“Mind in purity is the Self.”

–Ramana Maharshi, Be As You Are: The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi (ed. David Godman), p. 118.

How can it be that the mind that has been purified is identical with the Self?

To understand how this is so, we had better begin our inquiry with the question: “What is the mind?”

There are two answers that Ramana Maharshi wishes to give: a narrow answer and a broad one. The narrow answer refers to mind in the restricted sense. In this particular sense, mind is nothing but a thought arising or a thought movement (vritti). That is, we never find any object or entity labeled “mind”; never do we discover any container in which thoughts appear and in which they are confined. Our direct experience of mind, in the narrow sense, will bear out the trivial nature of mind. It is, quite literally and banally, nothing other than the current thought. The word “mind” therefore means only “this thought.”

Yet we need also to dwell on mind in the broad sense. For Ramana Maharshi, we can also pick out the “keystone feature” of the mind or its central element, which is the sense of I. This sense of I he also refers to as the “I-thought.”

Seminal in this investigation of the I-thought is, he states in Maharshi’s Gospel, the prising apart of the I from any object. In other words, self-inquiry (atma vichara) really begins once we separate the I from anything that is not-I and when we thus hold onto this I-ness.

As we hold onto this I-ness on its own and thus without any reference to any objects, we are allowing the I to, as he puts it metaphorically, “return to its Source.” This is a colorful way of saying that the I, without any sense of limitation (“superimposition”), is nothing but the Self.

How has this line of inquiry clarified Ramana’s epigram? Self-inquiry is, in essence, the purification of the mind. For a mind that is completely purified, there is nothing but “I am I” or “I-I.” That is, the very nature of mind (“I”) is the Self (“I”). I is I, or–what is the same thing–I am I.

Put differently, the mind that has been cleansed of all confusions or conceptual constrictions is the ultimate and, of course, has always been the ultimate. Zen agrees. When young Joshu asks his teacher, “What is Tao?,” the latter replies with the utmost clarity and concision: “Ordinary mind [right now] is Tao.”