The Intellectual Traditions of the East For Beginners, Part 1 | Persistence - Ātman, Brahman & Sat in the Upaniṣads

Identities: Conventional vs Actual

The famous ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus said “You do not step into the same river twice”. What he meant of course is that since the water is at constant flux in the river, the set of water that is in the river at some time is not the same as the set of water that is in the river after that time. Why then would we call such different waters at different times by the same river - what makes the river Ganga at one moment, the same river Ganga at another moment even though the waters that constitute it have completely changed between those moments? There is another related thought called “The ship of Theseus”. Theseus was a mythical king of Athens in Greek culture who saved Athenians from the evil King Minos. To commemorate the escape of Theseus to Athens after saving the Athenians from Minos, every year, it is said that ancient Athenians would mark this by taking his ship on a pilgrimage to Delos. Now, every year, the ship undergoes some maintenance so that some of its damaged parts are replaced. After a hundred years, no part of the ship is the same as that of the parts that were there originally but the Athenians still begin to call it as the ship of Theseus. Are they right or mistaken? This philosophical problem is called the paradox of Theseus and was discussed right from the time of ancient philosophers. There are two answers to this - let me call one side the conventionalist side and the other side as an actualist side.

The conventionalists argue that the ship hundred years later is not the same as the ship of Theseus initially in any way due to the complete change and hence technically, we are not right to think of both as the same ship. This side espouses that the identity that is indeed carried forward by the masses is a mere linguistic convention that thinks of the original ship during the times of Theseus to be the same as the ship hundred years later only due to the continuous and causally related links that connect the initial ship to the final ship. So, according to this conventionalist view, persistence of identity over time even with change is simply a mistaken folk belief. The actualists however argue back, saying that the ship of Theseus is not just the material of the ship but an abstract idea that has a reality of its own immaterially, that is only materially manifested by the actual material of the ship and that the form persists despite the material changes that gradually ensued over the years due to the causal continuity between the ship at one moment to the ship at another moment. But the conventionalist can argue back saying that this abstract idea is what we call as “mere linguistic convention” and is hence only conventionally real as it is thought of only in the mind and does not correspond to reality faithfully.

Whatever side one is on this debate, there is an underlying question that both sides need to answer - whether the identity of the ship of Theseus is only conventional or actual.

What are the criteria to be satisfied so that the ship continues to actually be or conventionally be referred to as the ship of Theseus over time?

Surely not all kinds of changes preserve the identity (whether conventional or actual) of the ship of Theseus. If the ship is destroyed by a fire and then someone recreates the ship perfectly to how it originally was in the minutest detail, we would still not think of the newly rebuilt ship as the ship of Theseus - we would only call it a replica. So, one important criteria required is continuity in change. The ship at any point in time should undergo only minor modifications to have only some of its parts replaced so that it continuously is related to how it was at its previous moment albeit with some modifications - however when it is destroyed by fire, the new ship that is built thereafter, is not causally linked to the ashes of the old ship which are materially of different chemical nature from the material of the old ship. So, causal continuity in the material realm seems to be a necessary condition for the persistence of identity (whether conventional or actual) to the ship. But is this alone enough?

The philosopherThomas Hobbes in the 17th century proposed a thought experiment to counter this notion - supposing that a ship custodian slowly gathers up all of the decayed parts of the ship (that were disposed of and replaced by the Athenians) and assembles it , to build a second ship. So that eventually we have two ships after a hundred years - one with all the material parts of the original ship that was built from scratch using all the parts of the old ship and another that was slowly renovated from the original - which of the two ships now can lay a claim on the identity of being the ship of Theseus? Both are causally related to the original ship of Theseus. Quoting his own words below¹:

For if that Ship of Theseus (concerning the Difference whereof, made by continual reparation, in taking out the old Planks, and putting in new, the sophisters of Athens were wont to dispute) were, after all the Planks were changed, the same Numerical Ship it was at the beginning; and if some Man had kept the Old Planks as they were taken out, and by putting them afterward together in the same order, had again made a Ship of them, this, without doubt, had also been the same Numerical Ship with that which was at the beginnings and so there would have been two Ships Numerically the same, which is absurd… But we must consider by what name anything is called when we inquire concerning the Identity of it… so that a Ship, which signifies Matter so figured, will be the same, as long as the Matter remains the same; but if no part of the Matter is the same, then it is Numerically another Ship; and if part of the Matter remains, and part is changed, then the Ship will be partly the same, and partly not the same.

