The richest cross-cultural argument in philosophy. The Upanishads: the Self (ātman) is identical with ultimate reality (brahman) — tat tvam asi. The Gautama Buddha: there is no permanent self (anattā). René Descartes: the self is a thinking thing. David Hume: the self is a bundle of perceptions. Søren Kierkegaard: the self is a relation that relates itself to itself — and despair is failing to become one. Friedrich Nietzsche: become who you are. Follow it in What Is the Self?.
Thinkers & Authors
72Uddālaka Āruṇi
Upanishadic teacher who instructed his son Śvetaketu with salt in water and the seed of a banyan, ending each lesson — “tat tvam asi”, that thou art.
Yājñavalkya
The boldest sage of the Upanishads, who taught that the Self (ātman) is the unseen seer, describable only as “neti neti” — not this, not this.
Homer
The legendary blind poet of Greece to whom the Iliad and the Odyssey are attributed — the founding works of Western literature, and for the Greeks the “educator of Hellas”.
Maitreyī
Yājñavalkya’s wife, “a discourser on Brahman”, who asked whether all the wealth in the world could make her immortal — and, refusing her share of his property, received instead his teaching that all love is love of the Self.
Kapila
The legendary founder of Sāṃkhya, revered as the “first knower” (ādividvān) and, in later Hinduism, as an incarnation of Viṣṇu — a sage known almost entirely through myth, to whom India credits the first systematic philosophy of consciousness and nature.
Gautama Buddha
The prince who left his palace to seek an end to suffering, awoke under the Bodhi tree, and taught the Four Noble Truths, the Middle Way and no-self (anattā).
Confucius
The teacher of Lu whose sayings on goodness, ritual, learning and right relationships shaped Chinese civilization for two and a half thousand years.
Mahāvīra
The twenty-fourth and last tīrthaṅkara of Jainism — a prince of the eastern Gaṅgā plain who renounced everything at thirty, practised twelve years of extreme austerity, attained omniscience, and taught a path of radical non-violence, truth and non-possession for thirty years.
Plato
Socrates’ student and Aristotle’s teacher, author of the dialogues, founder of the Academy, and the philosopher of the Forms — of whom Whitehead said all Western philosophy is a series of footnotes.
Zhuangzi
The wittiest of Chinese philosophers — the butterfly dreamer, sceptic, and teller of tales — who mocked fixed perspectives and taught the free and easy wandering of a mind attuned to the Dao.
Bādarāyaṇa
The author, by tradition, of the Brahma Sūtras — the systematisation of the Upaniṣads that became the root text of every school of Vedānta. Often identified with Vyāsa, compiler of the Vedas and author of the Mahābhārata.
Bharata Muni
The legendary sage credited with the Nāṭyaśāstra — the founding treatise of Indian theatre, dance, music and aesthetics, and the theory of rasa.
Aśvaghoṣa
The 1st–2nd century Buddhist poet and dramatist — author of the Buddhacarita, the first full epic of the Buddha’s life, and the Saundarananda — often called the first great poet of classical Sanskrit, before Kālidāsa.
Marcus Aurelius
Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher whose private notebook, the Meditations, is the most intimate record of a mind trying to be good while ruling the world.
Patañjali
The compiler of the Yoga Sūtras — 196 terse aphorisms that define yoga as the stilling of the mind — honoured by tradition also as the grammarian of the Great Commentary on Pāṇini and as an incarnation of the serpent Ādiśeṣa.
Kundakunda
The most revered Digambara Jain teacher — author of the Samayasāra, which distinguishes the absolute standpoint, from which the soul is pure consciousness untouched by karma, from the conventional standpoint, from which it is bound.
Tiruvaḷḷuvar
The Tamil poet-sage who wrote the Tirukkuṟaḷ — 1,330 couplets on virtue, wealth and love that form the most revered ethical work in Tamil, translated into more languages than almost any other Indian text.
Asaṅga
Co-founder of Yogācāra Buddhism, who after twelve years of fruitless meditation found the future Buddha Maitreya in a wounded dog — and wrote the great maps of the bodhisattva path and of consciousness.
Vasubandhu
The 4th–5th century Buddhist philosopher who wrote the definitive summary of Abhidharma — and then, converted by his brother Asaṅga, became co-founder of Yogācāra, arguing that the world we experience is “representation only”.
Augustine of Hippo
North African bishop, convert, and the most influential Christian thinker of the Latin West — inventor of the autobiography of the inner self.
Buddhaghosa
The 5th-century Indian monk who went to Sri Lanka and translated and systematised the Theravāda commentaries — author of the Visuddhimagga, “The Path of Purification”, the definitive map of Theravāda doctrine and meditation.
Kālidāsa
The greatest poet and dramatist of classical Sanskrit — author of Śakuntalā, The Cloud Messenger and the Birth of Kumāra — whose art of love, nature and longing made him “the Shakespeare of India”.
Bhartṛhari
The 5th-century philosopher of language who taught that ultimate reality is the Word (śabda-brahman), that meaning flashes forth as a whole (sphoṭa), and that all knowledge is shot through with language — and, by tradition, the poet of the Three Centuries on love, worldly wisdom and renunciation.
Gauḍapāda
The earliest systematic teacher of Advaita Vedānta, whose verses on the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad taught that nothing has ever really been born — the waking world is like a dream, and the one consciousness only seems to become many.
Śāntideva
The 8th-century Nālandā monk whose Bodhicaryāvatāra (“The Way of the Bodhisattva”) is the most beloved poem of Mahāyāna Buddhism — a guide to compassion, patience and wisdom that the Dalai Lama calls his greatest inspiration.
