Tat Tvam Asi — That Thou Art
The Mahavakya 'Tat Tvam Asi' (That thou art) from the Chandogya Upanishad is Uddalaka Aruni's teaching to his son Shvetaketu — the recognition that the student's innermost self is identical with the infinite Brahman.
Tat Tvam Asi ('That thou art' — Chandogya Upanishad 6.8-16) is the most frequently repeated of the four Mahavakyas and the most pedagogically developed. Uddalaka Aruni teaches his son Shvetaketu through a series of illustrations: 'As all the bees make honey from different flowers, and the honey does not know which flower it came from — so all beings, though they enter the universal Being, do not know it. That which is the subtle essence — in it all beings have their existence. That is the Real. That is the Atman. That thou art (Tat Tvam Asi), Shvetaketu.' The teaching is repeated nine times with nine different illustrations (salt dissolved in water, the nyagrodha tree latent in its seed, etc.). The Mahavakya identifies the apparently limited individual (Tvam — thou) with the infinite Brahman (Tat — that): not as an aspiration or metaphor but as a statement of fact requiring only recognition.
Sa ya eso anima, etad atmyam idam sarvam, tat satyam, sa atma, tat tvam asi, Shvetaketo. — That which is the subtle essence — all this has that as its Self. That is the Real. That is the Atman. That thou art, Shvetaketu.
German philosopher F.W.J. Schelling's 'absolute identity' philosophy — the claim that subject and object, mind and nature, are ultimately identical in an absolute ground — was explicitly influenced by Vedantic thought and represents the Western philosophical attempt to articulate the same insight as 'Tat Tvam Asi.'
Chandogya Upanishad
Written about in
- What Advaita Vedanta says about the self
That thou art, said by a father to his son: the subtle essence of everything is what the boy already is. It is teaching addressed to one person, not a slogan.
- What Advaita Vedanta says about loneliness
Notice who says it and to whom. Uddalaka Aruni says it to his son Shvetaketu, nine times, with nine illustrations — salt dissolved in water, the tree latent in its seed, bees making one honey from many flowers. The tradition's central claim about non-separateness arrives as a conversation between two people.