Atman

Atman is the Sanskrit word for self, used in the Upanishads and subsequent Hindu philosophy for the innermost reality of the human person — the witness consciousness that underlies and survives the changing states of body, sense, and mind. The atman is not the empirical self of personality, memory, and biography, but the deeper subject of which these are appearances.

The philosophical interpretation of atman is the central dispute within Vedanta. Adi Shankara's Advaita Vedanta holds that atman is identical with Brahman, the ultimate reality: the apparent multiplicity of individual selves is the product of cosmic illusion (maya), and liberation (moksha) is the recognition of the underlying non-duality. Ramanuja's Vishishtadvaita Vedanta holds that the individual atman is real and distinct from but qualifiedly non-dual with Brahman. Buddhist philosophy rejects the doctrine of atman altogether: the early Buddhist analysis of anatta (non-self) holds that what we call the self is a stream of conditioned states with no underlying substantial subject.