Ādi Śaṅkara
The great systematizer of Advaita (non-dual) Vedānta — Brahman alone is real, the world is māyā, and the individual self is none other than Brahman.
Āṇṭāḷ
The only woman among the twelve Tamil Āḻvār saints (9th century) — a girl who wore the garland meant for Viṣṇu, refused any human husband, and wrote the Tiruppāvai and Nācciyār Tirumoḻi, poems of longing for God as her bridegroom.
Abhinavagupta
The towering Kashmiri polymath (c. 950–1016) — the great systematiser of non-dual Kashmir Śaivism and the greatest theorist of Indian aesthetics, who taught that in the experience of art (rasa) the self tastes its own blissful consciousness.
Udayana
The great Nyāya philosopher of Mithilā who gave Indian philosophy its classic proofs of God’s existence, defended the reality of the self against the Buddhists, and closed the classical age of Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika.
Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā)
Persian polymath — physician, metaphysician, logician — whose Canon of Medicine was taught in Europe for 500 years and whose distinction between essence and existence reshaped philosophy in Islam and the Latin West.
Rāmānuja
Founder of Viśiṣṭādvaita — “qualified non-dualism” — who argued against Śaṅkara that the world and souls are real, forming the body of a personal God.
Al-Ghazālī
Theologian, jurist and mystic whose Incoherence of the Philosophers attacked Avicenna’s Aristotelianism, anticipated Hume on causation, and whose spiritual autobiography records a crisis of doubt.
Jayadeva
The 12th-century Sanskrit poet of Bengal or Odisha whose Gītagovinda — the love, quarrel and reunion of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa — is the most sensuous devotional poem in Sanskrit, sung in temples and danced in Odissi to this day.
Madhva
The 13th-century philosopher from Udupi who founded Dvaita Vedānta — the uncompromising teaching that God, souls and matter are eternally distinct, and that Viṣṇu alone is independent.
Amīr Khusrau
The 13th–14th century poet, musician and Sufi of Delhi — disciple of Nizāmuddīn Auliyā, master of Persian verse, pioneer of Hindavi (early Hindi-Urdu), and by tradition the inventor of qawwālī, the khayāl and the sitar.
Dante Alighieri
The Florentine poet of the Divine Comedy — the journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise that summed up medieval thought and created the Italian language.
Jñāneśvar
The 13th-century Marathi saint-poet who, at about twenty, wrote the Jñāneśvarī — a 9,000-verse commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā in Marathi that founded Marathi literature and the Vārkarī devotional tradition — and entered living samādhi at twenty-one.
Lal Ded (Lalleśvarī)
The 14th-century Kashmiri Śaiva mystic who wandered naked singing short verses (vākhs) of fierce, non-dual devotion — the mother of Kashmiri literature, claimed equally by Hindus and Muslims.
Kabīr
The 15th-century weaver-poet of Vārāṇasī who mocked both Hindu and Muslim orthodoxy, taught devotion to a formless God found within, and left the most quoted couplets (dohās) in the Hindi language.
Guru Nānak
The founder of Sikhism (1469–1539) — a Punjabi mystic and poet who proclaimed “there is no Hindu, there is no Muslim”, taught devotion to the one formless God (Ik Onkār), honest work and sharing, and the equality of all people.
Sūrdās
The 16th-century blind poet of Braj whose songs of Kṛṣṇa’s childhood mischief and the gopīs’ longing — the Sūrsāgar, “Ocean of Sūr” — are the heart of Kṛṣṇa devotion in Hindi.
Caitanya Mahāprabhu
The 15th–16th century Bengali saint who led an ecstatic movement of singing the names of Kṛṣṇa, regarded by his followers as Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā in one body — founder of Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism and ancestor of the Hare Kṛṣṇa movement.
Mīrābāī
The 16th-century Rajput princess who declared herself the bride of Kṛṣṇa, defied her royal in-laws, survived (the legends say) cups of poison and a basket with a snake, and left her palace to sing — the most beloved woman poet of North India.
Michel de Montaigne
The inventor of the essay, who made himself the subject of his book — sceptical, curious, tolerant, candid — and asked, “Que sais-je?” — What do I know?
Miguel de Cervantes
Soldier, captive, tax collector and the father of the modern novel — whose Don Quixote made a deluded old knight and his earthy squire the most famous pair in literature.
William Shakespeare
The playwright and poet of Stratford whose 37-odd plays and 154 sonnets gave English its richest store of quotation and gave philosophy Hamlet, Lear and Macbeth.
René Descartes
The father of modern philosophy, who doubted everything that could be doubted and found one thing that could not — that he himself was thinking.
Blaise Pascal
Mathematician, physicist, inventor and Christian apologist whose fragmentary Pensées confront the misery and greatness of the human being — the thinking reed — and propose the Wager.
John Locke
Father of British empiricism and of liberalism — the mind begins as a blank slate, and government rests on the consent of the governed.
Baruch Spinoza
The excommunicated lens-grinder of Amsterdam who identified God with Nature, wrote ethics in the form of geometry, and found freedom in understanding necessity.
David Hume
The great Scottish sceptic who showed that causation, the self, and induction cannot be justified by reason — and that reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The Genevan philosopher of nature, freedom and feeling — “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” — whose Social Contract inspired revolutionaries and whose Confessions invented modern autobiography.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Germany’s greatest writer — poet, novelist, dramatist, scientist and statesman — whose Faust is the modern myth of the striving soul, and whose life was itself treated as a work of art.
