3. The Identity Statements of the Upaniṣads

The practice of knowledge for Śaṅkara was fully focused on the identity statements of the Upaniṣads, statements that correlate Brahman the ground of Being with the individual Self. This was in a sense very much like the standard process of liberation in the Brahma-Sūtra attributed to Bādarāyaṇa, meditation on Brahman as one’s Self. Śaṅkara, however, rejected the direct soteriological significance of meditation, for a variety of reasons, most of which we have already seen: some meditations were part of saguṇa-vidyās and were good either for promotion or for gradual liberation; meditation in general affirmed rather than negate the sense of agency. Meditation certainly had a positive role to play in the pursuit of liberation, but that was before one had taken to the life of renunciation: meditation was for purity of the mind and existence, and it was practiced within the scope of the apara-vidyās. Liberation, on the other hand, being directly consequent on the removal of ignorance, was a result of knowledge qua knowledge.

The Upaniṣadic vidyās in the Brahma-Sūtra attributed to Bādarāyaṇa were built around injunctive statements, and even the triple pan-Vedāntic process was introduced by Yājñavalkya’s urging of Maitreyī. For Śaṅkara, however, all injunctive texts, even those that were part of nirguṇa-vidyās, presupposed duality, because they were based on a system of action and its contributory factors: they promoted the action of meditation, required an agent and an object of meditation, etc.^[1] Such statements could not occupy the textual locus around which the practice of brahma-vidyā would be organized, because that would mean that the Upaniṣads meant to affirm non-duality as intended. We saw, in fact, this problem already in the doctrine of prasaṅkhyāna, whose proponents accepted the identity of the Self with Brahman disclosed by statements such as tat tvam asi, but wanted meditation to be enjoined as their subsidiary so that the textual intuition of Brahman could transit from mediacy to immediacy and beyond the subject-object duality.

The prasaṅkhyāna doctrine was also not acceptable to Śaṅkara, again for several reasons. First, it seemed to miss the root cause of saṃsāra: ignorance. If one’s embodiment and transmigration were consequent on superimposing characteristics of one thing over another, the fallback to injunction and the practice of meditation just reaffirmed the same ignorant agency that had been, supposedly, annulled by the understanding of the negative descriptions of the Self in the Upaniṣads.^[2] Second, the essence of meditation was the repetition of the same notional action over and over. If the root problem of saṃsāra was ignorance, what new contribution would that same notion bring toward the removal of ignorance?^[3] Finally, meditation involved agency that was inherently antinomous: on the one hand, it reaffirmed ignorance such that so long meditation was practiced, there could be no liberation; on the other hand, it had to be practiced repeatedly, for there was no reason why one would not slip back into bondage when meditation was terminated, if understanding the identity statements was not enough. Was this stream of awareness what liberation was?

In Śaṅkara’s system, thus, the ontological identity of Brahman and the Self replaced the meditative correlation of the two in the Brahma-Sūtra attributed to Bādarāyaṇa, and the statements which posit this identity replaced the injunctions of meditation as the core of the practice of brahma-vidyā. Clarification of meaning of the identity statements through the three processes of śravaṇa, manana and nididhyāsana replaced meditative absorption in Brahman, and liberation followed once one had fully understood the identity statements. Playing with Śaṅkara’s language, we may call this stage of full understanding brahmānubhava, brahmātmatvānubhava, brahmātmāvagati, vākyārthānubhava, kaivalyānubhava, that is, direct experience of Brahman, of Brahman’s being the Self, of the meaning of the identity statements, or of liberation.^[4] Sureśvara in the Sureśvara’s Naiṣkarmya-Siddhi calls it tat-tvam-asy-ādi-vākyārtha-parijñāna, full comprehension of the meaning of the identity statements such as tat tvam asi, “you are that.”^[5] While in the Advaita chain of soteriological causality this stage was not the last link, being followed by the destruction of ignorance and the state of remaining in the Self, it was the culmination of one’s effort, since the last two links would follow by necessity, in a logical but not temporal sequence. We can, therefore, mark such full understanding of the identity statements as the point of consummation of the brahma-vidyā practice.

