Uddālaka Āruṇi

Uddālaka Āruṇi was a Brahmin teacher of the Kuru-Pañcāla country, probably of the eighth or seventh century BCE, who appears in several early The Upaniṣads and is remembered above all for one lesson: his instruction of his son Śvetaketu in the sixth chapter of the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, in which a series of simple demonstrations — clay and pots, rivers and the sea, a banyan seed, salt dissolved in water — culminates nine times in the words tat tvam asi, “that thou art”. He is the Upaniṣads’ great philosopher of Being: he argued that “in the beginning this world was Being alone, one only, without a second”, that Being cannot come from non-being, and that all change is “a matter of words, a name”. Some modern historians have called him the first natural philosopher of India, comparable to the earliest Greek thinkers.

Life

Uddālaka appears in the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, the Bṛhadāraṇyaka and Chāndogya Upaniṣads and the Kauṣītaki Upaniṣad as a learned ritualist and teacher. He is the son (or descendant) of Aruṇa, hence “Āruṇi”; his son Śvetaketu Āruṇeya is a figure in his own right — proud, quick and often humbled. Uddālaka is one of the Brahmins who challenge Yājñavalkya at the court of King Janaka, asking him about the “inner controller” and the “thread” on which this world is strung. Elsewhere, he and his son are humiliated when King Pravāhaṇa Jaivali asks questions about the afterlife that neither can answer; Uddālaka goes humbly to the king as a student and learns the doctrine of the five fires and the two paths after death — the first teaching of rebirth in the Upaniṣads.

The teaching to Śvetaketu

Śvetaketu, aged twelve, goes to study the Vedas and returns at twenty-four, “conceited, thinking himself learned, and arrogant”. His father asks whether he has learned “that teaching by which the unheard becomes heard, the unthought becomes thought, the unknown becomes known”. The boy has not.

Uddālaka begins with an analogy. By knowing a single lump of clay, one knows everything made of clay, because “the modification is merely a name, a verbal handle; the reality is just clay”. So by knowing one nugget of gold, all gold things; by one nail-cutter, all things of iron. Then he gives his cosmology. In the beginning, he says, there was only Being (sat), “one only, without a second”. Some say there was only non-being, and being came from it. “But how could that be? How could Being be born from non-being?” Being thought, “Let me become many”, and emitted heat; heat emitted water; water emitted food (earth). Everything is a compound of these three, entered by Being as “the living self”.

He then demonstrates the hidden presence of Being in a series of experiments, each ending with the refrain: “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”:

• He makes the boy fast for fifteen days, drinking only water; Śvetaketu forgets the Vedas, since the mind is “made of food”; when he eats again, he remembers them.
• The bees gather nectar from many trees into a single honey, in which no drop knows from which tree it came.
• The rivers flowing east and west become the ocean and no longer know “I am this river”.
• A great tree struck at root, trunk or top bleeds but lives, pervaded by its living self.
• He has the boy split a banyan seed and asks what he sees inside. “Nothing at all.” “From that finest essence, which you do not see, the great banyan grows.”
• He has the boy put salt in water overnight, then taste the water from top, middle and bottom: salty everywhere, though the salt cannot be seen. See Tat Tvam Asi — Salt in Water.

Significance

The phrase tat tvam asi became the most famous of the Upaniṣadic “great sayings”, and the sixth chapter of the Chāndogya the most commented-on passage in Indian philosophy. Ādi Śaṅkara read it as teaching the strict identity of the individual self with Brahman; Rāmānuja as teaching that Brahman is the inner self of the individual; Madhva‘s school as teaching — by a different division of the words — “thou art not that”.

Philosophically, Uddālaka’s argument that Being cannot arise from non-being has been compared with Parmenides‘s “nothing comes from nothing” and with the Latin Nothing from Nothing; his three elements with the Ionian search for a primal substance; and his “experiments” with the beginnings of an empirical attitude. His teaching method — demonstration, question, refrain — remains a model of philosophical pedagogy.

Uddālaka in conversation

The salt in water says it all: you cannot see it or grasp it, yet every sip is salty — tat tvam asi.