Arthur Schopenhauer
The great pessimist, who said the thing-in-itself is blind, insatiable Will, that life swings like a pendulum between pain and boredom, and that art, compassion and renunciation are our only escape.
Mirza Ghalib
The greatest poet of Urdu (1797–1869) — master of the ghazal, of wit, paradox, grief and doubt — who lived through the fall of the Mughal world in 1857 and wrote its elegy in letters and verse.
Søren Kierkegaard
The melancholy Dane, father of existentialism, who set the passionate individual against Hegel’s System and faith against reason — “truth is subjectivity”.
Ramakrishna Paramahamsa
The 19th-century Bengali mystic of the Dakshineswar Kālī temple who practised Hindu, Muslim and Christian paths and declared “as many faiths, so many paths” — the guru of Vivekananda and the fountainhead of modern Hindu universalism.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Philosopher with a hammer who announced the death of God, unmasked the genealogy of morality, and called for new values — the will to power, eternal recurrence, the Übermensch, amor fati.
Anton Chekhov
Russian doctor, short-story writer and playwright who revolutionised both forms — stories without neat plots or morals, plays where the drama happens beneath ordinary talk — and became the great artist of wasted lives, quiet longing and compassion.
Rabindranath Tagore
The Bengali poet, novelist, composer, painter, educator and philosopher — the first non-European Nobel laureate in literature (1913, for Gitanjali) — author of the national anthems of India and Bangladesh, founder of Santiniketan, and a universalist who argued with Gandhi and warned the world against nationalism.
Swami Vivekananda
The Bengali monk, disciple of Ramakrishna, who brought Vedānta and Yoga to the West at the 1893 Parliament of Religions in Chicago (“Sisters and brothers of America!”), preached a “practical Vedānta” of service to humanity as service to God, and awakened modern Hindu self-confidence.
Sri Aurobindo
The revolutionary nationalist turned yogi and philosopher of Pondicherry, whose The Life Divine and Integral Yoga teach that evolution is spirit’s ascent through matter, life and mind toward a “supermind” that will divinise earthly life.
Muhammad Iqbal
The Urdu and Persian poet-philosopher of Lahore who preached “khudī” — the self’s dynamic development — as the heart of a reconstructed Islam, wrote “Sāre jahāṅ se acchā” for India, and later envisioned a Muslim homeland that became Pakistan.
Ramana Maharshi
The silent sage of Arunachala (1879–1950), who at sixteen experienced his own death and the deathless Self, and taught one practice above all — self-inquiry, “Who am I?” — the simplest and most direct path of Advaita.
Franz Kafka
Prague insurance clerk whose parables of guilt, bureaucracy and metamorphosis became the defining images of modern anxiety — and the word “Kafkaesque”.
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
The philosopher-statesman who presented Indian philosophy to the West as a living tradition — Oxford’s Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions, author of Indian Philosophy, and India’s second President. Teachers’ Day is his birthday.
Martin Heidegger
The philosopher of Being, who argued that the West had forgotten the question of what it means to be, and analysed human existence (Dasein) as thrown, anxious, being-toward-death.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
The Viennese-Cambridge philosopher who twice transformed philosophy — first by mapping the limits of what language can say (Tractatus), then by showing that meaning is use in the countless “language games” of ordinary life (Philosophical Investigations).
Jiddu Krishnamurti
The philosopher raised by the Theosophists to be a “World Teacher”, who renounced the role in 1929 — “truth is a pathless land” — and spent sixty years teaching that freedom comes only from seeing the movement of one’s own mind, without authority, method or guru.
Jean-Paul Sartre
The face of French existentialism — existence precedes essence, we are condemned to be free, and hell is other people.
Samuel Beckett
Irish playwright, novelist and poet who wrote in English and French, the master of minimalism and the absurd — Waiting for Godot made a play in which “nothing happens, twice” into the defining drama of the twentieth century.
Simone de Beauvoir
French existentialist philosopher and novelist whose The Second Sex (1949) — “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” — founded modern feminist philosophy, and whose ethics of ambiguity argued that my freedom requires the freedom of others.
Works
39The Upaniṣads
The philosophical dialogues that close the Vedas (c. 800–200 BCE) — forest teachings in which kings, priests, women and a boy at Death’s door ask what the Self is, what Brahman is, and how to be free. The source of Vedānta, and of almost every later Indian idea about the self.
The Iliad
Homer’s epic of the wrath of Achilles in the tenth year of the Trojan War — the founding poem of Western literature, and its greatest poem of war, grief and mortality.
The Odyssey
Homer’s epic of Odysseus’s ten-year journey home from Troy — monsters, witches, the underworld and a household besieged — the archetype of every adventure, every homecoming and every clever hero.
Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad
The “Great Forest” Upanishad, oldest and longest, home of Yājñavalkya’s debates, the teaching to Maitreyī, and “neti neti”.
Chāndogya Upaniṣad
One of the oldest Upanishads, famed for Uddālaka’s teaching to Śvetaketu — tat tvam asi — and Satyakāma’s honest answer about his birth.
Taittirīya Upaniṣad
The Upaniṣad of the five sheaths and the graduation address — it defines Brahman as “truth, knowledge, infinity”, peels away the layers of the self from food to bliss, measures the bliss of Brahman, and tells departing students “Treat your mother as a god.”
Kaṭha Upaniṣad
The story of the boy Naciketas, who goes to the house of Death and asks what happens after death — receiving the teaching of the immortal Self.
