What could it mean to know the self?

Who could know the beginning?

What would it take to know how everything began? A witness would help, but where could a witness have stood before there was a world?

Rig Veda 10.129 dwells on exactly that difficulty. Moving through images of darkness, heat and desire, the hymn asks who can know how creation came about, and observes that even the gods arrived after the beginning it is trying to understand. It ends on an arresting possibility: perhaps the highest overseer knows; perhaps even he does not. [1]

The hymn belongs to the Vedas, collections of sacred learning in South Asian traditions; the Upanishads come from the same religious inheritance. Its questions do not make it an early statement of a modern scientific theory, and they cannot tell us what everyone who recited it believed. What they show is inquiry at work inside a religious text, and the uncertainty is this passage’s own. [3]

In the Upanishadic dialogue at the center of this lesson, the question turns toward the knower. What would it mean to know the self, if the self is what does the knowing?

What wealth cannot promise

In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, Yajnavalkya is preparing to leave his household and settle his property between his two wives, Maitreyī and Katyayanī. Maitreyī asks whether the wealth of the whole earth would make her immortal. It would give her the life of a prosperous person, Yajnavalkya replies, but it holds no promise of immortality. So she asks him to teach her what he knows instead. [2]

Her question changes the conversation. A settlement of property becomes an inquiry into whether the good on offer could ever satisfy the desire that matters to her. Adding more wealth would not change the answer, because more of something useful is still not a different kind of good.

We meet Maitreyī through the dialogue that has come down to us. The text gives her questions a decisive role, but it offers no biography we could securely recover, and it cannot tell us how women generally lived in the period.

Knowing the one who knows

Yajnavalkya asks Maitreyī to consider why a spouse, a child or wealth is dear to anyone. His answer ties their value to the self, and it ends in a demand: the self must be heard about, reflected on and understood. The Sanskrit term ātman, often written atman, can be translated as “self”; what that self amounts to is exactly what is at issue. [2]

It would be too quick to hear this as advice to put ourselves first. In the account Yajnavalkya develops, the self is not one more possession we happen to want. His inquiry asks what makes it possible for anything to be dear to us, or known by us, at all.

His comparisons lead toward a difficult claim. The self, he says, is like salt dissolved in water, which can no longer be picked out as a separate lump. He then speaks of a return to the elements, and of there being no knowledge after death. Maitreyī objects that this talk of no more knowledge has confused her. If the promise concerns the self, what becomes of the familiar person who knows one thing rather than another? [2]

The objection matters. Without it, a troubling argument would look like an easy assurance of personal survival. Yajnavalkya’s final response asks how knowing could go on at all once the distinction between the knower and what is known has fallen away. By what means could anyone know the knower itself?

A comparison of our own can make the difficulty vivid. When you look at your face in a mirror, the face is something you inspect, but the inspecting is still going on from your side of the glass. The mirror separates what is known from the activity of knowing it. It cannot show that there is an eternal self, or that every knower is ultimately one; those conclusions would need arguments the example does not supply.

Self, world and action

Another passage attributed to Yajnavalkya, Brihadaranyaka 4.4.5, identifies the self with brahman, which in this setting names ultimate reality. The claim joins what we most deeply are to what reality most deeply is. It belongs to a particular account, and not every Indian thinker accepts it. [2]

This inquiry grew up within traditions of ritual, recitation and teaching. Brian Black’s study shows how Upanishadic passages explore the relations among the person, the cosmos and ritual action. Read the dialogue as a modern theory of consciousness and nothing more, and you lose much of what knowing the self was meant to accomplish. Nor do the Upanishads speak with one voice: different texts and teachers give different accounts. [3]

The surrounding passage in 4.4 links desire, action and the life that follows. Karma means action, and here a person’s actions shape what that person becomes. The passage also describes release from a cycle of rebirth driven by desire. In this setting liberation means freedom from that cycle, though other texts and traditions explain it differently. [2]

Together, these terms explain why an inquiry into the self is also an inquiry into how to live, and into what could free a person from repeated death. Liberation here means far more than feeling more confident, and the early Upanishadic passages do not add up to one finished system; even the vocabulary that later accounts made familiar took time to develop. [3]

Pause and try

A reader says, “Maitreyī asks for immortality, so Yajnavalkya must promise that her familiar memories and personality will continue forever.” Why does the dialogue make that conclusion hard to draw? Explain how her objection helps us read it.

Read an explanatory answer

What Maitreyī wants does not tell us what the teaching promises: the reader has moved straight from her request to his answer. Yajnavalkya’s account challenges the ordinary separation between a person who knows and an object known, and her objection exposes the difficulty: what would remain of knowing if that separation disappeared? So the dialogue cannot be paraphrased as a guarantee that her familiar personality survives intact. The nearby identification of self and brahman offers a deeper account of self and reality, and whether that account is true still calls for examination.

Carry the question forward

The creation hymn asks who could know the beginning; Maitreyī asks what kind of knowledge could answer a desire that wealth cannot satisfy. Each passage, in its own way and in its own kind of text, brings the limits of an answer into view.

The next lesson turns to an early Buddhist discourse that asks whether any of the changing parts of experience can rightly be identified as self. It is worth reading beside this dialogue, as long as we don’t assume that it answers these exact words or speaks for every later Buddhist school.

Sources and limits

[1] Rig Veda 10.129, “Creation Hymn,” translated by Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, in The Norton Anthology of World Religions: Hinduism, edited by Wendy Doniger, general editor Jack Miles (W. W. Norton, first edition, 2015), printed pp. 79–80, for the hymn’s questions about the origin of creation. The complete hymn, its headnote and six notes were read; the hymn’s seven stanzas are on p. 80, and the page image of p. 80 was checked. The lesson relies on this English translation. It offers no independent Sanskrit analysis, and the rest of the Rig Veda was not read.

[2] Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, translated by F. Max Müller, The Upanishads, Part II, Sacred Books of the East 15, 2.4 (printed pp. 108–113) and 4.4.1–7 (pp. 174–177), hosted by the Internet Sacred Text Archive, for the dialogue with Maitreyī and the passage on self, desire and action. The full 2.4 dialogue and the selected 4.4 passage were read. On this web edition, the closing exchange about duality and the knower follows paragraph 13 without a new paragraph number; it is commonly located as 2.4.14.

Müller’s older English wording and his capitalized “Self” carry interpretive choices. The lesson explains the difficulty with help from [3]. It does not claim to settle the Sanskrit, compare every translation or recover a verbatim historical conversation.

[3] Brian Black, “Upaniṣads,” chapter 12 of History of Indian Philosophy, edited by Purushottama Bilimoria (Routledge, 2018). Four sections were read in full: “Introduction,” “The Upaniṣads and the Vedas,” “From ritual to philosophy,” and “The self in the Upaniṣads.” EPUB locators: OEBPS/html/ch22.xhtml, sections sec1-059a, sec1-059, sec1-060 and sec1-061. These are internal section locators, not print-page numbers. Later sections and the rest of the book were not read. The source supplies historical and interpretive context; it does not make the texts uniform or settle their precise chronology.