Prologue

This paper deals with the concepts of identity, difference and diversity, drawing primarily on one of the creation-myths narrated in chapter 1 of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka-Upaniṣad (BU).Footnote 1 The myth that I work with is narrated in BU 1.4.1–8, and opens with the phrase “ātmaivedam agra āsīt”, “In the beginning there was merely the ātman (self)”. This chapter includes four creation-myths. All of them begin with this initial self. Twice the author of the Upaniṣad says that in the beginning, there was the ātman, from whom the whole creation emerges (1.4.1 and 1.4.17), and twice he says that in the beginning, there was the Brahman (1.4.10 and 1.4.11). Here, the corresponding phrase is “brahma vā idam agra āsīt”. The notion of the Brahman also evokes a sense of selfhood, all-pervasive, transcending the four cubits of one’s individual existence. Aham brahmāsmi, “I am Brahman”, the Upaniṣadic author famously asserts in 1.4.10. This chapter consists, then, of four interlinked creation myths, all with the self as the point of origin. This narrative is very different from the creation myth in chapter 1 of the book of Genesis. The first verse of this Torah chapter suggests that “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (in Hebrew, Bereshit bara elohim et hashamayim ve’et ha’arets). Man was created last, on the 6th day of creation, when God (or the Lord God as the Hebrew word “Elohim” is translated in the seventeenth century King James Version of the Bible) completed the creation of the whole world, sky and earth, sun and moon, plants and animals. The Jewish commentators refer to man as “nezer habri’a”, “the crown of the creation”. Everything was created for him. He is the crown, but not the creator.

In the following paragraphs, I will look into the Upaniṣadic creation myth, the “ātmaivedam agra āsīt” myth, with one eye turned towards Śaṅkara’s commentary. Why only one eye? Since for Śaṅkara, the most authoritative commentator of the text, the myth under discussion (or in fact the present Upaniṣadic section until BU 1.4.7) belongs to the category of rites and meditation. Hence for him, it is just a “prelude” or “preparation” towards what he sees as the crux of the Upaniṣadic teaching, i.e. knowledge of Brahman. John Taber explains:

Since an Upaniṣad usually comprises the final chapters of a Brāhmaṇa, Śaṅkara often feels compelled to show at the outset of his work that the matters he is about to discuss have not been exhaustively dealt with in the Brāhmaṇa. Thus, he distinguishes what is to be attained through the means prescribed in the Brāhmaṇa—meditation and sacrifice—from the goal of the Upaniṣad. According to Śaṅkara in his Bṛhadaranyakopaniṣadbhāṣya, identification with Prajāpati, the firstborn among all beings and creator of the universe, is the highest attainment to be expected from engaging in meditation and sacrifice. A somewhat less spectacular achievement than this is the attainment of the world of the fathers (pitṛloka), or heaven (svarga), from which the soul eventually returns to earth to be reborn after having enjoyed there the fruits of its pious deeds. But higher than either of these—and what the Upaniṣads teach about—is mokṣa, liberation, the highest good (parama śreyas), the highest end of man (paramapuruṣārtha). And that, Śaṅkara argues, can have no possible connection with karma [sacrifice, rites] or upāsana [defined by Taber a few lines before this paragraph as “meditation on the deeper meaning of the Vedic sacrifice or on Brahman, prescribed in various forms in the Upaniṣads and the Brāhmaṇas”]. (1983, 7)

I will offer a close reading of the Upaniṣadic myth, then, with one eye turned to Śaṅkara. Following my discussion of the myth, I will challenge “the self first” narrative conveyed here, and the implied aspiration to retrieve and rediscover that first self, the ātman, which precedes and encompasses everything else, in dialogue with Mukund Lath, a contemporary theorist, drawing on his essay “Identity Through Necessary Change” (2003/2018).

“In the Beginning there was Merely the Self”

Here is the Upaniṣadic text (I use Patrick Olivelle’s English translation, and the original Sanskrit as it appears in Ten Principal Upaniṣads with Śāṅkarabhāṣya, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi), “interrupted” with my own—questioning, hardly authoritative—commentary:

In the beginning, there was merely the self in the shape of a man (ātmaivedam agra āsīt puruṣavidhaḥ). He looked around and saw nothing but himself (so ‘nuvīkṣya nānyad ātmano ‘paśyat). The first thing he said was “Here I am”, and from that the name “I” came into being (so ‘ham asmīty agre vyāharat. tato ‘haṃnāmābhavat). Therefore, even today, when you call someone, he first says “It’s I” and then states whatever other name he may have (tasmād apy etarhy āmantrito ‘ham ayam ity evāgra uktvāthānyan nāma prabrūte yad asya bhavati).

