Introducing the concept
The fundamental quest in all philosophical inquiry is to understand the nature of reality. ‘What is real?’ or simply ‘What is?’
One way of framing the question is to look at the World and ask ‘What is the stuff that all this is made of?’, ‘What is the stuff of reality?’ We look at cars and buildings, at mountains and oceans, at people and animals, we could look at everything that appears to us and ask ‘What is the stuff this is made of?’
The investigation into the nature of matter has occupied the minds of the leading scientific thinkers for centuries. Modern science, with its ever more sophisticated instruments, is able to probe further and further into what appears to us as this material World. You take any object in the World and break it down into molecules and atoms; further down into electrons, protons, and neutrons; further down into quarks, and so on. We can keep going into finer and finer particles. Is there an end to this?
And what we are also finding as we examine matter at such microscopic levels is that the very nature of matter seems a little hazy. What we thought were ‘particles of matter’ at discrete points in space might instead be ‘probability waves’ that are spread out across space. Where is the stuff of the Universe?
Vedanta goes much subtler in the inquiry into the fundamental substance of the World. Vedanta asks - What is common to all things that appear to us? Living beings and inanimate objects, galaxies and subatomic particles - what is common to all of these? Not just these objects but even your thoughts, your emotions, your sensations - what is common to everything that appears?
What is common, Vedanta says, is Existence itself. The thought that you have right now and the chair that you are sitting on both seem to exist, thus they both have the principle of Existence. Objects might have vastly different properties - shapes, sizes, colors, functions - but they have Existence in common. The pen is, the book is, this sensation is, the memory that flashed before you now is. What all of these vastly different objects share is their ‘is-ness’. This is-ness, this Existence, is what Vedanta calls Sat.
Going a little deeper
One of the most foundational teachings of Vedanta philosophy, which describes the nature of Sat, is verse 16 from chapter 2 of the Bhagavad Gita. Bhagavan Sri Krishna tells Arjuna -
nāsato vidyate bhāvo nābhāvo vidyate sataḥ
ubhayorapi dṛiṣhṭo ’nta stvanayos tattva-darśhibhiḥ
Which translates to -
Of the unreal there is no being; the Real has no non-existence.
The nature of both of these, indeed, has been realized by seers of the Truth.
Go over the verse a couple of times; does it seem confusing? Very simply, what it lays before us is a fundamental principle in Vedanta, that something cannot come from nothing.
nāsato vidyate bhāvo - Of the unreal there is no being.
Another way of putting this is that ‘the unreal can never come into being’, or simply ‘the non-existent can never come into existence.’ Let us examine this.
For the purposes of this discussion let us consider Existence of Sat to be a property that can be attached to a substance (read our page on Adheyata-Sambandha to understand substances and attributes better, and to see why Sat cannot be a property). How do you say that an object exists? It is when it contains Existence. So how would such an object come into existence? It has to be when Existence or Sat is added to it. And it would go out of existence when Sat is removed from it.
It might be easier to think of it in terms of other properties, like hotness. Here is a simple example used by Swami Sarvapriyananda - When you drop a potato into a pot of boiling water, it gains heat from the water. Later, when you pull the potato out of the water, it loses the heat it earlier gained. Heat is not an intrinsic property of the potato, but is something that it borrows, holds on to temporarily, and returns.
Similarly, we can say that objects in the World borrow Existence (when they are created), hold on to Existence (during their temporary existence), and then return Existence (when they are dissolved).
But can Existence itself borrow Existence? The very nature of Existence is to exist. Other objects can perhaps gain or lose Existence, but from where would Existence borrow Existence, if It itself is Existence?
Existence - or Reality - can never come into being. It just is.
Now let us take the second half of the sentence - nābhāvo vidyate sataḥ; the Real has no non-existence.
Just as Sat cannot gain Existence, it cannot lose or return Existence either. It is like the fire that is heating up the water, which in turn is heating up the potato. The water and the potato can gain and lose heat, but the fire’s very nature is to be hot. The very nature of Sat is to exist.
Sat can never come into being, Sat can never go out of existence. It is unborn, it is indestructible. It is Brahman, the Ultimate Reality.
Even if everything in the objective Universe were to disappear, even if space itself, and time itself, were to disappear, Reality will remain untouched; Sat will remain untouched.
What is real cannot be created, what is real cannot be destroyed.
Tying the threads together
You might think that we have reached an unsettling conclusion. Nothing real can be created or destroyed, we said, but what about everything that we see around us? We constantly see objects coming into being and going out of being - doesn’t this seem to contradict our conclusion?
To this let us bring in another foundational text in Advaita Vedanta, the Mandukya Upanishad Karika by Sri Gaudapacharya, who was Adi Shankara’s guru’s guru.
Earlier in this discussion, we had said that objects gain Existence, hold on to Existence, and then return Existence. That might be fine for the purpose of gradually understanding the nature of Sat, but is that really what is happening?
Gaudapadacharya pushes us to think carefully about this. He writes that anything that does not have existence in the beginning, and does not have existence after a certain point, cannot have existence in the intervening period either. Any object that did not exist at some earlier point and will cease to exist at some later point, cannot be real even right now, when it seems to exist.
If something was not real earlier, if something did not exist at some point of time, where could it have now come from? This question can be asked of any object in front of you, or it can be asked of the Universe as a whole.
The only option is to say that it has come from somewhere ‘outside’. But anything ‘outside’ the real is unreal, non-existent. There cannot be a jump from non-existence to existence, from the unreal to the real. As we just saw, the unreal can never come into being; something cannot come out of nothing.
Which means that the objects we see in the world are not ultimately real. They appear to us, but they do not possess intrinsic Existence. Sat alone is - immortal, unchanging, indestructible.
Reflect on this
If everything that appears to you is fundamentally unreal, and at the same time there undoubtedly is a Reality, then Reality can only be one ‘thing’. What is it?