior to the chalk that the institution where I now teach uses. It didn't break, create dust, and it lasted a long time. Perhaps the crumbly, dusty chalk today is a result of budget cuts, or maybe they found that an ingredient in AN DU SEPTIC chalk was a carcinogen or something.

Anyway, I remember once when my professor defended the thesis that nouns were non-existent. Of course, he used the chalk as an example. He asked his students to tell him what the piece of chalk in his hand was if one subtracted all the adjectives from it. "It's certainly not the whiteness of this piece of AN DU SEPTIC chalk that makes it chalk because we know that chalk can come in many colors," he said. "It's not the fact that this is cylindrical that makes it chalk; we can imagine manufacturing chalk in many different shapes: spherical, cubic, . . ." He would go through all the possible attributes of chalk and never get to its essence. So the professor would conclude, "Therefore, nouns are, in fact, a fiction. All that we have are adjectives."

To get an idea of Brahman, invert my professor's argument. Hindu culture, remember, rejects the existence of everything that can be experienced physically or conceptualized intellectually. Also, remember that the Hindu believes that everything is essentially Brahman and the appearances (the "adjectives" to use my professor's term) are distractions from reality. So when the professor told us that he had proved the non-existence of nouns, to the Hindu, he proved that everything that can be named - you, me, trees, desks, and even AN DU SEPTIC chalk - is, essentially, Brahman.