Dreamless sleep: no objects, no world, and someone wakes.
Ātman
The innermost self - not the personality or the body, but the awareness that all of those appear to.
- Theme
- Mind, self and consciousness
- Tradition
- Indian
- Term
- आत्मन् · ātman
- Term fixed
- c. 700 BC
In plain terms
Strip away everything you would ordinarily call yourself. The body changes. Thoughts come and go. Your personality at seven was not your personality now. Even your memories are partial and edited.
What the Upaniṣads propose is that something remains after all of that, and that it is not one more item on the list. It is the awareness in which every item appears - never itself an object, because it is what objects appear to.
The method for finding it is subtraction: neti, neti, not this, not this. Whatever you can observe is not it, precisely because you are observing it. And the claim that made the tradition famous is what follows: this innermost awareness is not different from the ground of everything else.
As a philosopher would put it
Ātman is established by argument and not only by assertion. The standard demonstration is that the self cannot be any of its objects, since the knower cannot be what is known; the Māṇᰳūkya analysis of waking, dreaming and deep sleep is the classic form, since in dreamless sleep objects vanish and the person is not annihilated.
The great identity is tat tvam asi, that thou art, in the Chāndogya - ātman is not merely like Brahman but is not other than it. Śaṅkara's Advaita takes this strictly: liberation is the removal of an error about identity, not the acquisition of anything.
The other Vedānta schools accept ātman and dispute the identity. Rāmānuja's Viśiṣṭādvaita makes selves real parts of Brahman, distinct and dependent; Madhva's Dvaita makes them permanently distinct. Sāṃkhya's puruṣa is a plurality of witnesses, each entirely passive, with all mental activity belonging to prakṛti. And Nyāya argues for a substantial self on inferential grounds, since desire and memory require a persisting substrate.
Where you meet it
The Upaniṣadic argument leans on something everyone has: dreamless sleep. In deep sleep there are no objects, no world, no thoughts and no sense of being anyone in particular. And yet a person emerges from it and reports having slept well, which is a report about a period with no content.
Sleep laboratories now measure this directly. Slow-wave sleep shows a characteristic EEG signature, minimal responsiveness and, on waking, either no report at all or a report of undifferentiated presence rather than of nothing. Studies of what sleep researchers now call dreamless sleep experience find that the blank is not always a blank, and the results are actively debated.
The tradition's use of this is precise. Something continues, since the person wakes and is not a stranger to themselves; nothing is being experienced, since there are no objects. That combination is what the argument needs, and it is available to anyone every night rather than requiring a special state.
What is actually disputed
Whether there is such a self, and if so how many.
The Buddhist denial is the sharpest and the oldest: no ātman is found under analysis, only aggregates, and the sense of an abiding self is exactly the error that binds. Advaita replies that this argument establishes only that no object is the self, which was never the claim. Buddhist writers respond that a witness that can never be found, described or distinguished has not been shown to be anything.
Within the traditions that accept it, the identity claim splits everything. If ātman is Brahman without remainder, individual selves are not ultimately many, and the plurality of persons is a fact about ignorance. Rāmānuja and Madhva both refuse that consequence, and the resulting three-way disagreement is the central structure of Vedānta.
Commonly confused with
- Soul c. 330 BC The Christian soul is created, individual and destined for judgement. Ātman is uncreated, and on the Advaita reading not individual at all.
- self in the psychological sense Personality, memory and self-image are exactly what the method subtracts. Ātman is what remains, not what is described.
- consciousness as studied by science Advaita takes consciousness to be self-luminous and not a product of anything, which makes it the wrong sort of item to be explained by a brain.
Defined against
- Anātman The two terms are the same debate from opposite sides, and neither can be stated without the other
Philosophers
- Yajnavalkya The Upaniṣadic dialogues where the term is fixed
- Shankara Ātman and Brahman identical without remainder
- Ramanujacharya Selves as real and distinct parts of Brahman
- Kapila Puruṣa as a plurality of passive witnesses
- Nagarjuna The tradition on the other side of the argument
Works
- The Principal Upanishads Where the term is established
- Brahmasutra Bhasya Śaṅkara's systematic case
- Sri Bhasya Rāmānuja's alternative
- Samkhya Karika Puruṣa distinguished from all mental activity
- Brahma Sutras The text all three are commenting on
Schools
- Advaita Vedanta Identity without remainder
- Vishishtadvaita Vedanta Real parts of a whole
- Dvaita Vedanta Permanently distinct selves
- Sāṃkhya school A plurality of witnesses
- Nyaya A substantial self argued for by inference
Related concepts
Anātman c. 450 BC · Self 1694 · Brahman c. 800 · Consciousness 1641 · Mokṣa c. 800
Yājñavalkya's dialogues in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka are where the term is pressed into its technical sense, some centuries before the Buddhist denial of it.