The Chandogya Upanishad

Of the ten principal Upanishads, two belong to the Sama Veda — the Chandogya and the Kena. The Chandogya is by far the larger; it is one of the two longest of all the principal Upanishads, and it is the one that gave Advaita Vedanta its central mantra. Its name — Chandogya — comes from chandoga, a Sama Vedic singer; the Upanishad is, in its origin, “the secret teaching of the singer.” That origin is everywhere in the text.

The Chandogya opens — and this is the place to start — with an instruction not about Brahman, not about the self, not about liberation, but about the chant. Aum ity etad akṣaram udgītham upāsīta, the first line says — let one meditate on the syllable Aum, the Udgitha. The Udgitha, as we have seen, is the central section of every Sama Vedic chant, the part the Udgatri himself sings. The Upanishad is telling its student: the syllable Aum, which you have been pronouncing as a stobha at the heart of every saman — meditate on that. The Sama Vedic chant is being turned inward; what was a sound to be sung is now an object to be contemplated. The whole Chandogya unfolds from this turn.

The first chapter of the Chandogya is, in this sense, pure Sama Vedic territory. It discusses the meaning of the Udgitha, the relationship between the chant and what is being chanted, the identification of the syllable Aum with the essence of the universe. It tells the famous story of Ushasti — the starving priest who, when asked to officiate at a sacrifice, demanded that he be allowed to chant only on condition that the patron’s Udgatri-priests first reveal which deities they intend to invoke their chants for, lest they botch the rite. The story is a Sama Vedic theological drama; only a reader steeped in the Udgatri’s craft will catch its full force.

But the Chandogya does not stay in the rite. It moves, chapter by chapter, outward and inward at the same time. By the sixth chapter it has reached the conversation between Uddalaka Aruni and his son Shvetaketu — the long, patient teaching in which the father gives the son, nine times, the same recognition in nine different shapes:

Tat tvam asi — That thou art.

This is the mahavakya of the Sama Veda — the single most quoted sentence in the Upanishadic literature, the foundation of Advaita Vedanta. It is the Sama Veda’s gift to the philosophical tradition. The text that begins by telling its student to meditate on the Sama Vedic Udgitha ends, in effect, by telling that same student that the object of the meditation — the singing self, the Self in the chant — is identical with the Being that underlies everything. The chant turns out to be a doorway, and what is on the other side of it is the recognition that there was never any otherness in the first place.

A reader who has already worked through the Principal Upanishads guide on this site will have met the Chandogya there — the salt in water, the seed of the banyan, the blindfolded man led back to his village. Read it again with the Sama Veda in mind, and you will notice how Sama Vedic the text actually is. Its first chapter is about the chant. Its second is about the saman itself as a metaphysical structure. Its third explores the meanings of various chants. Only gradually does it move into pure philosophy. The Chandogya is the Sama Vedic singing tradition becoming a teaching about the Self.

The two great Upanishads of any Veda are, in a sense, that Veda’s inward turn. The Yajur Veda’s Isha turns the rite of formula into the recognition that all this is pervaded by the Lord. The Sama Veda’s Chandogya turns the chant of the sacrifice into the recognition that the singer and the sung are not two. Tat tvam asi is what the Udgatri’s chant has been saying, in melody and stobha, all along.