Hobbes has proposed above two types of identities to solve this problem - identity of form and identity of material. Materially, the original ship of Theseus loses the identity of being as the ship of Theseus after all of its parts are getting replaced. After it loses one part, it is now 99% materially, the ship of Theseus. But that single part when gotten hold by the custodian, becomes 1% identical materially to the ship of Theseus. Materially, the ship that was built by the custodian with parts left over by Athenians, after completion, is materially identical to the ship of Theseus. So, identity by material is not a binary notion but comes in degrees. But only the ship renovated by Athenians is in form, identical to the ship of Theseus at all times as it is continuously related as a ship at all times to the original ship of Theseus (remember that the building of the ship by the custodian is an incremental process - first he starts with some parts and then gradually assembles together). It takes a while till the Athenians have thrown away all the parts of the original ship for the custodian to build his ship and hence during the initial stages, the custodian has only a collection of random disposed off parts from the original ship that does not have the structure of a ship. So, in form, it can never be related continuously to the original ship of Theseus. Identity by form is binary. We can then argue whether identity by form is just conventional or actual - Hobbes has thus just re-phrased the question.

But whichever side of the debate you are on - whether the identity of the ship is conventional or actual or a confusion between two different kinds of underlying identities, the problem of the identity of the ship does not affect you personally. If you take the conventionalist position that the identity of a ship that we commonly think about is actually an illusion or technically incorrect, you would not be shattered as much. But is this the same for all kinds of identities?

Ātman and Self-Identity: The Microcosm

But instead of that, let us take your identity as a person. If your name is X, then you believe that you are the same person X now as you were, when you were a child right? Imagine the staggering amount of changes that have taken place from your childhood. None of the cells in your body are the same as the cells that were there in your childhood (like the parts of the ship hundred years later were completely different). Also your mental world has changed completely - your thoughts, your tastes, your intentions, your views and so on have changed as well. But still we think of ourselves as the same person that we were. Is this also merely conventional like the identity of the ship of Theseus?

Most of us think that we have a constant self identity that runs throughout our life that is not merely conventional but something that is more firmly rooted. When we faint and regain consciousness to wake up in a radically different environment, we doubt everything but we always feel our own selves to be familiar. Even if we suffer from amnesia, after regaining consciousness, we may forget our own names and what we did, but there will still be a sense of “me” and the “outer world” running through although that is now more ethereal. What is it that remains constant throughout my life that makes me feel me at all moments despite drastic continuous changes? We think that our sense of self identity of ourselves a “me” is not just merely conventional but is actual - in fact it is more actual than any other identity - I can doubt about the identity of anything else (ships or rivers and so on), but I cannot doubt that I exist as a persistent self - Descartes said “I am” is the most fundamental and certain of all beliefs. To put in the words of the 18th century philosopher Bishop Butler, the identity of our self is “strict and philosophical” rather than “lose or popular” from convention.

But some Western philosophers did consider the idea of our own persistent self existence as merely conventional and hence fundamentally wrong and indefensible. How can I know that there is a me that persists as a stable element throughout my experienced life? Obviously, when you introspect your own thoughts, you do not find anything constantly running in them that binds them together (although there is a causal continuity). The radical empiricist philosopher David Hume asks this same question and thus concludes through introspection that there is nothing called a self - just a bundle of thoughts. The Buddha did the same thing 2500 years before Hume and we will see that in the section on Buddhism. Does this mean that the idea of the self is misplaced? Not necessarily. Critics of Hume have sometimes asked, ”If Hume looked for his own self and failed to find it, who/what was doing the looking?“. This is what Descartes also did to justify the existence of the self - if I doubt that I exist, there must be someone doing this doubting and that is the self. So, the persistent self is not to be looked for among the thoughts of our experience but to be inferred as the subject that does the thinking and not among the contents of what is thought. Every moment of thinking is a dual experience - it involves a subject and an object of thought. Perhaps, the idea of a self is not to be found in the objects of thought but in the subject. But even if we subscribe to the idea of the self as an inferred subject who does the thinking, how would you explain the persistence of the self when one is in a dreamless deep sleep - one does not think anything during deep sleep and hence does that mean that the self identity ceases to persist? The Indian philosophers would not take that as an answer - but what other non dual forms of experience beyond thinking are needed to directly trap the self at all times - even when one is not thinking as in a state of dreamless sleep?