According to Śaṅkara, this paragraph refers to the domain of ritual and meditation, through which the performer and meditator can obtain identity with Hiraṇyagarbha (literally the “golden womb” or “golden egg”). For Śaṅkara, Hiraṇyagarbha is synonymous with, or at least closely related to Prajāpati, god Brahmā, and “the lower Brahman” (aparabrahman). This is not the Brahman, ultimate, absolute, that he himself strives for (Upaniṣads and with Śāṅkarabhāṣya, 2007).

The first movement of creation in the myth under discussion is an act of observation and reflection: the first “I” looks around and sees nothing and no-one besides himself. He, therefore, says, “Here I am”, and the word “I” comes into being. Greg Bailey calls attention to the repetition of the preposition “agre” (in “In the beginning” and again, when “Here I am” is the first thing uttered following the initial observation), and of the prefix vi (in anuvīkṣya and vyāharat, “looked around” and “[the first thing] he said”) in the paragraph quoted above. Bailey implies that in this case, the repetitive formulation “strengthens the sense of creation” (2016, 62). Repetition as creation. Creation through language, through utterance, coincides with the biblical creation myth in chapter 1 of Genesis. Here, God (Elohim) creates the world and its content through utterances. With reference to every stage of the creation, from lights to living beings, the biblical author proclaims: “And God said… and it was so” (Vayomer Elohim… Vaihi khen). However, in the Upaniṣadic myth, the first thing created is the word. It is not the word which creates the world, but an instance of self-awareness is spontaneously translated into a phrase, a lingual expression. This phrase, “aham asmi”, is reminiscent of Descartes’s “cogito ergo sum”. In Descartes, this is the conclusion of introspection. In the Upaniṣad, since the ātman alone exists (at least in the beginning, before creation and procreation), there is no difference between “inner” and “outer”, hence when the first “I” looks around, it is simultaneously introspection and extrospection. Here, that sense of “I-amness” is born of a first reflection or gaze (conveyed by the verbs anuvīkṣya and apaśyat), which is the first movement of creation.

“Therefore, Even Today”

Another phrase in the Upaniṣadic paragraph which invites discussion is the phrase “therefore, even today” (tasmād apy etarhy). “Therefore, even today”, the Upaniṣadic author suggests, “when you call someone, he first says ‘It’s I’, and then states whatever other name he may have”. First, it is strikingly true. The “even today” of the Upaniṣad, composed way before the Common Era, applies “even today”, in the third millennium CE. When someone calls me, I often say “It’s I”, before stating my name. A similar phrase, similar “even today”, occurs a few paragraphs down the road, in BU 1.4.17. This creation-myth opens with the words “ātmaivedam agra āsīd eka eva”, “In the beginning, there was the Ātman (self), only one”.Footnote 2 Here, the first movement of creation is the double (or quadruple) desire (kāma), “I wish I had a wife so I could father offspring, I wish I had wealth so I could perform rites” (jāyā me syāt atha prajāyeya; atha vittam me syād, atha karma kurvīyeti). “Therefore”, the narrator suggests,

even today, when one is single, one has the desire “I wish I had a wife so I could father offspring, I wish I had wealth so I could perform rites”. As long as someone has not obtained either of these, he considers himself to be utterly incomplete. (tasmād apy etarhy ekākī kāmayate, jāyā me syāt atha prajāyeya; atha vittaṃ me syād, atha karma kurvīyeti. sa yāvad apy eteṣām ekaikaṃ na prāpnoti, akṛtsna eva tāvan manyate).

