Atman

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A boy named Śvetaketu comes home from twelve years of study swollen with learning and certain he knows everything worth knowing. His father Uddālaka asks one question he cannot answer — whether he has asked for the teaching by which the unheard becomes heard and the unknown known — and then sets out to supply it. He has the boy split a fig, then a seed inside the fig, until nothing visible is left, and tells him that from just such an unseen essence the whole great tree stands. Nine times in the lesson the father returns to a single sentence, applied to salt dissolved in water, to rivers losing their names in the sea, to the sleeping and the dying: tat tvam asi, Śvetaketu — that thou art. The subtle essence that is the self of all this is the very self the boy is. The Sanskrit word for that innermost self is ātman, and the Chāndogya Upanishad’s sixth chapter is one of the places where it is first carried all the way to its limit.

The word began far lower than the metaphysics built on it. Ātman derives from a root meaning “to breathe” — the same Indo-European stem that surfaces in the Old English æðm, breath — and in the oldest Vedic usage it meant just that: the breath, the vital air, the warm animating principle that distinguishes a living body from a corpse. From breath it slid to “the self” in the most ordinary reflexive sense, the word one uses for oneself, one’s own person, one’s trunk as opposed to one’s limbs. The whole speculative career of the term is the story of that ordinary word being pressed, question by question, until it named not the breathing creature but the silent ground on which the creature appears.

From breath to the inmost self

The pressure came from a method as much as a doctrine. The thinkers of the early Upanishads asked, with a persistence that has the quality of an experiment, what a person finally is when each candidate for selfhood is examined and set aside. The body is not it: the body is born, decays, and is left behind. The breath is not it, though breath is where the word started: breath comes and goes, and sleep suspends it. The mind is not it, for the mind is a traffic of images that the self watches pass. The intellect that discriminates and decides is not it either. Behind each of these stands something that is aware of it, and the analysis runs inward toward whatever is aware and is itself never an object of awareness — the seer that is never seen, the hearer never heard.

The Taittirīya Upanishad gives this inward analysis its most schematic form, the doctrine of the five koshas, the sheaths or coverings that wrap the self as the husk wraps the grain. The outermost is the annamaya sheath, “made of food” — the gross physical body, built of what is eaten and returning to earth. Within it lies the prāṇamaya, “made of breath,” the layer of vital energies that animate the body. Within that the manomaya, “made of mind,” the layer of sense and ordinary thought. Within that the vijñānamaya, “made of discernment,” the intellect that judges and knows. Innermost is the ānandamaya, “made of bliss,” the subtlest covering of all. The image is deliberately one of depth and concealment: each sheath is more interior, more refined, and less obviously a thing than the last, and the ātman is what the whole nested series points toward — not a sixth sheath but that which the sheaths are sheaths of, the consciousness for which the layers are present. To find it is not to add a final layer but to recognize what is left when none of the layers is mistaken for oneself.

An 1865 manuscript of the Aitareya Upanishad, the Ṛgveda text whose “great saying” is prajñānam brahma — consciousness is Brahman. — Photograph Ms Sarah Welch, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

This is why the self must be carefully distinguished from the thing most people mean when they say “I.” That everyday “I” is the ahaṃkāra, the “I-maker,” the ego-function that appropriates experiences and calls them mine, that fears and desires and tracks its own continuity through time. The ahaṃkāra is real enough as a working part of the mind, but it belongs among the sheaths; it is something the ātman illumines, not the ātman itself. The decisive move of Upanishadic introspection is to drive a wedge between the self that is witnessed and the self that witnesses. The witnessing self carries a name of its own in the later analysis — the sākṣin, the witness, pure consciousness present to every state of mind without being altered by any of them, awake in waking, present even in dreamless sleep, the constant light by which the changing contents of a life are seen. The contents change; the seeing does not. The ātman is that seeing.

The identity with Brahman

The Upanishads’ boldest stroke is to fold this innermost self together with the ground of the whole cosmos. The same texts that drive the analysis of the person inward also ask what underlies the world outward, and they answer with a single word — Brahman, the one reality from which everything proceeds and into which it returns. The astonishment of the Upanishads is the announcement that these two searches arrive at one place: the reality found at the bottom of the self and the reality found at the bottom of the world are not two things but one. The self at the core of the person is the absolute at the core of the cosmos. The search turned inward opens, at its end, onto everything.

