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Who Are You?

1.1 Selves

1.1.1 Upaniṣadic impersonal selves

There is no single perfect place or time for taking one’s initial philosophy steps – starting to be acquainted, let alone friends, with philosophy. But here, now, is an excellent place to begin, by meeting one of the earliest steps ever taken, in the Upaniṣads. These were philosophically religious literary writings on ideas from four earlier sacred Vedic texts, grounding what became Hinduism. Religion and philosophy are not always so separate. That is evident in these Upaniṣads (the term ‘Upaniṣad’ means ‘hidden connection’, maybe ‘hidden teaching’). All were written in Sanskrit, in northern India, seemingly over several centuries, possibly starting around 700 bce. (By whom? We do not know.) Let us sample a few of their ideas about selves (a beginning focus explained a moment ago in the book’s introduction).

What is a self? I am one. You are one. Or so we say. But what do we mean? What should we mean? Can we find self-understanding in the Upaniṣads?

In the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad (Great Forest Upaniṣad; the oldest Upaniṣad; probably pre-Buddhist), a sage, Yājñavalkya, spoke with his wife, Maitreyī, about selves (4.5.12–13).

Yājñavalkya seems to have been saying that the self within any one of us is somehow the same within all of us. There is no difference in that respect between my self and yours. Dramatically, this does not mean ‘the same in nature’; it means ‘the very same self’. My personal self is your personal self, and vice versa. Neither of us has a distinct personal self. It is as if all of us partake in, or share, a self – the same self, a common self. Yājñavalkya says this (4.5.15): ‘When … the Whole has become one’s very self, then who [= what more specific self] is there for one [= one’s self] to see and by what means?’

Does that make sense? Here is one way in which it might. Each of us is different. But is that because each of us has a fully individual self? Or might everyone be the same thing in whatever makes us persons at all? You and I would be one – somehow literally one self. People often say that we are all connected, really or fundamentally the same. Is that the picture here? We would be the same, in a way, by sharing a single universal self. Might we differ only in other details, such as how we look and what we think and feel? How I look is not how you look; yet our different appearances would be superficial: they would not be what makes either of us a self, let alone a distinct self.

Consider these lines from the later Kaṭha Upaniṣad (5.9–10):

Those analogies extend Yājñavalkya’s one about the ‘mass of salt’. The ‘single wind’ (the general power of breathing, I think this means) circulating within each of us ‘adapts its appearance to match each of us’. Our two selves would be one self, in that way (these analogies suggest).

Here is a more subtle way to make the point. In the also early Chāndogya Upaniṣad (5.18.1), Aśvapati talked of ‘this self here, the one common to all men’, and said that, when one knows the self ‘as somehow distinct’ (as not a single universally shared self), one ‘eat[s] food’. What did Aśvapati mean? It is explained by this contrast, with which he continued:

This seems to be saying that when thinking of one’s self in that universal way, as everyone’s self at once, one is engaging with the Whole: one ‘eats food’ among all the selves at once, so to speak; one does this in ‘all the worlds’, as ‘all the beings’ at once.

Maybe. I am trying – cautiously – to interpret some ancient writing, asking what may emerge. It feels like something important is being suggested. These Upaniṣads are poetic and complex, though. I am focusing on one idea that can arise when reading them. It seems like a philosophical idea. We have begun being philosophical.

1.1.2 Buddhist no-selves

Or might there be no selves? (No I? No you? No one else?)

That question is sparked by another of the world’s oldest organised ways of thinking – Buddhism, whose distinctive ideas include the no-self view. Meet King Milinda (he was real – the Greek king Menander) and the sage Nāgasena (perhaps not real) in a northern Indian dialogue, The Questions of King Milinda (from around two thousand years ago).

Thus Nāgasena, almost immediately, imbued an ordinary meeting with a philosophical tone. He acknowledged the name ‘Nāgasena’. But he denied that a real self was being named. King Milinda responded by paraphrasing Nāgasena’s thesis and wondering, aloud, whether it is true. ‘This Nāgasena says there is no permanent individuality (no soul) implied in his name. Is it now even possible to approve him in that [= to agree with him]?’ Whereupon Milinda reached for rhetorical questions that, in his view, showed why Nāgasena’s no-self view cannot be true.

Nāgasena was being asked, by Milinda, who is doing ‘his’ meditation if not really him (he who is named ‘Nāgasena’)? What would the imagined action of aggression be, if not murder of Nāgasena himself? Milinda persisted with such questioning, trying to locate the person Nāgasena:

Thus, Milinda asked about physical parts of Nāgasena. If they are not Nāgasena, what is?

Milinda was asking whether Nāgasena is constituted by a general appearance – an outward form. No? Then what of something ‘behind’ the appearance, a capacity for thinking or some actual thoughts? Still ‘no’, said Nāgasena.

Hence, Milinda felt that he had asked about all aspects of Nāgasena, the ‘outward’ appearance and the inner mental life. But there is this further possibility.