Both instances (and there are other “even todays” in the Upaniṣads, for example in Chāndogya-Upaniṣad 8.8.5) imply that language “remembers” something for us. Or as Hélène Cixous famously puts it,

The miracle is that language has not been cut from its archaic roots—even if we do not remember, our language remembers. (1994, xx)

In the Upaniṣad, the idea is that what happens “now” is just a replica of the myth. Whenever someone calls me, I answer “It’s I”, because of the “It’s I” of the “first I”, the primordial self. Similarly, the range of my desires is determined by the desires of that “first I”. These old myths are “re-lived” or “enacted” again and again (apropos Bailey’s remark on repetition as creation) by each one of us. They are perpetually replicated unknowingly by people who do not “remember” them. But even if we do not remember, Cixous suggests, language remembers. The phrase “therefore even today” in the Upaniṣad can be read, then, as an invitation to listen carefully to language, to the very same language that we use all the time but do not always listen to. If we do listen, we might be able to identify this replica pattern. The myth under discussion is not a myth about creation “once and for all”, but about continuous creation that each of us takes part in through replication. Can this replica pattern be stopped? Stoppage that might reveal the initial self beyond (and before) the mechanics of creation?

“He Became Afraid”

The next movement of creation in the myth under discussion is fear. In BU 1.4.2, the Upaniṣadic author goes on to say:

That first being became afraid. Therefore, one becomes afraid when one is alone. Then, he thought to himself: “Of what should I be afraid, when there is no one but me?” So his fear left him, for what was he going to be afraid of? One is, after all, afraid of another. (so ‘bibhet tasmād ekākī bibheti. sa hāyam īkṣāṃ cakre, yan mad anyan nāsti kasmān nu bibhemīti. tata evāsya bhayaṃ vīyāya. kasmād dhy abheṣyat. dvitīyād vai bhayaṃ bhavati).

When the word “I” comes into being, and one takes a first step “out” of his initial oneness and wholeness, fear comes into the picture. Here, the comparative philosopher would recall Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men” (originally published in 1754). “The first person”, the French philosopher writes,

having fenced off a plot of ground, took it into his head to say “this is mine”, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors, would the human race have been spared by someone who, uprooting the stakes or filling in the ditch, had shouted to his fellows “Beware of listening to this impostor!” (Rousseau, 1992, 43)

The context here is social, and Rousseau speaks of “mine”, not “I”, and of “crimes, wars, murders, miseries and horrors”, all interlaced with fear (which is both their cause and effect). However, it is the act of “fencing”, resulting in segregation, which for me is the cause of fear, not just in Rousseau but even in the Upaniṣad, when the word “I” is created. This “I” (aham)—altogether different from the all-embracing initial “I” (ātman)—differentiates or puts a fence between the other and me. The Upaniṣadic narrative further implies that owing to (or replicating) the primordial fear of the primordial “I”, we too are afraid when we are alone. Here, I recall a short discourse by Jiddu Krishnamurti titled “aloneness and isolation”. “Aloneness”, Krishnamurti asserts, “is not aching, fearsome loneliness. It is the aloneness of being. […] Loneliness, with its fear and ache, is isolation. [..] Aloneness is indivisible, and loneliness is separation” (from his Commentaries on Living, Series I, chapter 5) (Krishnamurti, 1956). This, I would like to suggest, is the difference between the aloneness (or all-oneness) of the ātman in the Upaniṣadic narrative and the fear—described in terms of loneliness—of the aham, the “I” who is alienated from the other, from “you”. Another contemporary thinker relevant to our discussion is Ramchandra Gandhi. In the chapter “Advaita is Ahiṃsā” (in his magnum opus I am Thou, 1984/2011), he suggests that the first instance of violence does not take place when one raises one’s hand to hit another. It is the gaze that sees you as different from me, which is the cradle of violence. If one can prioritize—at the level of the gaze—the common denominator between you and I over the obvious differences between us, Ramchandra continues to suggest, then violence can be avoided. This common human denominator, he refers to as the ātman. Ahiṃsā, nonviolence, emerges when one touches base with this common denominator which precedes and overcomes the I-You partition. Partition, in Ramchandra’s vocabulary, is the antonym of Advaita, nonduality, and it extends, according to him, from the metaphysical (diversion from the primordial Upaniṣadic oneness) to the political (from the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent onwards).

