That Thou Art

In the sixth book of the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, Uddālaka Āruṇi instructs his son Śvetaketu through a series of images: salt dissolved in water, the seed of a fig, rivers entering the sea. Each ends with the same refrain.¹1 The rivers are at 6.10, the seed of the nyagrodha, a fig tree, at 6.12, and the salt at 6.13.

Müller renders the refrain as a direct address, keeping the second person of the Sanskrit (Müller 1879, Chāndogya 6.8.7). The sentence is not a proposition about selves in general. It is said to someone. This commentary reads the sentence slowly: its setting, its images, and the readings that have divided the schools of Vedānta for more than a thousand years.²2 The refrain, tat tvam asi, closes each of the teachings from 6.8 to 6.16, nine times in all.

The setting§

The sixth book opens with a homecoming. Śvetaketu has spent twelve years studying the Vedas, and returns, the text says, proud of his learning and thinking himself well read (Müller 1879, Chāndogya 6.1.1–2). His father asks him a single question: has he asked for that teaching by which the unheard becomes heard, the unthought becomes thought, and the unknown becomes known? Śvetaketu has not, and does not know what such a teaching could be.

Uddālaka answers with an image from the potter’s workshop. By knowing one lump of clay, one knows everything made of clay; the pots and jars differ only in name and form, and what they really are is clay (Müller 1879, Chāndogya 6.1.4). The teaching he is about to give is of that kind: not one more fact, but the knowledge of that from which all things are made, and by which everything else is known. He then describes the beginning of things. In the beginning, he says, there was only being, one only, without a second, and from it, by its own intention to become many, came heat, water and food, and from their combination everything else (Müller 1879, Chāndogya 6.2).

The images§

The teaching does not begin with a definition. It begins with things a boy can hold: water, salt, a seed. The lessons that follow each take an ordinary experience and turn it toward the one being. Bees gather nectar from many trees and make it into a single honey, in which no drop knows which tree it came from (Müller 1879, Chāndogya 6.9). Rivers flowing east and west enter the sea and become the sea, and do not know themselves as this river or that (Müller 1879, Chāndogya 6.10). So creatures, Uddālaka says, come from being without knowing that they came from being.

Then the images become experiments. Śvetaketu is told to bring a fruit of the great fig tree, to break it open, then to break open one of its tiny seeds. What does he see inside? Nothing at all. From that subtle essence which he cannot see, his father tells him, the great tree stands (Müller 1879, Chāndogya 6.12). Next, he is told to put salt in water overnight and bring it in the morning. He cannot find the salt; it has dissolved. His father tells him to sip from the top, the middle and the bottom. It is salty everywhere. The salt is present throughout, though it cannot be seen (Müller 1879, Chāndogya 6.13).

The images are chosen with care. Each teaches the same lesson from a different side: that what is most real is not an object among objects, that it is subtle rather than large, that it pervades what it grounds, and that it is known not by looking at it but by tasting it everywhere. The last point matters. Śvetaketu does not see the salt. He finds that there is nowhere it is not.

Near its end the sequence turns to the most personal images of all. A man brought blindfold from the land of the Gandhāras and left in a wilderness finds his way home only when someone removes the blindfold and he asks directions from village to village; so a person who has a teacher comes to know (Müller 1879, Chāndogya 6.14). A dying man’s speech merges into his mind, his mind into breath, his breath into heat, and heat into the highest being (Müller 1879, Chāndogya 6.15). The last lesson, of a man proved innocent or guilty by an ordeal of a heated axe, turns on truthfulness (Müller 1879, Chāndogya 6.16). After each image, the refrain.

The sentence§

The Sanskrit is three words: tat tvam asi. Tat is “that”, the subtle essence the lessons have been pointing to, the being that was in the beginning, one without a second. Tvam is “thou”, Śvetaketu, the proud young scholar sitting in front of his father. Asi is “art”. Grammatically the sentence is as simple as a sentence can be. Two terms are joined by the verb “to be” in the second person.

Everything depends on what that joining means. “You are that” can express identity, as in “you are the one I met yesterday”. It can express membership or kind, as in “you are a scholar”. It can express a relation of part and whole, or of body and indwelling soul. The Upaniṣad does not say which. It says the sentence nine times, and leaves the hearer to discover what it means for it to be true.

Two readings§

Later Advaita counts the sentence among the four “great sayings” (mahāvākyas), one drawn from each Veda.³3 The others usually listed are prajñānaṃ brahma (Aitareya Upaniṣad 3.3), ahaṃ brahmāsmi (Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 1.4.10) and ayam ātmā brahma (Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad 2). For Śaṅkara the “thou” names the witnessing consciousness once everything that can be observed has been set aside; for Rāmānuja it names the individual self as the body of the Lord who indwells it.

The Advaita reading has to explain how an identity can hold between terms that seem so unlike: the infinite source of the world and a finite young man. Its answer, worked out by Śaṅkara and systematized in later manuals, is that each term carries features that belong to it only by superimposition, and that the sentence works by setting those features aside. The usual illustration is a sentence like “this is that Devadatta”, said of a man one meets again in a different place and time: the identity holds of the person, once the differences of here and there, now and then, are left out.⁴4 The technique is called jahadajahallakṣaṇā or bhāgalakṣaṇā, “implication that abandons part and keeps part”. It is set out in later Advaita manuals such as Sadānanda’s Vedāntasāra. Remove from “that” its character as cause of the world, and from “thou” its character as this body and mind, and what remains in both is the same: pure consciousness, one without a second.

Rāmānuja, writing in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, found this reading forced. Words, he argued, do not normally mean less than they say. When scripture says “that thou art”, both terms keep their full meaning and both refer, in the end, to Brahman: “that” to Brahman as the cause of the world, and “thou” to Brahman as the inner controller of the individual self, which is its body. The sentence expresses a real unity, but a unity of the kind that holds between a self and its body, not an identity that dissolves the individual. For Rāmānuja the individual self is eternally distinct from Brahman and eternally dependent on it, and its highest good is not to disappear into Brahman but to know and love it.

Who is addressed§

Each reading gives a different answer to a question the text itself raises: who is the “thou”? It is worth noticing how the Upaniṣad has prepared that question. The whole sixth book begins with Śvetaketu’s pride, and its first lesson is that everything he knows leaves out the one thing that would make it knowledge. The images then take him further and further from the kind of knowing he already had. The seed contains nothing he can see. The salt is nowhere and everywhere. By the time the refrain is spoken, he is being asked to find the subtle essence not in a seed, not in water, but in the one who is doing the looking.

This is why the second person matters. A sentence in the third person, “the self is Brahman”, could be learned as a doctrine and repeated in an examination. A sentence in the second person cannot be fully understood by anyone but the one to whom it is said. The Advaita tradition makes this explicit: the great sayings are not information but instruction, and they do their work when the hearer, having been prepared, recognizes what they point to. Rāmānuja’s tradition makes the same point in another key: the sentence reveals to the self its relation to the Lord, and the fitting response is devotion.

Śvetaketu, as far as the text tells us, never answers. After the ninth refrain the book simply ends, with a closing sentence that he understood. The proud young scholar of the first page has become a listener. Whatever else the sentence means, that change is part of it.