Kena Upaniṣad
The “By whom?” Upaniṣad — by whom is the mind sent forth, the breath set going, speech uttered? Its answer is the paradox that Brahman is known only by those who know they do not know it — and a story of the gods humbled by a blade of grass.
The Analects
The collected sayings and conversations of Confucius and his disciples — the most influential book in East Asian history.
Īśā Upaniṣad
The shortest of the principal Upaniṣads — eighteen verses that begin “All this is pervaded by the Lord” and reconcile renunciation with action, knowledge with works, and the one with the many.
Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad
The Upaniṣad of the “shaven head” — it distinguishes the “lower knowledge” of the Vedas and sciences from the “higher knowledge” of the imperishable, compares ritual to leaky boats, gives the image of two birds on one tree, and India its national motto, “Truth alone triumphs”.
Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad
The most theistic of the principal Upaniṣads — it identifies Brahman with Rudra-Śiva, a personal Lord to be loved, blends Vedānta with early Sāṃkhya and Yoga, and first uses the words māyā and bhakti in their later senses.
The Dhammapada
423 verses of the Buddha’s teaching in 26 chapters — on the mind, the fool and the wise, anger, craving, the path and the true Brahmin. The best-loved Buddhist scripture, and the shortest door into the Buddha’s ethics.
Saṅgam Poetry
The oldest Tamil literature (c. 300 BCE–300 CE) — 2,381 poems by 473 poets, on love (akam) and war (puṟam), in which each landscape — mountain, forest, field, seashore, desert — carries a mood of love. One of the great classical literatures of the world.
Brahma Sūtras
Bādarāyaṇa’s 555 terse aphorisms systematizing the Upanishads — so condensed they are unreadable without the commentaries that founded the schools of Vedānta.
The Bhagavad Gītā
The “Song of the Lord” — Kṛṣṇa’s teaching to the despairing warrior Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukṣetra, on duty, action without attachment, knowledge and devotion.
The Nāṭyaśāstra
Bharata’s encyclopaedia of the performing arts — theatre, dance, music, costume, architecture, and the theory of rasa — called the “fifth Veda”, composed for all classes of people. The foundation of Indian aesthetics.
The Nyāya Sūtras
The root text of Indian logic — about 530 aphorisms on the means of valid knowledge, the structure of argument, the art of debate and its dishonest tricks, and the self, the world and liberation.
Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad
The shortest Upaniṣad — twelve verses on the syllable Oṃ and the four states of consciousness, waking, dreaming, deep sleep and the “fourth” (turīya), the pure Self. Said to be enough, by itself, for liberation.
The Questions of King Milinda
A dialogue between the Indo-Greek king Menander and the Buddhist monk Nāgasena — the chariot argument for no-self, the flame of rebirth, and a Greek king’s sharp questions answered with Indian wit. A meeting of Greece and India in the 2nd century BCE.
Tattvārtha Sūtra
Umāsvāti’s “Manual of the Meaning of the Reals” — the first Sanskrit summary of Jain philosophy, 350 sūtras accepted by both Digambaras and Śvetāmbaras, covering knowledge, souls, the universe, karma, ethics and liberation.
Meditations
The private notebook of the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius, written on campaign — the most intimate and enduring work of ancient practical philosophy.
The Kāmasūtra
Vātsyāyana’s treatise on kāma — pleasure, love and desire — as one of the three legitimate aims of life. Far more than a sex manual, it is a handbook of urban culture, courtship, marriage, friendship and the arts of living well.
The Yoga Sūtras
Patañjali’s 196 aphorisms — the root text of classical Yoga — which define yoga as the stilling of the mind’s fluctuations, diagnose the afflictions that cause suffering, set out the eight limbs of practice, and end in the “isolation” of pure consciousness.
Sāṃkhya Kārikā
Īśvarakṛṣṇa’s 72-verse poem that is the classical statement of Sāṃkhya philosophy — from the threefold suffering of life, through the evolution of nature in twenty-five principles, to the liberating vision in which nature, “seen”, stops dancing.
Meghadūta (The Cloud Messenger)
Kālidāsa’s lyric poem of 111 verses in which an exiled yakṣa asks a monsoon cloud to carry a message of love to his wife in the Himālaya — describing, as the cloud flies north, all of India alive with longing.
The Recognition of Śakuntalā
Kālidāsa’s seven-act masterpiece — a king and a hermit girl fall in love in a forest, a curse erases his memory, a lost ring restores it, and the lovers are reunited in heaven. The most celebrated play in Sanskrit, which astonished Goethe and Europe.
The Tirukkuṟaḷ
Tiruvaḷḷuvar’s 1,330 couplets in 133 chapters on virtue (aṟam), wealth and statecraft (poruḷ), and love (inbam) — a secular, universal ethic, compact and witty, the “Tamil Veda” and one of the most translated books of India.
The Bhāgavata Purāṇa
The most beloved of the Purāṇas (c. 9th–10th century) — twelve books of devotion to Viṣṇu, culminating in the tenth book’s life of Kṛṣṇa: the butter-thief child, the cowherd, the lover of the gopīs, the god who dances with every devotee at once.
Gītagovinda
Jayadeva’s 12th-century Sanskrit song-cycle on the love of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa — jealousy, separation, longing and reunion — the most musical and sensuous poem in Sanskrit, read as an allegory of the soul’s love for God.
Hamlet
Shakespeare’s longest play — a prince ordered by his father’s ghost to avenge a murder thinks, doubts, delays, feigns madness, and dies in the act.