The tradition fixes this identity in a handful of compressed declarations it calls the mahāvākyas, the “great sayings,” and the later teaching, codifying them, drew one from each of the four Vedas. From the Chāndogya comes tat tvam asi, “that thou art” — Uddālaka’s word to his son, the identity stated as instruction. From the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upanishad comes aham brahmāsmi, “I am Brahman,” the identity spoken in the first person as realization: at Bṛhadāraṇyaka 1.4.10 the text says that whoever knows “I am Brahman” becomes the All, and that even the gods cannot prevent it, for he has become their very self. From the Aitareya of the Ṛgveda comes prajñānam brahma, “consciousness is Brahman,” the identity as definition. From the Māṇḍūkya comes ayam ātmā brahma, “this self is Brahman,” the identity stated as bare equation. The four are not four claims but one, approached as instruction, as realization, as definition, and as direct identification.

If one instrument of the teaching is this positive declaration, the other is wholly negative, and it bears directly on the self. Pressed in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka to say what the ātman finally is, the sage Yājñavalkya answers only by refusal: neti neti, “not this, not this.” Every predicate offered is taken back. The self is not the body, not the breath, not the mind, not anything that can be named or grasped, because to name is to set a boundary and the self that grounds everything can have no boundary. The method is a deliberate unsaying, a stripping of concept after concept as inadequate, until what is left is precisely what cannot be stripped away because it is the one doing the stripping. Applied to Brahman, neti neti clears the cosmos of false absolutes; applied to the self, it clears the person of false identities. It is the same gesture run in two directions, and it ends in the same place.

The opening verses of the Īśā Upanishad, one of the shortest of the principal Upanishads and among the most concentrated on the indwelling Self. — Photograph Ms Sarah Welch, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The principal Upanishads carrying these sayings were first rendered whole into scholarly English by Max Müller in his Sacred Books of the East, and the hosted Müller translation preserves both the Chāndogya with its dissolved salt and its tat tvam asi and the Bṛhadāraṇyaka with Yājñavalkya’s neti neti. Müller’s renderings are now read as much as documents of a nineteenth-century cross-cultural encounter as windows onto the texts; the modern critical standard is Patrick Olivelle’s annotated edition of the early Upanishads, which deliberately resists the systematized glosses that later schools projected back onto words like ātman and reads these texts as composed across several centuries during the urbanization of the Gangetic plain. But the doctrine they record is unmistakable: the self is the seam where the person and the absolute meet.

What liberation turns on

If the self is in truth the ground of everything, then bondage is a case of mistaken identity, and the analysis carries a practical edge. To live as the ahaṃkāra — to take oneself for a particular body with a particular history, anxious for its survival — is to be bound to the wheel of death and rebirth, driven by the residue of one’s acts. To know oneself as the ātman, the witness untouched by the changing contents it lights, is release — mokṣa. The decisive instrument is therefore knowledge rather than work: not the accumulation of merit but the dissolving of an error, the recognition of what was always the case. The whole apparatus of yoga, in this reading, is preparation for a seeing — a quieting of the mind sufficient for the witness to be recognized as the witness and not confused with anything it witnesses.

The question of how exactly the self relates to Brahman, once the identity is granted, became the dividing line of classical Vedanta, and the schools that took shape around the Brahma Sutras part company on it as sharply as on anything. Śaṅkara, in the eighth century, read the identity without remainder. The ātman is Brahman, wholly and without qualification; the appearance of a separate individual self, a jīva bounded off from the absolute, is the work of ignorance and the world-projecting power of māyā. Liberation is not the joining of the self to God but the waking recognition that the two were never separate — that there is, finally, no second thing. This is advaita, non-duality in the strict sense, and on it Śaṅkara built the most rigorously monistic of the Indian systems. His reading leaned on the earlier verses of Gaudapada on the Māṇḍūkya, which had pressed the non-dual reading toward an almost acosmic edge. The fullest English presentation of his metaphysics is George Thibaut’s translation of the Vedānta-Sūtras with Śaṅkara’s commentary, whose long introduction remains the clearest map of the architecture: Brahman as thought without qualities, the individual self as that one reality appearing under the limiting conditions of ignorance.

Adi Śaṅkara, who read the identity of ātman and Brahman without remainder; painting by Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906). — Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The collapse was exactly what Rāmānuja, the Śrī Vaiṣṇava theologian of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, refused. For him the self is real and the self is conscious, but it is not Brahman without qualification; it is a real mode of Brahman, distinct from God, wholly dependent on him, animated and ruled by him as a body is animated and ruled by the self that dwells in it. Souls and world together form the real body of the personal God, never dissolved into him, never identical with him, never ceasing to be themselves. This is viśiṣṭādvaita, “qualified non-duality” — oneness with a difference held permanently inside it. The third great commentator, Madhva, carried the reaction to its limit with outright dvaita, dualism: the self is eternally and irreducibly distinct from the God it depends on and serves, distinct even in liberation, and it never becomes the absolute it loves. All three read the same scriptures and the same great sayings. They divide over what tat tvam asi can be made to mean — whether the “thou” and the “that” name one reality seen twice, or two realities bound in dependence, or two that draw close and stay forever two.