Ramchandra Gandhi’s position, or proposition—training the gaze to prioritize the common denominator over the obvious differences between you and I, sits well with Śaṅkara’s allegory of clay vessels (in his Brahmasūtra-bhāṣya 2.1.14). Clay is clearly the shared quality of every vessel made of clay. Every clay vessel preexists in clay as raw material. For Śaṅkara, the clay is Brahman, and the different vessels represent the phenomenal world of nāma-rūpa (names and forms), created by language. “A modification (vikāra)”, Śaṅkara writes (and Swami Gambhirananda translates), “e.g., a pot, plate, or jar, etc. originates from speech alone that makes it current by announcing, ‘it exists’. But speaking from the standpoint of the basic substance, no modification exists as such (apart from the clay). It has existence only in name and it is unreal. As clay alone it is real. This is an illustration about the Brahman cited in the Upaniṣad” (2009, 327). From Brahman perspective, or ultimate perspective, Śaṅkara suggests here, there is no modification. Brahman is unchangeable, modification-less. It is language which creates a world of diversity and modification. But Ramchandra Gandhi emphasizes the power of the gaze. According to him, it is the gaze, the way we see, which prioritizes differentiation over a sense of nonduality. The crux of the matter for him is that we can train our gaze to foreground that sense of non-otherness (Ramchandra Gandhi uses the term ananyatā, the author of the Brahmasūtra in 2.1.14 uses the synonymous term ananyatvam), to see the clay before we see the unique shape and particular function of the different vessels made of it. If for Śaṅkara, oneness is a matter of the metaphysical sphere, the sphere of Brahman, then Ramchandra Gandhi aspires to reveal non-otherness here and now, in the world, in the social and political circumstances in which we live. Language (Śaṅkara in the present case) and the gaze (Ramchandra Gandhi) as instruments of differentiation are the very tools of worldmaking, of the one becoming many in the Upaniṣadic myth under discussion.

Back in BU 1.4.2, the “first I” overcame his fear by rationalizing: “of what should I be afraid, when there is no one but me?”, and the author of the text explains that “one is, after all, afraid of another” (dvitīyād vai bhayaṃ bhavati). Here, the comparative philosopher cannot but recall Jean-Paul Sartre’s harsh statement (from his 1943 play No Exit) “Hell is other people” (l’enfer, c’est les autres). Along similar lines, Arindam Chakrabarti opens his paper “Troubles with a Second Self: The Problem of Other Minds in 11th Century Indian and 20th Century Western Philosophy” with the sharp statement: “The main trouble with you is that you are a self, but not my self” (2011, 24). It is astonishing to discover that I am your other as much as you are mine, and that you can objectify me in the same way that I am capable of objectifying you, and even more astonishing, that I need you in order to become a subject. My subjecthood (or uniqueness) depends on the difference between us. There is a sense of ambivalence here. My uniqueness-as-difference depends on the similarity between us, on your uniqueness and subjectivity, which is not just parallel but non-different than mine. “Yet what could it mean to share uniqueness?” Chakrabarti rightly asks (2011, 24). He draws on K.C. Bhattacharyya (KCB), who in chapter 1 of his book The Subject as Freedom (1930), writes:

Object as symbolized by the word this may be an individual object or a generality. The word I as intending the subject is not definitely either singular or general. It is indeed used to indicate not only one thing at a time, but a thing which cannot be indicated by more than one speaker; but then different speakers can be understood to use it—each of a distinct thing, namely himself—by the same hearer, and understood to use as he would use it. As used the term has a uniquely singular reference; but as understood, it is general in the sense the term unique is general. (2008, 382)

Śaṅkara’s Adhyāsa-bhāṣya echoes in this paragraph. Śaṅkara’s concepts of the viṣaya and the viṣayin, the object and the subject, the former manifested in the idea of “you”, the latter in the idea of “I”, and the discontent (for the subject) involved in their natural (naisargika) but “erroneous” intermixture (adhyāsa), are at the core of KCB’s paragraph. But it is the word “unique” which took me to Chakrabarti and from Chakrabarti to KCB. The latter makes an interesting distinction between use (singular) and understanding (general). But nevertheless, there is a sense of misnomership in the generality of the word “unique”. It “feels” counterintuitive to its meaning. This is the crux of the matter. I feel so unique compared with everything else, objects and other subjects, that being the other of my other who like me is unique to herself is almost ungraspable.

In the Bṛhadāraṇyaka-Upaniṣad, Sartre and even Chakrabarti, the other is portrayed as a source of fear. Is the ideal of Advaita, then, of a retreat or involution into an “all-embracing self”, just a “remedy” prescribed to overcome the fear of the other?