Don Quixote
Cervantes’s comic masterpiece about a country gentleman driven mad by chivalric romances, who sets out as a knight-errant with his squire Sancho Panza — often called the first modern novel and the greatest ever written.
Pensées
Pascal’s unfinished defence of Christianity, left as nearly a thousand fragments — on the thinking reed, diversion, the infinite spaces, and the Wager.
Phenomenology of Spirit
Hegel’s first masterpiece — the “voyage of discovery” of consciousness through sense-certainty, self-consciousness, reason, spirit and religion to absolute knowing.
Faust
Goethe’s two-part dramatic poem of the scholar who wagers his soul with Mephistopheles that no moment of pleasure will ever satisfy him — the defining myth of modern restless striving.
The World as Will and Representation
Schopenhauer’s single great work — the world is my representation; in itself it is Will; and the Will is the source of all suffering.
Notes from Underground
A spiteful, hyper-conscious ex-official rants from his “mousehole” against reason, progress and the Crystal Palace — often called the first existentialist novel.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Tolstoy’s novella of a respectable judge who, dying of a trivial injury, realizes that his correct, comfortable life was a lie — and finds, at the last moment, the light.
The Metamorphosis
Gregor Samsa, a travelling salesman, wakes one morning transformed into a monstrous vermin — and his family’s duty slowly curdles into disgust and relief.
Ideas
10Ātman is Brahman
The central Upanishadic insight — the innermost Self of each being is identical with the ultimate reality of the universe.
Mokṣa
Liberation — release from the cycle of rebirth and from all suffering, the highest goal of human life in the Hindu and Jain traditions (and, as nirvāṇa, in Buddhism). Every Indian school defines it differently, and the arguments over what it is, and how it is won, are the backbone of Indian philosophy.
Saṃsāra
“Wandering” — the beginningless cycle of birth, death and rebirth through which beings pass according to their karma, and from which every major Indian religion seeks release.
Anattā (No-Self)
The Buddha’s teaching that there is no permanent, unchanging self — only a flowing stream of physical and mental processes.
Rasa
The Indian theory of aesthetic experience — the “flavour” or “relish” that art evokes in the audience. Bharata named eight rasas; Abhinavagupta added peace and explained rasa as the self tasting its own consciousness through universalised emotion.
Cogito, ergo sum
I think, therefore I am — the one certainty Descartes found after doubting everything else.
The Will
Schopenhauer’s name for the thing-in-itself — a blind, aimless, insatiable striving that expresses itself in everything, from gravity to human desire.
Dasein
Heidegger’s term for the human being — “being-there” — the entity whose own being is an issue for it.
Bad Faith
Self-deception about one’s own freedom — pretending to be a thing, determined by role or nature, to escape the anguish of choice.
Existence Precedes Essence
Sartre’s formula — humans have no pre-given nature; we exist first and make ourselves through our choices.
Schools & Movements
16Vedānta
“The end of the Veda” — the schools that interpret the Upanishads, Bhagavad Gītā and Brahma Sūtras to understand Brahman, the Self, and liberation.
Jainism
The ancient Indian tradition of the Jinas — radical non-violence toward every living being, a soul weighed down by karmic matter, the “many-sidedness” of truth, and liberation by self-discipline without a creator God. Small in numbers, immense in influence.
Buddhism
The tradition founded by the Buddha — suffering, impermanence, no-self, and the path to nirvāṇa — later dividing into Theravāda, Mahāyāna (Madhyamaka, Yogācāra) and Vajrayāna.
Confucianism
The ethical and political tradition founded on Confucius’s teaching — humaneness, ritual, filial piety, learning and government by virtue — the backbone of Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese civilization.
Sāṃkhya
The oldest of the classical Indian systems — a radical dualism of pure, inactive consciousness (puruṣa) and active, unconscious nature (prakṛti) with its three strands, the guṇas. Liberation is seeing that consciousness was never really entangled in nature.
Theravāda and the Abhidharma
The oldest surviving school of Buddhism — the Pāli Canon, the arhat ideal, and the Abhidhamma analysis of experience into momentary ultimate realities — living today in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia.
Nyāya
India’s great school of logic and epistemology — the theory of valid knowledge (pramāṇa), the five-membered syllogism, the catalogue of fallacies, realist metaphysics, and the most famous arguments for God in Indian philosophy. Its later form, Navya-Nyāya, became the technical language of all Indian scholarship.
Yoga (darśana)
The classical school of Patañjali — Sāṃkhya’s dualism of consciousness and nature, plus a God and a practical method — defining yoga as “the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind” and mapping the eight limbs from ethics to absorption.
Yogācāra
The “mind-only” school of Mahāyāna Buddhism, founded by Asaṅga and Vasubandhu — the world we experience is a construction of consciousness, carried by a “storehouse” of karmic seeds; awakening is the transformation of the basis of consciousness itself.
The Bhakti Movement
The great devotional revolution of Indian religion — from the Tamil Āḻvārs and Nāyaṉārs (6th–9th centuries) to Kabīr, Mīrābāī, Tulsīdās and Tukārām — which made passionate, personal love of God, sung in the languages of the people, a path to liberation open to every caste and to women.
Advaita Vedānta
Non-dualist Vedānta — Brahman alone is real, the world is appearance (māyā), and the self is identical with Brahman.
Kashmir Śaivism
The non-dual Śaiva philosophy of medieval Kashmir — reality is the free, self-aware consciousness of Śiva, who playfully contracts himself into the many selves and the world, and liberation is the recognition that you are Śiva. The world is not illusion but God’s self-expression.