The upaniṣads offer a radically different answer to this question by indeed appealing to such a form of experience but this form of experience is not available to everyone and requires extensive preparation and hard work. The upaniṣads are the earliest body of philosophical works in India, that confront the problem of the self and self identity head on. The authors of the upaniṣads firmly believe that the self is unchanging. But all our bodies, thoughts and personality and even the very fact that whether we are thinking (of something) - all these change - this is also a matter of fact that also can’t be denied. But they do not adopt a Western Cartesian solution to infer the self from the thinking mind because even thinking is not a constant in our lives [e.g. in deep sleep]. So, they conclude radically that our bodies and thoughts and personality and even the subject of thinking - are not a part of our self and hence play no role in constituting our self - who we really are. In short, this is the argument:

Each of us has a persistent sense of “me”.

This “me” (as is intuitively felt) must be unchanging.

But personality, thoughts, behavior and bodies and even whether we think or not, change.

Hence, the persistent “me” cannot include these elements.

This is different from the Western conceptions that seek to look for the self among the objects or subjects of thought. So, who we really are and that which gives us our persistent personal identity is divorced from thinking, our bodies and behaviors. It is very bare and simply exists without including any of our activities that we are engaged in. The Indian philosophers call such a self by the name - आत्मन् (ātman). The word आत्मन् is a Sanskrit noun derived from the verb root “अत्” that conveys the idea of being continuously persistent and conveys a connotation of eternality. For example, the word for Hinduism in Sanskrit is सनातनधर्म​ (sanātana-dharma - meaning: eternal dharma) that etymologically splits as सं (intensifying prefix) + आत् (modification of root अत्) +अन (noun suffix) which demonstrates that the word for eternal contains a form of the verb root अत् which indicates persistence through time.

What does such a postulation logically imply? The seers who composed the upaniṣads didn’t shy away in taking this to its fullest logical conclusions. It must be shocking to conclude that what we think so dearly of ourselves and our individuality - our personality, thoughts, desires and bodies - are not who we are because they are not “me” that runs constant. Who we really are - our ātman lacks all elements of our individuality. But if it lacks all individuality, then what is there to distinguish your ātman from my ātman?! Or even broader, what is there to distinguish your ātman from that of a dog or a bacteria or a plant?! So,at a deepest level of what persists and really constitutes who we are, we are the same as a dog or a tree or a bacteria. This is the radical conclusion reached in the upaniṣads. That what persists and hence constitutes really “us”, is the same as that which constitutes every other human being and even every living being. Deep down, we all are constituted by the same underlying persistent single “ātman”. But, this does not stop here. We have converged on a single persistent reality that underlies all existence of all living beings. Why stop at just living beings? What about gods? What about the material cosmos?

Brahman and Divine-Identity: The Theocosm

Like most other ancient civilizations of the world (Greece, Rome, Egypt etc..), ancient Indian civilization too was a polytheistic religion where prayers and sacrificial rituals to many divine gods and goddesses formed an integral part of ritual and cultural life. Different cultures of the world did eventually make a transition from polytheism to monotheism eventually. But they did it differently.

• One simple way to make the transition to monotheism is to radically deny that all the gods who have been worshiped by your ancestors for millenia [except one] simply do not exist - and now start worshiping just that one god as the true god who alone exists. This transition was made by the Hebrews initiated during the times of King Josiah (c. 640-690 BCE) and was solidified and reinforced during the times of prophets when the Jews were conquered and exiled by the Babylonian Empire. The Jews in exile started believing that exclusive worship of their national God (Yahweh) will placate him and then make him redeem them from the Babylonian exile. Eventually, the prophets convinced them to not just worship one god (their national god) but also to deny the existence of other gods.
• Another way to make the transition is to elevate one god as “the god” and place the other previous gods subordinate to the one supreme god - this too was did by many cults in the ancient world but was systemically did in Zoroastrianism - the founder of this religion named Zarathushtra reformed the traditional Iranian religion by making it into a monotheism by placing one god as supreme -Ahura Mazda- but the other traditional Iranian gods were not denied of their existence. They still existed but they are either evil (hence not worshipable) or if good, were declared to be subordinate to Ahura Mazda.
• The Greco-Roman world, the rest of Europe and Africa, and the Middle Eastern world made a discontinuous and violent transition to monotheism by forced conversion to a new monotheistic religion - Christianity (that started out as a Jewish sect) or Islam (that arose from a heretic form of Christianity prevalent in pre-Islamic Arabia). This is not actually an evolution to monotheism but a rampant revolution.

