Who Am I — Body or Soul?

The most fundamental and revolutionary teachings start from here.

And it begins with a question so simple that a child could ask it, and so deep that the greatest philosophers of every age have spent their lives exploring it.

Who am I — body or soul?

देहिनोऽस्मिन्यथा देहे कौमारं यौवनं जरा ।
तथा देहान्तरप्राप्तिर्धीरस्तत्र न मुह्यति ॥

Bhagavad Gita 2.13

“Just as the soul passes through childhood, youth, and old age in this body, similarly it passes into another body at death. The wise are not deluded by this.”

The first philosophical argument of the Bhagavad Gita is based on the distinction between Deha and Dehi.

• देह — Deha: the body, the physical form, the instrument through which the soul experiences the world. Born at a particular moment. Changing constantly.
• देही — Dehī: the one who has the body, the indwelling Self, the soul.

Shri Krishna’s argument is breathtakingly simple. Every human being has already lived this truth without recognising it. We were once a child, and that child’s body no longer exists. The cells, size, face, voice all changed beyond recognition. And yet we know, without any doubt, that we are the same person who was that child. Then, it is obvious that something persisted through all the changes of the body, something remained continuous while everything around it transformed.

That something, the continuity that persists through childhood, youth, and old age is the Soul. If the soul persists through every change the body undergoes in a single lifetime, then the greater change is called death. The body changes its form entirely and the soul moves on.

Dehāntaraprāptiḥ — obtaining another body. Shri Krishna uses this compound word for death as casually, as one might say changing clothes. Because that is precisely what it is from the soul’s perspective.

The soul is eternal, the body is temporary, and grief arising from confusion between the two has no ultimate foundation. What Arjun is about to destroy does not exist, what actually exists cannot be destroyed.

न जायते म्रियते वा कदाचि
नायं भूत्वा भविता वा न भूय: ।
अजो नित्य: शाश्वतोऽयं पुराणो
न हन्यते हन्यमाने शरीरे ॥

Bhagavad Gita 2.20

“The soul is never born and never dies. It is unborn, eternal, ever-existing, and primeval. It is not slain when the body is slain.”

The soul was never born.

This is the verse that cuts through the deepest layer of Arjun’s grief, and through the deepest layer of every human being’s fear. Because beneath all grief, sorrow, pain of loss and separation, there is one primal fear — the fear of ending, the fear of death.

But the soul does not end because the soul never began. It was never born into existence and therefore it cannot be removed from existence. What has no beginning has no end. What was never created cannot be destroyed.

The soul is अज (unborn), नित्य (eternal), शाश्वत (everlasting) and पुराण (primeval).

When young Nachiketa sits before Yamraj, the god of death himself and he asks the question that every human being carries somewhere inside them:

“When a man dies, what happens? Some say he exists. Some say he does not. Tell me the truth of this.”

Yamraj’s answer spans the entire Katha Upanishad, and its most celebrated verse is:

अणोरणीयान्महतो महीयान् आत्मास्य जन्तोर्निहितो गुहायाम् ।
तमक्रतुः पश्यति वीतशोको धातुप्रसादान्महिमानमात्मनः ॥

Katha Upanishad

“The Self is smaller than the smallest, greater than the greatest; it is hidden in the heart of every living being. The one who is free from desire, grief and by the grace of God beholds the glory of the Self.”