Viśiṣṭādvaita
Qualified non-dualism — Brahman is one, but includes real souls and matter as its body; liberation is through devotion and grace.
Dvaita Vedānta
Madhva’s realist, theistic Vedānta — God (Viṣṇu) alone is independent; souls and matter are real, eternally distinct from God and from each other, and wholly dependent on him. The most uncompromising rejection of Advaita in Indian thought.
Existentialism
The philosophy of the existing individual — freedom, anxiety, authenticity, the absurd — running from Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky through Nietzsche and Heidegger to Sartre and Camus.
Phenomenology
Husserl’s method of describing experience exactly as it appears — “to the things themselves!” — which Heidegger and Sartre turned toward existence.
Debates
2Is There a Self? Nyāya vs. the Buddhists
The thousand-year Indian debate between Nyāya logicians, who argued that memory and recognition prove an enduring self, and Buddhist philosophers, who held that a person is a stream of momentary events.
Śaṅkara vs. Rāmānuja
The great Vedāntic debate — is the self identical with Brahman, and the world an illusion? Or are souls and world real, the body of a personal God?
Characters
4Gregor Samsa
The travelling salesman who wakes as a giant insect and remains, inside, more human than the family that comes to find him a burden.
Ivan Ilyich Golovin
A successful, decent, utterly conventional judge who learns, dying, that he never really lived.
Hamlet
Prince of Denmark — scholar, wit, mourner, avenger who cannot avenge — the most quoted and most interpreted character in literature.
The Underground Man
Dostoevsky’s nameless, spiteful, hyper-conscious narrator who rebels against reason, progress and his own interests to prove he is free.
Great Scenes
6The Death of Socrates
In prison, on his last day, Socrates argues for the immortality of the soul, drinks the hemlock calmly, and asks that a cock be offered to Asclepius.
Lordship and Bondage
Hegel’s parable — two self-consciousnesses fight for recognition to the death; one yields and becomes slave; but the slave, through fear and labour, wins the truer freedom.
Naciketas at the House of Death
Given away by his angry father, the boy Naciketas waits three days at Death’s door, and refuses all the riches Yama offers until Death tells him what lies beyond.
The Storm on the Heath
Shut out by his daughters, Lear rages at the storm, prays for the poor, and meets “unaccommodated man” in the naked Poor Tom.
To Be, or Not to Be
Hamlet’s soliloquy weighing life against death — the most famous speech in English, and a compressed treatise on suicide, fear and the paralysis of thought.
Tat Tvam Asi — Salt in Water
Uddālaka tells his son Śvetaketu to dissolve salt in water and taste it — invisible, yet everywhere — “that is the Self; that thou art.”
Great Questions
3How Is the Mind Related to the Body?
Witness-consciousness and matter, the soul as form, two substances, one substance, Dasein — the mind–body problem across civilizations.
What Is the Self?
From ātman to anattā, from the cogito to the bundle, from Kierkegaard’s task of becoming oneself to Sartre’s nothingness.
What Is the Self? — The Indian Argument
Three thousand years of Indian argument about the “I” — from the Upaniṣads’ Self that is Brahman, through the Buddha’s no-self, the Jain soul, the Nyāya substance, Sāṃkhya’s witness, to Ramana’s “Who am I?” and Ambedkar’s social self.
Lines to Remember
47 quotationsYou cannot step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.
Context & when to use it
The famous “river fragment”, known in several ancient versions.
For change, impermanence, the self in flux.
Character is destiny.
ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων
Context & when to use it
Literally “a person’s character is his daimon (guiding spirit)”.
For fate versus freedom — fate comes from within.
Man is by nature a political animal… he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.
Context & when to use it
For community, belonging, the social nature of human beings.
You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.
fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te
Context & when to use it
For spiritual longing, the God-shaped hole.
Grant me chastity and continence — but not yet.
da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo
Context & when to use it
For procrastination and weakness of will (akrasia), with humour.
Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman — a rope over an abyss.
Context & when to use it
Zarathustra’s first speech in the marketplace, while a tightrope-walker performs.
For human beings as unfinished, a transition rather than a goal.
One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
Context & when to use it
Warning against the Last Man, who has no chaos left.
For creativity out of inner turmoil.
Become who you are.
Werde, der du bist.
Context & when to use it
Borrowed from Pindar (Pythian 2.72) — “become such as you are, having learned what that is.”
For self-realization and authenticity.
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
Context & when to use it
Reflection always comes after; we must act before we understand.
For decisions under uncertainty, regret, the limits of hindsight.
The most common form of despair is not being who you are.
Context & when to use it
Kierkegaard distinguishes despair at not willing to be oneself from despair at willing to be oneself.
For authenticity and self-alienation.
⚠ A popular paraphrase, not a direct quotation.
Existence precedes essence.
L'existence précède l'essence.
Context & when to use it
The one-line definition of existentialism.
Hell is other people.
L'enfer, c'est les autres.
Context & when to use it
Three dead people locked in a room realize they are each other’s torturers — through the judging gaze.
For the gaze of others, social judgment, being trapped by how others see us.
⚠ Sartre later said it means that our relations with others are poisoned when we depend wholly on their judgment — not that other people are hell.
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.
Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt.
Context & when to use it
For alienation, sudden loss of identity, becoming a burden.
That which is the finest essence — this whole world has that as its Self. That is the Truth. That is the Self. That thou art, Śvetaketu.