But in India, the transition to a “kind of monotheism” happened in the most elegant and continuous manner possible. The transition happened through getting convinced by investigation. If you remember from the previous section, the persistent self is devoid of any personal attributes that characterize us as a distinct individual in our everyday world - our thoughts, our desires, our bodies and so on. But even the gods of Hinduism are anthropomorphic - they have desires, bodies and thoughts and behavioral patterns too. Applying this same logic by asking what persists to gods and goddesses, we conclude that there is an underlying sense of identity behind all gods. But by the same reasoning, this persistent self-identity behind each god is divorced from their individual attributes - and hence fundamentally, all gods and goddesses originate in a single underlying persistent eternal reality - the upaniṣads call it as ब्रह्मन् (brahman). The word ब्रह्मन् in Sanskrit comes from the verb root “बृह्” that means “to grow, to swell, to expand, to enlarge”. Using the term brahman for this underlying impersonal divinity refers to the process of origination as it is the source from which all other gods and goddesses expand from.

So, all gods and goddesses become a single underlying brahman if viewed and understood only in terms of their bare essence of their own selves. This is not just tolerant but deeply accommodating to all kinds of popular religions - the multiplicity of gods and goddesses are neither denied nor subordinated to one supreme god and their worship continues exactly the same as before. Just that it is understood at a higher level that all these multiplicities of gods and goddesses when understood more perfectly, are actually one with respect to their persisting essence.

This is why Hinduism resists classification into monotheism or polytheism. There is an underlying monotheism (actually more precisely, monism, as we will see in a later section) behind a phenomenal polytheism. Yes, Hindus do worship many distinct gods and yes, Hindus also recognize that there is a base of one-ness in the divine realm.

Sat and World-Identity: The Macrocosm

All civilizations have attempted to understand the outside natural world that we perceive. Everyone must have asked at some point even in their childhood and be amazed by the magnificent changes that take place in our world around us. Change of seasons, change of weather, climate, flow of rivers, movement of celestial bodies and so on. Suddenly there is an earthquake or a tornado that wreaks havoc on millions and then disappears into oblivion. This phenomenal world of change that we observe, is referred to in Sanskrit as जगत् (jagat) which derives from a verb root “गम्” that means “to go, to move”.

For Sanskrit grammar nerds only: The word जगत् is a reduplicated weakened form of the root गम्. Reduplication happens in Sanskrit for example in the perfect tense (e.g. जगाम​ = he went). The disappearance of the final म् is also common in weak forms of the verb (e.g. गत​ = gone).

But is there any underlying constant beyond all of these natural phenomena? This has led to the development of natural science starting from the atomic theory to modern particle physics and general relativity. Atomic theory aims to explain the entire phenomenal world by saying that atoms are constant and all phenomenal change that we observe in the universe is simply due to the movement and rearrangement of these atoms due to their interaction by known physical laws. We are not yet towards a theory of everything in physics but we have come fairly close. We have broken down everything as much as we can to identify the fundamental particles that constitute everything and have come fairly close to describing all of their interactions through the four fundamental forces. What remains is just to unify one such force of gravitation to the three remaining fundamental forces in a single framework.

Would our Ṛṣis who wrote the Upanishads have been impressed by this? Were these particles and forces what they had been looking for? Not at all - this was not their ultimate aim. The Ṛṣis were looking for not just mere fundamental particles [which can’t be broken down further] and their interactions. This is still the phenomenal world of जगत् - it is still changing. The atoms move about and interact - just that we have now tamed down our understanding of these changes and restricted them and reduced them to a few fundamental particles and laws.