Now, what are these identity statements? We saw under the previous heading that they were Upaniṣadic statements that affirm the identity of the individual with the supreme Self, the vijñānātman with the paramātman. More formally, they are statements that affirm the being of the category or padārtha of “that” to the category or padārtha of “you,” which stand for Brahman and the Self respectively.^[6] The precise meaning of the two categories is ascertained through examination of Upaniṣadic passages, and we will see how that proceeds shortly. The identity that is affirmed of the two categories is not analytic, as noted by Rudolph Otto. That is, the second is not just another name for the first, although the ultimate reference of the two categories is the same. The identity statements are, rather, synthetic, that is, conveying new information that is unknown about the correlated categories before they are identified.^[7] That must be so, in any case, if the statements are to be pramāṇa at all. It is not necessary, furthermore, that their form be x = y, for Śaṅkara mentions among them statements of the “there is no other x than y” kind, where y stands for the Self directly or through some of its cognitive functions that an agent might identify with.

This new knowledge contained in the identity statements cannot be had before one fully understands what the two categories ultimately stand for. In fact, the clarification of meaning as the process that replaced meditation was clarification of meaning of the respective categories. “A sentence such as tat tvam asi cannot give rise to certain knowledge regarding its meaning in the case of those for whom the two categories are blocked by ignorance, doubt, or confusion, because the meaning of the sentence depends on understanding the meaning of the individual words.”^[8] We will, therefore, first focus on what entities Śaṅkara thought were correlated in statements such as tat tvam asi.

Before we do that, however, we should mention that there does not seem to be a technical term that is consistently used to refer to such identity statements as a category, nor do we find anywhere the full scope of their class. There are several designations that we can identify in the Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Brahma-Sūtra One is abheda-nirdeśa, statement of non-difference, but that wording was influenced by the sūtra itself.^[9] The second is the one we have seen under the previous heading, vijñānātmanaḥ paramātmaikatvopadeśa-parā (pravṛttiḥ), a mode of scriptural sentences that identify the individual with the supreme Self. The most common way to refer to them seems to be tat-tvam-asy-ādi, “the group in which the first member is tat tvam asi,” to which various additions can be attached, such as evaṃ-jātīyaka and ity-evam-ādi-vākya, “of such kind;” vākya; vedānta-vākya; śāstra; śruti; brahmātmaikatva-vastu-pratipādana-para, “a statement that affirms the unity of Brahman and the Self.”^[10]

From passages in the Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Brahma-Sūtra, we can provide the following examples of identity statements as a representative but not an exhaustive list.^[11] Such a full list cannot be found in Śaṅkara’s works, and whenever he lists statements of this kind, his purpose is just to illustrate.

-) ahaṃ brahmāsmi, “I am Brahman,” in Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 1.4.10.

-) ayam ātmā brahma, “This Self is Brahman,” in Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 2.5.19

-) eṣa ta ātmā sarvāntaraḥ, “The self within all is this self of yours,” in Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 3.4.1.

-) eṣa ta ātmāntaryāmy amṛtaḥ, “This Self of yours, the inner controller, the immortal,” in Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 3.7.3-23.

-) nānyo’to’sti draṣṭā śrotā mantā vijñātā, “There is no other seer, hearer, thinker, knower than him,” in Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 3.7.23

-) nānyad ato’sti draṣṭṛ, “There is no seer other than this [imperishable],” in Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 3.8.11.

-) [tat satyaṃ sa ātmā] tat tvam asi, “That is Being, that is the Self, that is what you are,” in Chāndogya Upaniṣad 6.8.7-6.14.3.^[12]

-) tvaṃ vā aham asmi bhagavo devate’haṃ vai tvam asi devate, “Blessed Lord, I am surely you and you are surely me.”^[13]

Establishing an exhaustive list seems superfluous in any case, because the principle is that a statement which identifies Brahman with the Self in a text that has nirguṇa-vidyā as its scope is “of that kind” as tat tvam asi. It is rather important to note that such a statement must be part of a nirguṇa-vidyā: a glaring absence from this list is the statement from the Kauṣītaki, yas tvam asi so ‘ham asmi, that mister X addresses to Brahman on the couch in brahma-loka. One can hardly imagine a more explicit and fuller identity statement, and Śaṅkara’s aversion to this old Upaniṣad has been well noted by Signe Cohen.^[14]