स य एषोऽणिमैतदात्म्यमिदं सर्वं तत्सत्यं स आत्मा तत्त्वमसि श्वेतकेतो
Context & when to use it
The refrain of Uddālaka’s teaching, repeated nine times.
For non-duality, compassion grounded in identity, the unity of self and world.
This Self is not this, not this. It is ungraspable, for it is not grasped; indestructible, for it is not destroyed; unattached, for it does not attach itself.
स एष नेति नेत्यात्मा
Context & when to use it
For apophatic thought — what cannot be described, only negated (compare negative theology).
What should I do with that which will not make me immortal?
Context & when to use it
Offered half of Yājñavalkya’s wealth, his wife asks whether the whole earth full of wealth would make her immortal. No — “then what should I do with it?”
For priorities, materialism versus meaning. Amartya Sen used it in Development as Freedom.
You cannot see the seer of seeing; you cannot hear the hearer of hearing; you cannot think the thinker of thinking; you cannot know the knower of knowing.
Context & when to use it
For the subject that cannot be an object — compare Kant’s transcendental “I” and Wittgenstein’s eye that does not see itself.
The knowing Self is not born; it does not die. It has not come from anywhere, has not become anything. Unborn, eternal, everlasting, ancient — it is not slain when the body is slain.
Context & when to use it
Yama’s teaching to Naciketas — nearly identical to Bhagavad Gītā 2.20.
For the immortality of the self; facing death.
Weapons do not cut it, fire does not burn it, water does not wet it, wind does not dry it.
नैनं छिन्दन्ति शस्त्राणि नैनं दहति पावकः। न चैनं क्लेदयन्त्यापो न शोषयति मारुतः॥
Context & when to use it
On the indestructible Self — why Arjuna should not grieve.
For the eternal self, consolation in grief.
As a man casts off worn-out garments and puts on others that are new, so the embodied Self casts off worn-out bodies and enters into others that are new.
Context & when to use it
For reincarnation; death as transition.
Better is one’s own duty, though imperfectly done, than the duty of another well performed.
श्रेयान्स्वधर्मो विगुणः परधर्मात्स्वनुष्ठितात्
Context & when to use it
For authenticity and vocation — your own path over imitation.
Mind is the forerunner of all things; mind is chief; they are mind-made.
manopubbaṅgamā dhammā manoseṭṭhā manomayā
Context & when to use it
For the power of thought over experience; pair with Hamlet’s “thinking makes it so”.
Brahman is real, the world is illusory; the individual self is none other than Brahman.
ब्रह्म सत्यं जगन्मिथ्या जीवो ब्रह्मैव नापरः
Context & when to use it
The half-verse summary of Advaita Vedānta.
⚠ The formula is traditionally attributed to Śaṅkara; its exact textual source is debated.
I think, therefore I am.
Je pense, donc je suis.
Context & when to use it
The foundational certainty of modern philosophy; for self-knowledge and doubt.
When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other… I never can catch myself at any time without a perception.
Context & when to use it
For the bundle theory of self — pair with the Buddha’s anattā.
It has been the consolation of my life, and it will be the consolation of my death.
Context & when to use it
On the Upanishads, which he read in Anquetil-Duperron’s Latin Oupnek’hat.
For the Western reception of Indian philosophy.
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt.
Context & when to use it
The Tractatus on the subject as the limit of the world.
For how vocabulary shapes thought, and for learning languages.
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.
On ne naît pas femme, on le devient.
Context & when to use it
The first line of the volume on lived experience.
For gender as social formation rather than fixed nature.
He is the Subject, he is the Absolute — she is the Other.
Context & when to use it
For how one group becomes the norm and another the deviation.
It seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and splendid life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that the end was still far off, and that the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning.
Context & when to use it
For beginnings disguised as endings.
The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
Context & when to use it
For the power of attitude — and its limits.
⚠ Spoken by Satan — and the poem shows him unable to escape his own Hell.
Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him.
Context & when to use it
Zosima to the buffoon Fyodor Karamazov.
For self-deception — Sartre’s bad faith in Dostoevsky’s words.
I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man.
Context & when to use it
One of the great opening lines — self-diagnosis as self-display.
For the modern anti-hero, self-loathing, the confessional voice.
To be too conscious is an illness — a real thorough-going illness.
Context & when to use it
Hyper-consciousness paralyses action — the Underground Man as a Hamlet in a mousehole.
For overthinking, anxiety, the intellectual’s paralysis.
Ivan Ilyich’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.
Context & when to use it
The narrator’s verdict on a life lived entirely by convention.
For conformity, the unexamined life, bad faith.
What if my whole life has really been wrong?
Context & when to use it
The question that finally opens him to truth.
For mid-life crisis, examined life, regret.
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.
Context & when to use it
Reflection paralyses action. “Conscience” means consciousness as much as moral scruple.
Against overthinking; for analysis paralysis; for the intellectual who never acts.
What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty… the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals; and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
Context & when to use it
Renaissance humanism’s hymn to man — undercut in the same breath by melancholy.
For humanism versus nihilism; human greatness and insignificance at once.
This above all — to thine own self be true.
Context & when to use it
Pompous advice to his son Laertes from a man who spies on everyone.
For authenticity — with a wink, since Polonius is a hypocrite.
⚠ Spoken by Polonius, whom Shakespeare treats as a windbag. Quoting it as Shakespeare’s own wisdom misses the irony.
Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.
Context & when to use it
In the storm, Lear looks at the half-naked “Poor Tom” and tears off his own clothes.
For what humans are without culture, property and status — the existential condition laid bare.
All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts.