What is it about these particles that make them persist? This picture of objects or particles are just filters applied on our perceived reality to explain it. If we just are struck in our senses by the flux of this phenomenal जगत् (jagat), we feel just a bunch of momentary sights, sounds, smells, tastes and touches. The particles and forces are simply more sophisticated versions of categorizations and classifications to predict and exploit this world of phenomena. What makes any of these categorizations [these particles and forces themselves] persist? In other words, what was being looked for, was the base of existence - not about objects but about what it means “to exist” that persists through all phenomena.

To put into the language of the 20th century Western Existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger, what is being looked for by the rishis is “ontological” whereas what is studied by science is “ontic”. “Ontic” is about entities. When you talk about what makes a shoe a shoe, a mountain, an atom, an electron, etc., you’re talking about ontics. “Ontological” concerns at a more fundamental level - the structure of being as such - not particular beings, but what it means for beings to just be. Only when things are being all these other structures of interest in the ontic realm are made possible to manifest. Existence - plain, bland yet persistent. That is the target. Just plain “being” devoid of any attributes - which just persists. Just as behind the phenomenal changing sequences of thoughts, body parts and personalities, there underlies a persistent self (ātman), the Upaniṣadic seers concluded that behind the changing flowing world of jagat, there must be some ontological one-ness that persists all these and grounds existence of the entire cosmos. Just as the ātman cannot be sought out for in the flux of changing thoughts and perceptions, so does this constant which cannot be perceived as an object of the phenomenal experience that is constantly in flux.

This sounds as a logical extrapolation - when we looked for the underlying persistent factor behind the selves and gods and found them all to be a unity, should not there be a unity too into whatever underlies existence or “being” this entire phenomenal material world? This underlying unity in the phenomenal flow of जगत् (jagat) is called in Sanskrit in the text of upaniṣads by the term सत्(sat). The word सत् in Sanskrit literally means “being” and is grammatically the present active participle (शतृ न.पुं form in Sanskrit grammar) of the verb root “अस्” that means “to be”. In fact, the word “sat” is cognate to the English word “is” and the German word “ist” through Proto-Indo-European (i.e. if we go far enough back in time, the words “sat सत्” and “is” go back to the same word in PIE - the ancestral language to English, German, Sanskrit and all other Indo-European languages like Greek, Latin, Russian, Lithuanian, Persian, etc…). We thus see that the only thing that can be a common attribute of all that is really and persistently there in the world is sheer being and existence - divorced from the changing flux of our thoughts and material bodies and the categories that we impose on this flux of phenomenal world - “sat सत्” is the primordial fundamental state of the cosmos - the state of undifferentiated being. As the ātman and brahman are bereft of particular human and divine personalities, the sat is devoid of particular categorizations of phenomena. All three of them just share one attribute - being alive, being divine and being respectively.

Thus, सत् is just sheer being and existence that underlies all the flowing reality of the changing world of jagat.

Religion & Philosophy: The Hindu Trinity

We have derived the following three underlying unities:

1. Ātman - the underlying impersonal persisting self in the microcosm
2. Brahman - the underlying impersonal persisting divine in the theocosm
3. Sat - the underlying uncategorical persisting being in the macrocosm

But if at the deepest level, we cannot distinguish between categories of various individuals, gods and materials, what makes us think that we can distinguish between even these three categories?! The upaniṣads declare that all these three are the same and the equation “ātman = brahman = sat” is as revolutionary to Indian philosophy as much as the equation “E=mc^2” in modern physics. I call this the Hindu trinity. Equating these three means that “I (the ātman) am God (understood as brahman), God is the Cosmos (understood as sat), I am the cosmos”. The former two would be blasphemous in an Abrahamic theology while the third would contradict the privilege of humanity from the rest of creation. But in philosophical Hinduism, these would be almost obvious.

The ātman exists and it can never be known in the normal sense of the word. Can we move on now? No! In Hindu metaphysics, we are really ātman and after death, we will be reincarnated in a new body. In fact this is why religious conflicts have rarely become lethal and intensely violent in pre-Islamic India. Because, even if you are wrong in this birth, you can fix it next time! You will keep on getting chances to fix if you make mistakes. At the outset, this might give us hope - we are born again after death and hence we do not really die. But for Indians, this was actually a bad case since when you are born again, you also die again and rebirth also means redeath. The Indian ideal was not eternal joy in this cycle of birth and death but ironically, to escape this endless cycle of reincarnation, called in Sanskrit as संसार saṃsāra. The ultimate aim was to get liberated from this cycle and technically this was termed as मोक्ष​ mokṣa which literally means liberation in Sanskrit. What leads to this liberation and what happens after liberation?

