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The Upanishads and the Search for the True Self

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Who am I? This is perhaps the oldest and deepest question in philosophy. More than two and a half thousand years ago, the sages of the Upanishads rose up to it. Their meditation, often conveyed obliquely in the form of stories, remains one of the most striking and illuminating in the history of human thought.

The Story of Indra

In the Chandogya Upanishad (c. 7th century BCE), Indra, king of the Vedic gods, and his nemesis, Virochana, king of the asuras (anti-gods), go to the ashram of the creator god, Prajapati, to learn the secret of Atman (the Self).

Prajapati takes them both in, and, after 32 years, summons them and tells them that Atman is the reflection of the self in the pupil of the eye. Satisfied with this answer, Virochana returns to the asuras, who take to venerating the bodily self.

But Indra is not so sure, and goes back to the ashram. After 32 more years as a brahmacharya (celibate student), Prajapati tells Indra that Atman is the dream self.

Still full of doubt, Indra is made to wait another 32 years, before being told that Atman is the unconscious self.

When Indra protests that no good can come of this knowledge, Prajapati keeps him for five more years and, after a total of 101 years, finally tells him the secret of Atman.

If Atman is neither the waking self, nor the dreaming self, nor the sleeping self, then what is Atman?

By having Indra wait for what is the natural lifespan of a wise person, Prajapati is making the point that the deepest truths cannot simply be taught, but must painstakingly be learnt. Wisdom is not something that can simply be handed over. It demands patience, perseverance, and, above all, the willingness to question even the answers one has already received. Virochana was content with appearances; Indra sought the truth behind them.

The Upanishads return to this mystery again and again. In one Upanishad, Indra spends a lifetime seeking the Self. In another, the same mystery is pursued by a very different seeker.

The Story of Nachiketa

The brahmin (priest) Vajashravasa purports to be sacrificing everything he owns, but his son Nachiketa notices that he is only offering up those cows that are old, lame, or otherwise unproductive.

Nachiketa repeatedly taunts his father, saying, “I too am yours! To which god will you offer me?” In a fit of rage, Vajashravasa cries out, “To Yama himself!”

Taking his father at his word, Nachiketa descends to Yama’s abode. But the god of death is out, and the boy is made to wait for three days without food or water. When Yama returns, he offers the brahmin boy three boons to atone for his lack of hospitality.

For the first boon, Nachiketa asks for peace between himself and his father when he is returned to the old man. Yama happily grants this.

For the second boon, he asks to learn the fire sacrifice, which he performs to Yama’s satisfaction.

Finally, for the third boon, he asks to be told what comes after death.

Yama replies:

Here, even the gods of yore had doubt. Indeed it is not easy to know—subtle is this matter—O Nachiketa, ask for some other boon. Press not this on me; give this up for me… Ask for centenarian sons and grandsons, many cattle, elephants, gold and horses. Ask for wide extent of earth and live yourself, as many autumns as you like.

But Nachiketa resists the riches of the world, saying that man is not to be satisfied with wealth: “If wealth were wanted, we shall get it, if we only see thee.”

Impressed by the boy, Yama agrees to tell him the Secret of the Self, which persists beyond the death of the body.

After a time, Nachiketa bids farewell to Yama and returns to his father as a jivanmukta, that is, one who has achieved moksha (liberation) in this life.

Whereas Indra’s trial was patience, Nachiketa’s was temptation. Both the god and the boy proved themselves worthy of the knowledge they sought.

The Secret of the Self

One seeker waited 101 years. Another contended with Death himself. Both sought the same truth.

What did Yama tell Nachiketa? And what, in the Chandogya Upanishad, did Prajapati finally tell Indra?

“Atman” is often translated into English as “soul” but does not include the individual or cognitive aspects of the Judeo-Christian soul and, for this reason, is better translated as “Self.”

In Hindu thought, the individual aspects of the Judeo-Christian soul, such as ego, mind, reason, emotion, and desire, are subsumed under the jivanatman (“life-breath”), or jiva for short.

Whereas the jiva, the personal self, is enmeshed in the world, the Atman is detached from this contingent life and incarnation. And whereas the jiva is ever-changing and evolving, the Atman, the universal Self, is steadfast and immoveable.

In the Shvetashvatara Upanishad, the jiva and Atman are compared to two inseparable birds sitting in a tree (the body). One bird, the jiva, gorges on the sweet and bitter fruits of the tree, while the other, tasting of neither, calmly looks on.

The Atman is neither the waking self, nor the dreaming self, nor the sleeping self, as Indra had been led to believe, but pure consciousness, or witness-consciousness, and of a kind with the supreme soul, Paramatman, which is either Brahman or an aspect of Brahman.

There is something within us that witnesses every thought without itself becoming a thought, every emotion without itself becoming an emotion. Our bodies change, our memories fade, our personalities evolve, yet the simple fact of awareness remains. The sages of the Upanishads identified this silent witness with the Atman.

In all living things, Atman is the spark of life, or light of consciousness, that ignites and illumines all else for the time that it remains embodied. It is the eternal core of a living being, which, in death, leaves it for another form, or, at long last, returns to the infinity of Brahman.

If the Self, the Atman, is made of the same stuff as the world, then self-understanding and self-control become means of understanding and controlling the world and existing on a higher plane.

In the Katha Upanishad, Yama tells Nachiketa:

Subtler than the subtle, greater than the great, in the heart of each living being, the Atman reposes. One free from desire, with his mind and the senses composed, sees the glory of the Atman and becomes absolved from grief.