“He Found no Pleasure”

Back in the Upaniṣad, the process of creation proceeds:

He found no pleasure at all, so one finds no pleasure when one is alone. He wanted to have a companion. Now he was as large as a man and a woman in close embrace. So, he split (pat) his body into two, giving rise to husband (pati) and wife (patnī) […] He copulated with her, and from their union human beings were born. She then thought to herself: After begetting me from his own self, how could he copulate with me? I know, I’ll hide myself. So she became a cow, but he became a bull and again copulated with her. From their union cattle were born. (sa vai naiva reme. tasmād ekākī na ramate. sa dvitīyam aicchat. sa haitāvān āsa yathā strīpumāṃsau sampariṣvaktau. sa imam evātmānaṃ dvedhāpātayat. tataḥ patiś ca patnī cābhavatām. […] tāṃ samabhavat. tato manuṣyā ajāyanta. so heyam īkṣāṃ cakre - kathaṃ nu mātmana eva janayitvā sambhavati. hanta tiro ‘sānīti. sā gaur abhavad vṛṣabha itaraḥ. tāṃ sam evābhavat. tato gāvo ‘jāyanta. […] BU 1.4.3-4).

This is as far as I wish to go with the Upaniṣadic narrative, but before I discuss this paragraph, let me briefly sum up what happens next. In what follows, she becomes a mare, and then a female donkey, female goat and female sheep, and he becomes a stallion, male donkey, male goat and ram. From their union, the animals are born, “down to the very ants”. Thereafter, the first “I” churned Agni “from his mouth as if a vagina” (abhyamanthat. sa mukhāc ca yoniḥ, 1.4.6, this accurate translation is Frederick Smith’s), and from his semen created Soma (tad retaso ‘sṛjata. tad u somaḥ, 1.4.6). “These two”, Smith explains, Agni and Soma, “are the great polarity of Vedic thought: heat and cold, dry and wet, the two forces that the ritualist strives to balance” (2006, 204).

Let us look into the paragraph that begins with “He found no pleasure at all”. In Krishnamurti’s “Aloneness and Isolation”, it is implied that aloneness and loneliness (loneliness and isolation are synonymous in his formulation), different as they are, are also two sides of the same coin. And coins, we see here, can flip very quickly. The first “I” who just a moment back was afraid of the other, the dvitīya, and preferred the safety of his aloneness, now desires this very other. Therefore, the formula is already known to us, “even today” we find no pleasure when we are lonely, and feel fear intermixed with desire, both directed at the other. The first “I” of the Upaniṣadic narrative now breaks himself in two, to create man and woman, pati and patnī, both words reminiscent of the primordial split (pat). The narrative is similar and reminiscent of Aristophanes’s speech in Plato’s The Symposium. “In the beginning”, Plato (in Michael Joyce’s translation) writes,

we were nothing like we are now […] there really was a man-woman in those days, a being which was half male and half female. […] They were arrogant and tried to scale the heights of heaven and set upon the gods. At this, Zeus took council with the other gods as to what was to be done. […] I think I can see my way, he said, to put an end to this disturbance by weakening these people without destroying them. What I propose to do is to cut them all in half. […] So saying, he cut them all in half just as you or I might chop up sorb apples for pickling, or slice an egg with a hair. […] And so, gentlemen, we are all like pieces of the coins that children break in half for keepsakers—making two out of one, like the flatfish—and each of us is forever seeking the half that will tally with himself. (Joyce, 1961, 542, 543 and 544)

The narrative is similar, but there are two crucial differences between the Greek and the Indian myths. In the Upaniṣadic myth, the creator is the first self, in Plato, it is Zeus who creates man and woman. In the Upaniṣad, it is a self-split, an act and resolution of the primordial “I”. The other (she) is his creation. In The Symposium, it is Zeus, the king of the gods, who determines the human condition. Moreover, in the Upaniṣadic narrative, the motivation behind the split is positive, namely desire for the other. In Plato, it is a punishment for human hubris and a method for “weakening these people without destroying them”. Zeus further reflects that by cutting the primordial humans all in half, he will kill two birds in one stone, as Joyce renders Plato, “for each one will be only half as strong, and there’ll be twice as many of them, which will suit us very nicely”. “Twice as many of them” means more manpower in the service of the gods. Here again, there is a striking similarity between Plato and the Upaniṣadic chapter under discussion. In Bṛhadāraṇyaka-Upaniṣad 1.4.10, it is implied that whoever knows that he is the Brahman, “the whole”, becomes this very “whole” (sa idaṃ sarvam bhavati). This is so, the Upaniṣadic author suggests, with regard to gods, rishis (ṛṣis) and humans (the distinction between the rishi, seer or sage, and the ordinary human being, manuṣya, is noteworthy). “This is so even today” (tad idam api etarhi), the author of the text says, as usual by now. But if, on the other hand, someone worships a god (devatā), thinking that “he is different [from me] and I am different [from him]” (anyo‘sau anyo ‘ham asmīti), this is a sign that “he does not understand” (na sa veda). The author of the text explains, and the logic is one and the same as in Zeus above, that,