The Buddhist refusal

The sharpest pressure on the doctrine of the self came not from within Vedanta but from the tradition that grew up beside it and rejected its founding premise. Where the Upanishads drive inward expecting to find, at the end of the analysis, an unchanging witness, the Buddha drove the same analysis inward and reported that no such witness is found. This is anattā — in Sanskrit anātman, literally “non-self,” the negation of the very word the Upanishads had exalted. The teaching does not assert that a person is nothing; it asserts that a person is a process, a bundle of five ever-changing aggregates — form, sensation, perception, mental formations, and consciousness — with no permanent, independent essence underlying them. Examine each aggregate and it proves impermanent, conditioned, not-self; behind them there is no further thing, no abiding owner, no sākṣin that stands clear of the flux. The sense of a stable “I” is itself one of the conditioned formations, and clinging to it is precisely the error that binds.

The disagreement is exact, which is what makes it instructive. Both traditions perform the same subtractive analysis of the person, stripping away body, sensation, and thought. The Upanishadic seers reach a residue and name it ātman; the Buddhist analysis reaches the same point and finds the residue empty — finds, where the witness was expected, only the witnessing without a witness. The Buddhist doctrine of non-self, with its companion teaching of dependent origination, is in this sense the photographic negative of the Upanishadic Self: the same procedure, the opposite conclusion. Later Mahāyāna thought complicated the picture — the doctrine of Buddha-nature speaks of an innate awakened ground in a way that some critics, ancient and modern, heard as a self smuggled back in under another name — but the founding contrast holds. The ātman is the one thing early Buddhism is most concerned to deny.

The Western rapture

When the Upanishads reached Europe, it was the doctrine of the Self that produced the strongest reaction. The route was indirect. A Mughal prince, Dārā Shikoh, had the principal Upanishads translated from Sanskrit into Persian in 1657; from that Persian a French Orientalist, Anquetil-Duperron, made a dense Latin rendering, the Oupnek’hat, published in Strasbourg in 1801 and 1802 — the first version of the texts in any European language. Arthur Schopenhauer read this Latin Oupnek’hat and was overwhelmed by it. He found in the Upanishadic Self a confirmation of his own conviction that the empirical world of separate individuals is appearance, māyā, a veil over a single underlying reality — and that the deepest truth of ethics, the recognition of oneself in another, was already compressed in tat tvam asi. His tribute became famous: in the whole world, he wrote, there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads; it had been the solace of his life, and would be the solace of his death.

Through Schopenhauer and the German idealists the current ran on to the American Transcendentalists, who read the Upanishads and the Gita with a recognition that bordered on homecoming. Ralph Waldo Emerson built the most purely Transcendentalist of his essays around a concept he called the Over-Soul — the one universal soul within which every individual being is contained and to which each has access by intuition, “that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man’s particular being is contained and made one with all other.” It is the Advaitic identity transposed into the idiom of New England: the divinity is not above and apart but within, and the self at one’s own center opens onto the self of all. The transposition was not exact — Emerson kept a flavor of moral and personal presence the strict Advaitin would call provisional — but the gravitational source is plain, and through him the Upanishadic Self entered the bloodstream of American literature, surfacing in Whitman’s cosmic first person and in a hundred later vocabularies of inner divinity.

Inside India the doctrine never became a museum piece. The twentieth-century sage Ramana Maharshi reduced the whole apparatus to a single instrument, the inquiry “Who am I?” — a relentless tracing of the sense of “I” back to its source until the ahaṃkāra dissolves and what remains is the witness it had obscured. The same recognition is restated in every generation of Advaita teaching and in the reform Vedanta that carried the message around the world. The question Uddālaka set his son in the forest — what is the one thing by which everything else is known — is still being asked in the only place the Upanishads ever said it could be answered, which is not outward among the objects but inward, at the silent point where the seer is finally seen to be what it was looking for.

→ In the library: The Upanishads (Müller, SBE I & XV) · Śankara — The Vedânta-Sûtras (Thibaut, SBE 34 & 38)

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