Knowledge of the Self can be attained through the practice of yoga, which Yama defines for Nachiketa as ‘the firm holding back of the senses’.

This is the first recorded mention of ‘yoga’ in something close to its modern sense—and it is put into the mouth of Death himself.

Yama warns Nachiketa to be watchful, ‘for yoga comes and goes.’

More than twenty-five centuries later, the question that drew both Indra and Nachiketa remains our own. We spend much of our lives identifying ourselves with our bodies, our ambitions, our possessions, our memories, even our thoughts. The Upanishads invite us to look deeper. Beneath everything that changes, they suggest, lies something that does not: the silent witness, the Self, which is not merely ours but one with the universe.

Whether one accepts this vision or not, it remains one of humanity’s most beautiful and profound meditations on the oldest of all philosophical questions:

Who am I?

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The Buddha and Buddhism on the Illusion of the Self

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Article substantially revised on 12 August 2026.

Who are you?

The answer seems obvious. You have a body, a mind, a personality, a history, a name. You remember your childhood, make plans for the future, and feel yourself to be the same person from one day to the next.

The Buddha thought otherwise.

More than two and a half thousand years ago, he advanced one of the boldest and most unsettling ideas in the history of philosophy: that the self we spend so much of our lives constructing, indulging, and defending is, in an important sense, an illusion. This is not to say that we do not exist. Rather, the person we ordinarily take ourselves to be is far less fixed than we imagine. Understanding this, taught the Buddha, is not a cause for despair but the beginning of freedom.

The Middle Way

Two early insights that led the Buddha to enlightenment are the doctrines of the Middle Way and Dependent Origination.

According to the doctrine of the Middle Way, we are more likely to achieve insight and wisdom if we avoid the extremes of self-gratification and self-mortification. According to the doctrine of Dependent Origination, or Interdependent Arising, life is a continuous process of change, and every instance of change has manifold causes and effects. Everything is conditioned by everything else; nothing exists in complete isolation.

Suffering arises from our craving for permanence. Yet permanence is itself an illusion, and our attempts to cling to it can only end in pain and disappointment. Although nothing exists permanently, it is equally mistaken to say that nothing exists at all. This, too, is a middle way.

Does the self exist?

In one sense it does. In another, it does not—which is why, when asked the question directly, the Buddha, as was often his way, simply remained silent.

The Illusion of Self

How is it that the self can both exist and not exist?

According to Buddhism, the self—or rather the not-self (anatta)—is composed of five elements (skandhas): body, sensation, perception, will, and consciousness. These five skandhas are in a constant state of flux, yet together create the illusion of integrity and continuity that we mistake for a permanent self.

This explains why, when I turn my attention inwards, I can become aware of such and such a sensation, such and such a perception, or such and such a thought, but never of any actual, enduring self.

Try it now for yourself.

There are thoughts.

There are feelings.

There is awareness.

But where, exactly, is the self?

Nagarjuna on Emptiness

The Middle Way and Dependent Origination pervade all aspects of Buddhist thought. After the Buddha, the most celebrated Buddhist philosopher is Nagarjuna (d. c. 250 CE), who founded, or perhaps re-founded, the Madhyamaka (‘Middle Way’) school, an important strand of Mahayana (Great Vehicle) Buddhism.

In his Root Verses on the Middle Way, Nagarjuna argues that between the extremes of permanence and nothingness lies emptiness, or shunyata. Although phenomena exist, they are ‘empty’ insofar as they lack permanence and autonomous existence.

This sounds pessimistic—and Nagarjuna has often been accused of nihilism—but it is precisely this emptiness and fluidity that make change, freedom, and creation possible. In Zen Buddhism, a more dynamic alternative to the koan, or riddle, is for the master suddenly to slap his student, literally shaking him out of who he thinks he is and what he thinks he’s doing. This, however, would probably not be legal today.

Rebirth and Release

The death of the bodily self leads to the disaggregation of the skandhas and to their re-aggregation into another not-self, which is neither identical to nor entirely different from the previous one, but forms part of a causal continuum with it. A traditional analogy is that of a flame, fuelled by desire, passing from one candle to the next.

The cycle of rebirth can only be broken if the self is able to transcend its subjective and distorted image of the world, built around the ‘I am’ conceit. This is nibbana, or, in Sanskrit, nirvana. As I see it, nirvana rests on the understanding that consciousness is not one continuous, unbroken entity but a succession of conscious moments.

Western Parallels

If all this sounds rather mystical, consider that the Scottish philosopher David Hume independently arrived at a remarkably similar conclusion:

…when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I can never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.

Two thousand years after the Buddha, Hume found no permanent self behind experience, only a ceaseless stream of perceptions.

Why It Matters

Our ego defences as broadly conceived—that is, not only our ego defences proper but also our habits, customs, culture, and other ties—may provide us with an illusion of self, but they also define us as such and such, and, in so doing, constrain our range of thought, feeling, and action. Paradoxically, the very elements that furnish us with our sense of self are also those that prevent us from fulfilling our true promise and potential as human beings.

As I argue in my book on the psychology of self-deception, it is only by renouncing the self, that is, by dropping his defences and committing symbolic suicide, that a person is able to open up to different modes of being and relating, and transform himself into a pure essence of humanity. In so doing, he becomes free to recast himself as a more joyful and productive person, and attains the only species of transcendence and immortality that is open to us, mere mortals.

And so, if we are to live, we must first learn to die.