Tat Tvam Asi — and the Shock of It

Uddālaka teaches his son Śvetaketu in the kitchen.

He asks him to bring a fruit from the banyan tree. To cut it open. To find the seed. To cut the seed open. To find — what? Nothing visible. That which is so subtle you cannot see, that is the essence of the banyan, says the father. And — he turns to the boy — that thou art. Tat tvam asi.

Nine times this teaching is repeated in chapter six, with different examples. Salt dissolved in water. Honey from many flowers. Rivers flowing to the sea. Each example circles the same point: the formless reality that pervades everything is not separate from you. That, says the father, is the Self, and that is you.

If you take this teaching as poetry, you can read it many times without it disturbing you. If you take it as philosophy, you can debate it for a lifetime without sitting with what it actually says.

The Advaita teachers, beginning with Shankarācārya, will not allow either escape. They insist: the sentence is not a metaphor. It is a direct identification. And the entire discipline of inquiry — vichāra, anvaya-vyatireka, neti-neti — exists to take you from hearing the sentence to recognising it.

When the recognition arrives, the sentence stops being interesting. The fact behind it — never absent, never gained — is what remains.

— Acharya Bhagyashree Joshi Ji