As livestock is for men, so is he for the gods. As having a lot of livestock is useful to a man, so each man proves useful to the gods. The loss of even a single head of livestock is painful; how much more if many are lost. The gods, therefore, are not pleased at the prospect of men coming to understand this. (yathā paśurevaṃ sa devānām; yathā ha vai bahavaḥ paśavo manuṣyam bhuñjyurevamekaikaḥ puruṣo devān bhunakti; ekasminneva paśāvādīyamāne‘priyam bhavati kimu bahuṣu; tasmādeṣāṃ tanna priyaṃ yadetanmanuṣyā vidyuḥ; Olivelle, 1998, 48-49)

The human person for the gods is of the same value as livestock is for him. They “own him”, he is “useful to them”. Hence, they do not want “to lose” him, in the same way that he wishes to maintain his livestock. If he comes “to know” and becomes “the whole”, the gods will “lose him”, but even they cannot prevent it. They cannot prevent the redemption of a human being from his fragmented existence to become “the whole”. The desire for the other, both in Plato and the Upaniṣad, which motivates the act of union between man and woman, is the desire for “the whole”, for a long lost primordial oneness.

The desire for a woman/wife (jāyā) by the first self is portrayed as the first movement of creation in the creation myth narrated in BU 1.4.17. The full articulation here, we saw above, is “so ‘kāmayata jāyā me syād atha prajāyeya”—“He had this desire: I wish I had a wife so I could father offspring”. And moreover, “I wish I had wealth so I could perform rites” (atha vittaṃ me syād atha karma kurvīyeti, Olivelle, 1998, 50–51). Along the same lines, Radhakriahnan translates the phrase “atha prajāyeya” as “then I may have offspring” (1953, 172), Paul Deussen as “I should like to propagate myself” (1995, 416) and R.E. Hume as “then I would procreate” (1951, 86). But Swami Madhavananda and Nitya Chaitanya Yati translate this phrase as “so that I may be born (as a child)” (1997, 192 and 1994, 198–199 respectively), and Som Raj Gupta offers the same translation but takes the words “as a child” out of the brackets (2008, 247). According to the first four translators, the first self wants to have a wife for the sake of procreation. For the last three translators, the birth of a son is a continuance of oneself. One is reborn, so to say, in his child, hence achieves a sense of immortality. But this is not the immortality that Śaṅkara advocates. For Śaṅkara, one’s very desire, whether for a wife (who provides him with karma-adhikāra, entitlement to perform rituals), or for the fruits of the ritual, is born of and belongs merely to the phenomenal realm. In his commentary of BU 1.4.17, Śaṅkara depicts the desiring self of the narrative as “possessed with ignorance” (Madhavananda 1997, 192). This ignorance, Śaṅkara implies here, and the desire which is part of it, has to do with identification with the body. He further suggests (with BU 3.5.1 in mind) that scope of desire (like the scope of phenomenal existence) is limited: wife, son, wealth and rites. A person driven by desire is further likened here by Śaṅkara to a silkworm (kośakāra), trapped in a cocoon. For Sthaneshwar Timalsina, the crux of the matter is that the cocoon is self-spun; hence, “there is no entity extrinsic to the self that determines its agency” (Timalsina, 2014, 195). But I wish to further suggest that the silkworm metaphor conveys a sense of blindness, of avidyā (“ignorance”) as blindness. Anyone encapsulated in one’s phenomenal existence is hardly aware of one’s ātmanhood, of one’s capital-S Selfhood, not the small-s self who is caught by fear and desire. Moreover, the silkworm metaphor also conveys a sense of evolvement (the silkworm goes through four stages of development: egg, larva, pupa and adult; the larva is the silkworm caterpillar; the adult stage is the silkworm moth). This takes me to Śaṅkara on the question of evolvement, which is in fact the question of the relation between Brahman and the world. “When Śaṅkara states that the Brahman is the cause of the world”, Timalsina clarifies this point,

comparing the world to the show of a magician, we should not conclude that he is describing creation. What we need to keep in mind is that the model of causality where the Brahman or the deep self gives rise to manifoldness without going through an actual transformation, addressed in terms of vivarta, is distinct from the actual causation where the effect has been transformed from its original state, addressed in Indian philosophy as satkāryavāda. (2014, 192)

