I Am Brahman

Aham brahmasmi, I am brahman, is one of the four mahavakyas, the great statements that Advaita Vedanta draws one from each Veda and treats as the compressed content of the entire teaching. It comes from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. Read in isolation it can sound like a boast, but in the tradition's own reading it is the opposite: it is not the limited ego (ahamkara) that is identified with the absolute, but the innermost self (atman), and the statement asserts that this self is not other than brahman, the single reality underlying all things.

As a mahavakya it functions less as a mantra to be repeated for its sound than as a formula for contemplation (nididhyasana), held before the mind so that the identity it states may be realised rather than merely believed. Shankara's Advaita treats such statements as the decisive scriptural testimony to non-duality, and the whole apparatus of the school, its analysis of the self, its account of ignorance and its method of negation, can be seen as an extended commentary on how a sentence of three words can be true. It is paired in the tradition with the second-person formula tat tvam asi, that thou art.