Sat

Pure being — that which exists intrinsically and can never go out of existence. One of the three doorways into brahman.

Overview

Sat is the Vedantic word for reality approached through the side of existence. Swami Sarvapriyananda, following Shankara’s commentary on 02-16, frames it through a simple contrast: properties can be intrinsic or incidental. A heated pan is hot incidentally — it borrowed its heat and will lose it. Fire is hot intrinsically — whenever fire is, it is hot. If existence, analogously, is an incidental property of a thing, that thing will be born and die. If existence is intrinsic to something, that something will always be.

The argument of verse 2.16 is that there is such a reality — something whose existence is intrinsic, not borrowed, never coming, never going. That reality is sat. Everything we ordinarily experience — pots, bodies, the universe — has borrowed existence; each is a vikara that depends on its material cause for its very being. Trace the chain of causes down and you arrive at sat: the one thing that does not borrow its isness from anything further.

The move that closes the teaching is that sat is not “out there.” In every experience whatsoever — clock is, book is, hand is — the object varies, but the “is” does not. That unchanging “is-ness” running through every cognition is your own being. Sat is you.

Related concepts

• brahman — what sat names from the existence side
• sat-chit-ananda — the three-part formula
• asat — (in Shankara’s usage here) the appearance, the false
• mithya — borrowed existence
• upadana-karana — the chain of material causes that terminates in sat

In the Gita

• 02-16 — the verse that formally opens the sat approach
• 02-17 — sat as what pervades the whole field of experience
• 02-18 — sat as aprameyam, the śarīrin

Lecture evidence

• Ep. 5 [11:30]: Intrinsic vs incidental properties — existence analyzed the same way. If existence is borrowed, things come into being and die; if intrinsic, that thing always is.
• Ep. 5 [32:15]: In every experience — clock, book, hand — the object changes but “is” does not. That unchanging is-ness is sat.
• Ep. 5 [55:55]: Waves do not have water in them; water appears as waves. Sat is the ocean.
• Ep. 6 [50:20]: Satta-sphurti — sat (being) and sphurti (shining-forth); sat gives existence, shining manifests it.
• Ep. 6 [17:00]: Sat pervades the world as water pervades a wave — constituted through and through, not alongside.