What Am I?

So they lived for many years, until youth ebbed away, as water drains from a cracked jar. Then they saw that death is hard to ward off, that old age falls like frost on a lotus, that life drips away like water from the palm of the hand. Together they decided that only knowledge of the Self could cure the sickness of the world, and they gave themselves to the teaching of the Self, going to those who knew it, and each awakened the other.

Cūḍālā listened to those who knew the Self, and day and night she reflected on her own self. Let me look at my own self, she thought. What am I? The body is inert and knows nothing; I am not that. The senses are inert. The mind is driven by the understanding, the understanding by the sense of I, and the sense of I is brought forth by the living soul, which lives by consciousness. By what is this consciousness itself awakened?

And then she knew. Ah, after so long, she said, I have known at last what is to be known, and it is untroubled. There is only the one great consciousness, which is called Brahman and the supreme Self. I am nothing but consciousness, free even of the sense of I. Ah, after so long, I am at peace, I have passed into nirvāṇa. I am in nirvāṇa, wholly in nirvāṇa; I rest beyond it all, and the fever is gone. And passion and fear and delusion were stilled in her, and she was at peace, like a streak of cloud in the autumn sky.