Reading Sanskrit can feel like swimming in an ocean.
Indians and Greeks were asking questions about the most basic reality by 500 BCE. The first Upanisads had been composed between 800 and 500 BCE, and their charged language takes you into a different world than what most Greeks knew.
These masterpieces of the imagination began as reflections on Vedic rituals and grew into speculations about the universe and human life. The earliest were in the form of students, Brahmin teachers, kings, and a few women discussing philosophic issues.
What might have been the earliest Upanishad is called the Brihadaranyaka. Aranya meant wilderness; it has often been translated as forest, but its meaning was broader. In general it meant a place that was distant from the village or town, and it was where some of the discussions took place. Those remote areas and royal courts were different from Greece’s landscape of small, distinct places ruled from city-states’ agoras and separated by clear mountain ranges and coastlines, and they might have helped shape people’s discussions.
The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad begins by comparing the world to a sacrificial horse. The dawn is its head, the sun is its eye, the wind is its breath, the year is its body, the sky is its back, the atmosphere is its belly, the earth is its hoof, the seasons are its limbs, the months and half-months are its joints, and so on in a long list of correlations between the animal and the cosmos. This and another early Upanishad, the Chandogya, often compare physical things to the universe. They don’t compare things to other objects that are nearby and of similar size nearly as much as the Homeric epics do (which focus on visual similarities between things), Plato and Aristotle (who both attempted to define classes of things), or merchants and farmers in Greek agoras (who were centered on trade and local politics). Instead, they followed the Vedas and assumed that the most basic and exemplary type of comparison is not between two objects of similar magnitude, but between an object and the whole universe, which the sacrifice symbolized. Vedic rituals had long been seen as microcosms of the universe. Composers of the early Upanishads kept this traditional way of thinking, linked things across cosmic dimensions, and saw these connections as most basic in nature.
With this tendency to apprehend things in terms of cosmic vastness, it was a short mental step from Vedic sacrificial rituals to imagining the whole universe as a sacrifice—the world’s huge panoply of plants, animals, and humans is one field which ultimately dissolves like the offerings that priests burn. The hallowed Vedic rituals had been key intellectual centers of gravity; more people were now extending their meanings as they pondered all of creation. Those groups of inquirers, taking breaks from domestic life, journeying beyond the village or town, and sitting under trees and in royal courts, had two monumental insights.
One arose from questions about the origin and basis of all things. What is this vast universe in constant flux based on? Is it water? Or air? How about fire? Or maybe the vegetation that sustains us? It’s none of these, because in a universe of constant change, they also transmute. The basis of all is a deeper invisible energy which everything came from, brahman. It’s the inner essence of all things and of the whole cosmos. It’s invisible, but everything visible emerged from it, and it exists within all things. People in Rigvedic times already thought in terms of a profusion of energy throughout the universe; thinkers were now more actively inquiring about it.
The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad’s charged language immerses people in the universe’s origin. The basis of reality, brahman, is “avayv, anakasam, asangam, arasam, agandham, acaksuskam, asrotram, avak, amanah, atejaskam, apranam, amukham, amatram, anantaram, abahyam” (not air, not space, not bound with anything, without taste, without smell, without eyes, without ears, without voice, without mind, without splendor, without breath, without a mouth, without measure, without an inside, without an outside). In this passage, a long flow of ideas leads to nothing. It doesn’t end in a definition, which most Greeks would have expected. They would have become impatient without one. Instead, the Upanishadic passage expresses negative ontology (reality is not this or that). The sentence carries you through such a long undulating wave of sound that it can make you feel that you’ve just traveled through the energies emanating throughout the universe.
And the profusion of alliterations beginning with the letter A heightens the feeling of being in a long wave. This river of sound can bring sensitive reciters, readers, and audiences to the conclusion that the basis of everything cannot be defined, but it’s everywhere. The Upanishads give some potent metaphors for this idea. In the Chandogya Upanishad, the teacher Uddalaka compared it to salt dissolved in water. You can’t see the salt, but it pervades the water.
Uddalaka also illustrated this idea with the image of a banyan tree. Its above-ground root system is sometimes more copious than its trunk, but where did all this sprawling mass come from? Trace it to its source and you will find a tiny seed. Cut it open and it’s hollow. Likewise for the universe. The source of its enormous panorama of life is invisible. Upanishadic thinkers concluded that the universe’s essence is all pervasive rather than concentrated in specific locations.
But how the heck can you know brahman? Sanskrit again helped inquirers think of profusions that flow beyond any nameable object and into a vaster and subtler field. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad says that you know it when you know the vital breath of the vital breath, the eye of the eye, the ear of the ear, and the mind of the mind (pranasya pranam uta caksusas caksuh uta srotrasya strotrm manaso ye mano). You can see what the eye can’t see with the eye of the eye? I can imagine ancient Athenians finding this ridiculous and responding, “Hey Demetrios, clarify that before you get a kick in the ass of your ass!” Aristophanes wrote a comic play that parodied Socrates’ metaphysical speculations, and it ended with a student’s disgruntled father burning his school down. Become too airy and reality will strike where you’re sure to feel it.
But the Upanishads’ language takes people into a different world than one in which definitions of distinct objects and precisely delineated concepts are the central concerns. The language’s lengthy flows help people’s consciousness merge into a larger field than the dimensions of visible objects in the world. The long, melodious lines can feel like a river of life that you’re dissolved in, and this flow comes from the source of all things. Some of the language in the early Upanishads thus helps people feel oneness with the whole universe. This unity can’t be seen or defined, but it pervades all things.
This realization led to the second insight, which was one of the most influential in human history. Uddalaka, in the Chandogya Upanishad, said, “Tat tvam asi” (that art thou). This unnamable origin of the universe is within each of us, and it’s the essence of the self, the atman. Brahman and atman are the same. People thought that by meditating on their unity, they could overcome the mutability of the individual self. A person’s real identity and the universe are one.
But how do you realize this when your senses are engaged with the world around you? The heart is the way. Brahman/atman can be found in the hridaya akasha, the space within the heart. It’s imperceptibly small, yet so vast that it contains the whole universe. Aristotle’s followers could say, “That is a logical contradiction. Declaring that a thing is two opposites is absurd.” But ancient Greeks were used to thinking that limits are basic in the universe, because limits were highlighted in their natural environment, their most widely shared narratives, their aesthetics, and the proportions and abstract geometric shapes that people emphasized. While Greeks were perfecting ways of representing distinct objects and ratios, Indians were used to thinking in terms of flows that are more vast and abundant than a single thing. All opposites emerged from the same field and will dissolve back into it. From the perspective of the whole field, all opposites are temporary and will ultimately be unified. Upanishadic thinkers could have told Greeks, “Instead of focusing on distinctions in the external world with your eyes, meditate on the heart and realize that all things that appear different share the same subtle essence.”
Of course the idea of merging one’s self into the whole universe hasn’t been confined to India. Mystics have expressed it on every continent, and some Greeks were also exploring it in the fifth century BCE. But it became more institutionalized and mainstream in India. People developed yogic techniques to realize it and created ways to express it that became canonical in every major art form.
Sanskrit can make you feel that you’re merged in this reality. Reciting verses composed in it can make a sensitive person feel like he’s swimming in a vast river of life that emerged from the origins. It can seem that he’s dissolved into the energies that the universe came from and that still pervade it. It’s all brahman.