Richard King delves further into the relation between the Brahman and the world. He provides an illuminating discussion of the analogy of a snake unfurling (Brahmasūtra 3.2.27), which “can be seen as envisaging the creation of the world [by the Brahman] in terms of “rolling out”. […] Thus, in the Brahmasūtra, creation is said to be nothing more that the self-development or self-unfoldment of Brahman”. King adds that “the earliest usage of the term vivarta (understood in post-Śaṅkarite Vedānta as a technical term for the illusoriness of the creative act) was to denote this ‘rolling out’ or ‘unfolding’ of the creation. […] This is how the term was used by Śaṅkara himself” (King, 1997, 84). Hence, King suggests that the creation of the world according to Śaṅkara is not a matter of a full-blown transformation but of a subtler “unfoldment”, as in the snake analogy. Timalsina moves on to quote and translate Śaṅkara who claims (in Brahmasūtra-bhāṣya 2.1.14) that “plurality is displayed by false cognition (mithyājñānavijṛmbhitaṃ ca nānātvam)”. Therefore, Timalsina suggests, “when considering the absolute Advaita viewpoint, no creation has ever occurred” (2014, 191). “The conversation regarding creation”, Timalsina concludes,

applies only on the phenomenal level. Śaṅkara reminds us repeatedly that the instances where creation is discussed [for example the Upaniṣadic narrative which is the heart of the present discussion] are not meant to describe or endorse the notion of a real creation as such, but only to affirm the oneness of the Brahman and the world. (2014, 195)

To sum up our findings so far: In the Upaniṣad, one becomes many, ekatva transforms into bahutva, the undifferentiated is replaced with differentiation, but the main trajectory is that “something” remains the same despite change. The ātman is always here, “even today”, behind every worldly occurrence. The world and the worldly are made of him and created out of “his” primordial split. The whole or a sense of completeness is waiting to be re-claimed, if one manages to assemble the jigsaw-puzzle pieces scattered all around, as to retrieve the long lost oneness. In the Upaniṣad and in Śaṅkara, identity takes precedence and priority over change. In the Upaniṣad, procreation through an act of union between the male and the female, human or other, and even between Agni and Soma, can be seen as an act of restoration, restituting the original oneness. In the Upaniṣad, at every phase and stage of creation, the presence of the ātman, of primordial oneness, is retrievable if one is endowed with a measure of perceptibility. “The task of the translator”, Walter Benjamin asserts in his essay “The Task of the Translator”, “consists of finding that intended effect upon the language into which he is translating, which produces in it the echo of the original” (1999, 176). If we think of creation and procreation in the Upaniṣadic myth as an act of translation (from one to many), then it is indeed through “that intended effect” upon language (we saw how the primary sense of I-amness is translated into the word “aham”) that one can hear and feel “the echo of the original”, of the “ātmaivedam agra āsīt” ātman.

Identity: A Counter Perspective

I wish to further think of identity with and through Mukund Lath’s essay “Identity Through Necessary Change”. “Identity”, Lath suggests, “is usually understood as something which remains the same despite change” (2018, 6). His attempt is to explore an alternative to this convention. “However”, Lath continues, “there are identities where difference is not contingent but necessary to identity. Identity in such cases is formed and maintained through a process of change” (2018, 6–7). Lath’s case study in his inquiry into “identity through necessary change” is classical Indian music, rāga music. “In a rāga”, Lath explains,

we have an enticing case of identity where the rāga is necessarily formulated through a process of palpable self-conscious change called ālāpa. […] Here, identity is the result of a necessary process of ālāpa-like change, a change that aims at creating an identity. This identity cannot be imagined without change. (2018, 6)

Lath continues to explain that,

The rāga pattern is given and forms the basis of a free and open ālāpa, or improvised elaboration according to a set of rules which assume the pattern, but allow room for imagination. […] Identity in a rāga cannot be restricted to a given pattern or even rules, since a good ālāpa reweaves them in its own way, and a great ālāpa can even transform them. (2018, 7-8)

But what is identity through (not despite) change? How can it be thought of meaningfully, fruitfully, if the usual overtones which accompany the notion of identity imply the very opposite? Or as Lath puts it:

What do we mean by speaking of the “same” rāga in spite of an inbuilt plurality of distinctly different formulations, which a rāga by its very nature has? […] We do identify a rāga in the plurality of its formations. And in creating it through ālāpa, we are earnestly intent on creating an individual identity for it, distinguishing it from other rāgas. What is this identity that not only accommodates, but also invites change and plurality? (2018, 7)

Lath underscores the fact that it is not pattern and rules (that “a great ālāpa can transform”) which determine the identity of a rāga (otherwise, it would be the same old “identity despite change”). Identity, according to him, is not a primary essence that needs to be retrieved or rediscovered, as in the Upaniṣad. The concept of identity, as depicted by him, rather takes into account the process and journey of creation. For Lath, being and becoming are not different from one another. Becoming is at the heart of being. To be is to become. The rāga illustrates this position, since every execution of a rāga is new and different. Anekāntatva, non-singularity, or many-sidedness, is at the core of the rāga. But what makes a rāga, then, the same rāga? When we listen to rāga Yaman, for example what makes it Yaman? According to Lath, it is not only, not even primarily the nāda-rūpa, which he depicts as “the body” of the rāga, its external (sthūla) dimension, its tonality and structure, but rather the rāga-bhāva (which he refers to as bhāva-rūpa), namely the inner, subtle (sūkṣma) dimension of the rāga, its emotive essence or mood, which is constantly changing and developing (2018, 19). To listen to a rāga is like meeting an old friend after a long time, trying to find out who she or he is right now. Not trying to recall who she or he was (in the Upaniṣad, it is a Platonic type of recollection, pertaining to the idea of ideas, namely the ātman), but to be able to see the changes and the potentiality of further, continuous change. This openness and curiosity towards change apply to listener and musician alike. Lath describes the ālāpa, the overture of the rāga, as a dialogue between the musician and the rāga, which he sees as a living entity. “The idea of rāgas as living forms”, Lath notes,

is deep rooted in the rāga-tradition itself. Rāgas have been likened to women and men. […] as with persons, so with rāgas: “knowing” them is an evocative, evolving, open-ended process with the prospect of a gradual deepening. (2018, 17)

Identity, then, as process and dialogue. It is from the ālāpa as dialogue (with the rāga as a “living being” as we just saw, and with numerous different executions of this “same” rāga) that the identity of the rāga is carved out. Identity, it is implied here, is an ongoing improvisation, ongoing seeking, ongoing journey. Lath foregrounds the role of imagination in this process. “Svara [sound]”, he explains, “the foundational unit of music, permits us to self reflexively explore the felt world as a world of meaning, to investigate its independent vastness and its immense possibilities with an introspective, imaginative and creative eye” (2016, 96). Lath alludes to a selfhood, of the rāga and of each of us—humans—with “immense possibilities”, with a myriad of potentialities waiting to be unfolded.

Reading Lath who speaks of identity—human and musical—as “inherently plural” (2018, 16), I recall Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex. In Sophocles’s tragedy, no one before Oedipus was able to solve the riddle of the Sphinx, which is the riddle of human identity: What goes on four feet in the morning, two feet at noon and three feet in the evening? The fearful Sphinx ruled over the city of Thebes and would pose the riddle to anyone wishing to enter the city. If they could not answer, she would devour them. Oedipus’s answer is obvious and at the same time concealed from the eye: a human being, since they walk on all fours as infants, on two legs as adults, and with a cane in old age. It is concealed from the eye, since we usually consider consistency and sameness, not change, plurality and diversity, as inherent to self and identity. This conventional thinking habit Lath strives to root out.

“Man is a transitional being, he is not final”, Sri Aurobindo—a lifelong influence on Lath’s thinking—famously writes.Footnote 3 According to Aurobindo, man (and woman of course)—can and should strive to rise from his “manhood” to the higher stage of “superman”. Without delving into Aurobindo’s vision of volitional evolution, I would like in closure, in dialogue with Lath, to bring Aurobindo’s statement about the human person as “transitional” and “not final” down to earth, and see each of us as an artist crafting one’s identity and self. “It is, of course, true”, Daya Krishna realistically remarks, “that we all are most of the time bad artists as far as the art of living is concerned. But then, how few are the works of art that are really good?” (1999, 26). It is not a matter of “good” or “bad”, nor of a “final product” or “final destination” à la Aurobindo’s superman. It is the journey which counts.