Context & when to use it
The melancholy Jaques’ “Seven Ages of Man”, ending in “mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”
For social roles, the self as performance (Goffman, Sartre’s waiter), the stages of life.
In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost.
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, ché la diritta via era smarrita.
Context & when to use it
For mid-life crisis, losing one’s way, the beginning of every spiritual journey.
Consider your origin — you were not made to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.
fatti non foste a viver come bruti, ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza
Context & when to use it
Ulysses urges his old companions on their last voyage beyond the known world — which ends in shipwreck.
For the thirst for knowledge — and its risks. Primo Levi recited it in Auschwitz.
Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast, and each wants to separate from the other.
Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust, die eine will sich von der andern trennen.
Context & when to use it
For inner conflict between earthly desire and higher aspiration.
Whoever strives with all his might, him we can redeem.
Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, den können wir erlösen.
Context & when to use it
For striving as a moral ideal.
O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars are in the poorest thing superfluous.
Context & when to use it
Lear’s daughters strip him of his retinue, asking why he needs any knights at all.
For human dignity beyond bare necessity.
Do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?
Context & when to use it
For resisting manipulation.
Sententiae
phrases in the originalGnōthi seauton
Origin. Inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi; Socrates made it the charge of his philosophy (Plato, Phaedrus 229e, Charmides 164d). — Socrates
⚠ Originally probably meant “know your place — you are mortal, not a god”, not introspection.
For self-knowledge, humility, the starting point of wisdom.
Ēthos anthrōpōi daimōn
Origin. Heraclitus, fragment B119. — Heraclitus
For the idea that fate flows from who we are.
Akrasia
Origin. Socrates denied it is possible (no one does wrong knowingly); Aristotle analysed it in Nicomachean Ethics VII. — Aristotle
For procrastination, addiction, knowing better and doing worse — “grant me chastity, but not yet”.
Zōon politikon
Origin. Aristotle, Politics I.2. — Aristotle
For human beings as social by nature.
Cogito, ergo sum
Origin. Descartes, first in French (“je pense, donc je suis”, Discourse on Method, 1637), then in Latin in the Principles of Philosophy (1644). — René Descartes
⚠ The Meditations never use this formula — there it is “ego sum, ego existo” (I am, I exist). Augustine had argued “si fallor, sum”.
For the one certainty that survives doubt; the birth of modern subjectivity.
Werde, der du bist
Origin. Nietzsche’s rendering of Pindar, Pythian 2.72 — “γένοι’ οἷος ἐσσὶ μαθών” (become such as you are, having learned what that is). — Friedrich Nietzsche
For self-realization.
L'enfer, c'est les autres
Origin. Sartre, No Exit (Huis clos), 1944. — Jean-Paul Sartre
⚠ Sartre said it means that if our relations with others are twisted, others become hell — because we depend on their judgment to know ourselves.
For the tyranny of the gaze and of reputation.
L'existence précède l'essence
Origin. Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism (1945). — Jean-Paul Sartre
The motto of existentialism.
Mauvaise foi
Origin. Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1943). — Jean-Paul Sartre
For self-deception, hiding behind roles.
L'homme n'est qu'un roseau, le plus faible de la nature; mais c'est un roseau pensant
Origin. Pascal, Pensées §347 (Brunschvicg). The universe can crush him, but he knows he dies; the universe knows nothing.
For human fragility and dignity in one image.
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
Origin. Dante, Inferno I.1 — “I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost.”
For the mid-life crisis — Dante’s, Tolstoy’s, yours.
Tat tvam asi
Origin. Chāndogya Upaniṣad 6.8.7, repeated nine times by Uddālaka to his son Śvetaketu. — Uddālaka Āruṇi, Chāndogya Upaniṣad
⚠ Some scholars (Joel Brereton) argue the grammar may mean “you are that (finest essence)” — the reading of identity with Brahman comes from the Vedāntic tradition.
For non-duality, the unity of self and cosmos, compassion grounded in identity (Schopenhauer).
Ahaṃ brahmāsmi
Origin. Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 1.4.10 — one of the four mahāvākyas. — Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad
For the realization of identity with the absolute — not ego-inflation but ego-dissolution.
Neti neti
Origin. Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 2.3.6 and Yājñavalkya’s teachings (4.2.4, 4.5.15). — Yājñavalkya, Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad
For the via negativa — reaching the absolute by negating every description.
Anicca, dukkha, anattā
Origin. The three marks of existence in the Pāli Buddhist canon. — Gautama Buddha
For the Buddhist diagnosis of existence in three words.
Explore Next
related by shared connectionsDoes God Exist?
The proofs, the refutations, the wagers and the leaps — the great argument about God from the Upanishads to Nietzsche.
What Are the Limits of the Human Mind?
Can reason know everything — or are there things the mind can never reach? From the Upanishads’ unknowable knower to Kant’s boundary and Wittgenstein’s silence.
What Is the Meaning of Life?
Liberation, virtue, tranquillity, God, the will, revolt — the great answers to the greatest question.
What Is Justice?
From Thrasymachus’s “advantage of the stronger” to Rawls’s veil of ignorance — the question of what we owe each other and who should rule.
How Should We Face Death?
Naciketas at Death’s door, Socrates’ hemlock, Epicurus’s argument, the Stoics’ rehearsal, Hamlet’s skull, Ivan Ilyich’s scream, Heidegger’s being-toward-death.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Russian novelist of the abyss — crime, faith, freedom, suffering — whose characters argue philosophy with their lives. Nietzsche called him the only psychologist he had anything to learn from.