The method for liberation in Hindu dharma lay in knowledge - realization that we are actually ātman = brahman = sat. But this knowledge is not mere belief after being convinced by either logical reasoning (for e.g, after reading this article) or by faith. If Hinduism were an Abrahamic religion, one could get liberation by just uttering and sincerely believing in a catechism or shahada [profession of faith] like “I am ātman which is the same as the brahman and sat”.

But in Hinduism, this is just a mere beginning in the road to liberation. What is needed is not a matter of sincere outward epistemic realization but a deep down realization that persists and transforms the way we live life. For example, imagine a sincerely believing Christian who thinks that he will be saved by his faith in Jesus and believes that he is guaranteed a ticket to heaven after his death wherein he will be in eternal joy thereafter. He also knows that the joys of heaven are much more gratifying than the ones on earth. But let’s say his doctor one day, suddenly gives him news that he is suffering from a deadly disease and soon is going to die. Will he be happy? Imagine that he is actually happy. That is the beginning to demonstrate the kind of belief that you need to possess to actually achieve liberation in Hinduism. One has to immerse oneself in the realization that atman is same as brahman and sat such that one loses their individuality completely - this state is called enlightenment. In this state, outwardly an individual looks enlightened to others but to himself, this statement becomes meaningless as his individuality is lost in that experience. That experience in which one realizes that one is atman is not like a realization of the correctness of a mathematical theorem (where there is a knower trapping a knowable entity) but is more like an experience when one is in dreamless deep sleep - there is no duality at all but still there is a consciousness that simply is and illuminates itself without creating any sense of duality. The process or technique which leads to this experience is called योग​ yoga which literally means unity or joining in Sanskrit.

The Status of the Phenomenal World

There are two questions that arise now. We have said that beyond the world of flux that includes multiplicities of persons, gods and objects, there lies another persistent unitary world of ātman = brahman = sat (hereafter I will use brahman to engulf the other two as well as anyways they are all equal). One must then ask -

1. What is the relationship between the phenomenal world of multiplicities and the underlying world of brahman?
2. In what exact sense, every individual self / object is ultimately equal to every other individual self/object and to the brahman?

Several metaphors are given by the upaniṣads to understand these relationships and equalities. In the later era of classical darśanas, Hinduism would split into several schools based on the answers to these and other questions. These schools would justify their proposed answers to the questions by interpreting the upaniṣadic metaphors that are given regarding this.

But whatever the answer to these questions one may subscribe to, it is undeniable that there is a superficial everyday reality of diversity and an ultimate deeper reality of unity (talk about unity in diversity!) - whatever the relationship between the two may be. How can both be true simultaneously? Can both be true simultaneously (Spoiler Alert: Advaita school will answer NO!).

The famous British astronomer Arthur Eddington gives this example: From the perspective of common sense experience, a table is solid and dense and as solid as one can get. Yet from the perspective of atomic physics, a table is mostly empty (remember that all atoms that constitute the table are mostly empty space with a tiny yet heavy nucleus). Both of these are simultaneously true - it would be unwise to deny atomic physics as just a mental structure that just encashes ordinary experience because it provides a stable framework and appeals to all sorts of evidence. It would also be unwise to deny ordinary experience as an incorrect, inferior, pre-science and folk reasoning. But just because atomic physics says it, doesn’t mean that it invalidates our common sensical experience of a table being solid and dense. Both are related and true simultaneously. The common sense experience served as the ingredient to scientific theories like that of atomic physics. And atomic physics can explain why we perceive the table to be solid and dense despite it being mostly empty. There is no contradiction as both these statements are made in different नयs (perspectives) and if one understands these. In other words, the philosophical point being made is that it is impossible to sharply separate what is meant by calling a statement “true” from what are the acceptable criteria for judging it to be true.

In the next part, we will continue and trace the development of the Indian philosophical tradition by studying a school that denied that anything persists at all - which is Buddhism.

Read the next part in this series here.

References

1. Elements of Philosophy, The First Section, Concerning Body