Śaṅkara, nevertheless, focused most of his attention on interpreting tat tvam asi and ahaṃ brahmāsmi, and there seems to be a good reason for that practice. Under Brahma-Sūtra attributed to Bādarāyaṇa 4.1.3, the sūtra that established meditation on Brahman as one’s Self because “they understand and teach it like that,”^[15] he divides the identity statements in two categories, related to the notions of understanding and teaching, respectively. Ahaṃ brahmāsmi is in the first group, while tat tvam asi in the second, providing thus neat blueprints for the two perspectives in the processes of brahma-vidyā, that of the student and that of the teacher. Historically, however, it was another identity statement, one contained in the Taittirīya Upaniṣad, that anchored the text based on which the very notion of identity statement culminating in mahā-vākya was developed: it was tasmād vā etasmād ātmanaḥ, “from this very [Brahman] which is the Self [creation proceeds].”^[16] Śaṅkara’s commentary on the second chapter of the Taittirīya was the primary source for Sarvajñātman’s Pañca-Prakriyā, and therefore I will base my account there. I will also draw on Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Brahma-Sūtra 4.1.2 and 2.1.14-22, as well as on Śaṅkara’s Upadeśa-Sāhasrī

Footnotes and references:

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[1]:

Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Brahma-Sūtra 2.1.22.

[2]:

Cf. for instance Śaṅkara’s Upadeśa-Sāhasrī 18.21:
“Once the superimposition has been negated through the neti neti text, no further injunction of superimposition is in any way possible.”—
so 'dhyāso neti netīti prāptavat pratiṣidhyate |
bhūyo 'dhyāsa-vidhiḥ kaścit kutaścin nopapadyate ||

[3]:

See, for instance, Sureśvara’s Naiṣkarmya-Siddhi 3.124:
“If reasoning and hearing do not directly give rise to certain knowledge before, what new result could possibly appear by repetition?”—
yukti-śabdau purāpy asya na ced akurutāṃ pramām |
sākṣād āvartanāt tābhyāṃ kim apūrvaṃ phaliṣyati ||

[4]:

These are adaptations of expressions from Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Brahma-Sūtra 1.1.4, 2.1.4, 3.3.32, 4.1.2.

[5]:

Sureśvara’s Naiṣkarmya-Siddhi 1.52.

[6]:

Formulations of this kind abound in the Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Brahma-Sūtra, and the correlated entities are interchangeably called tat-padārtha, brahma, īśvara, parameśvara, and tvaṃ-padārtha, jīva, śārīra etc. See for starters Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Brahma-Sūtra 2.1.21, 2.3.46, 3.2.6, and 4.1.2-3.

[7]:

Otto 1970:102: “To judge by terms and speculative efforts, “Ātman is Brahman” is an analytical statement, or rather a verdict of identity. In secret, however, it remains a verdict of synthesis.”

[8]:

tatra yeṣām etau padārthau ajñāna-saṃśaya-viparyaya-pratibaddhau, teṣāṃ tat tvam asi ity etad vākyaṃ svārthe pramāṃ notpādayituṃ śaknoti, padārtha-jñāna-pūrvakatvād vākyārtha-jñānasyeti. Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Brahma-Sūtra 4.1.2.

[9]:

Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Brahma-Sūtra 2.1.22, II.328: nanv abheda-nirdeśo’pi darśitaḥ—tat tvam asi ity evaṃ-jātīyakaḥ. The sūtra runs: adhikaṃ tu bheda-nirdeśāt.

[10]:

Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Brahma-Sūtra 1.1.4, 1.2.8, 1.3.19, 1.4.6, 3.3.32; throughout Sureśvara’s Sureśvara’s Naiṣkarmya-Siddhi as well.

[11]:

References in the Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Brahma-Sūtra include 1.1.4, 1.2.8, 2.3.30, 3.2.27, 3.4.8, 4.1.3.

[12]:

Joel Brereton (1986) had argued against the interpretation of tat tvam asi as an identity statement, claiming that the gender of the subject would have to follow the gender of the predicate, and that the sentence, if meant to be an identity statement, should read saḥ tvam asi. For my purposes this intervention is irrelevant, since Advaitins have universally read tat tvam asi as an identity statement. I do not wish to address the issue at length here, but it does not seem to me that Brereton is right. The personal pronoun tvam is not gendered, and it is but right for the demonstrative tat in such a case to follow the gender of the noun it stands for, which is sat, Being.

[13]:

In Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Brahma-Sūtra 4.1.3, III.773, introduced by tathā hi parameśvara-prakriyāyāṃ jābālā ātmatvenaiva etam upagacchanti, “To illustrate, the Jābālas, in the chapter on the Supreme Lord, present him as the Self.” I have not been able to identify the reference.

[14]:

Cohen 2008:139-147.

[15]:

ātmeti tūpagacchanti grāhayanti ca.

[16]:

Taittirīya Upaniṣad 2.1.1.