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The
Upanishad Version
Note 1. A seriously critical analysis of the Upanishads – and of the 5 extant versions of Vedanta – has not yet been written. Note 2. Scholarly research (to wit, Oldenburg, Deussen & Radhakrishnan) suggests that the earliest Upanishads began to treat the term Brahman (possibly derived from the root brh. ‘to grow, to burst forth’) and Atman (possibly derived from the root an ‘to breathe’) as synonymous, i.e. as two sides of the one coin (neither side being the jiva). What the Upanishads (nor the series of commentators right up to Shankara) did not do was produce a clear and unambiguous (i.e. verifiable, falsifiable or predictive) definition of either term. So, in essence, no one really knows what both terms actually meant when first used. The sheer uncertainty of these two key terms created a fruitful ground for wild and extreme speculation (as did the undefined terms nibbana or nirvana and atta for Buddhists), and which continues to this day. Note 3. The translation into English of the term Brahman as ‘Self’ and the term Atman as ‘self’ is fundamentally flawed since in English the term ‘self’ implies ‘difference’, the latter notion being absent from both Brahman and Atman.
The
important problem was not really about the difference or sameness of Brahman
and Atman but about the relationship between the Nirguna Brahman
and the Saguna Brahman and how the latter emerges from or is a
turbulence (or relativization) of the former. The problem was not resolved in
the Upanishads, nor, indeed, by the Shankaracharya or any of his successors. Hence,
it’s up to you to propose a solution!
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