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What is sat-chit-ānanda?

Sat-chit-ānanda (सच्चिदानन्द, sut-chit-AH-nun-duh; also written satchidananda, satchitananda or saccidānanda) is a Sanskrit name for what is most real. It joins three words:

  • Sat: being; what exists, what is real. It’s the root of satya, truth.
  • Chit: consciousness; awareness.
  • Ānanda: bliss; joy.

Sanskrit blends sounds where words meet, so sat and cit and ānanda become saccidānanda, which is why the name is spelled so many ways.

It isn’t three things side by side. In Advaita Vedanta, the teaching that reality is not two, being, consciousness and bliss are one reality described three ways: what simply is, is aware, and its nature is joy. That joy isn’t a high mood to reach and hold. It’s fullness, nothing missing: “That which is infinite is the source of happiness. There is no happiness in the finite.” (Chandogya Upanishad 7.23.1)

Each word also guards against a misreading of the others. Sat says it is, not nothing; chit, that it’s aware, not inert; ānanda, that it’s full, not cold, lacking nothing. Swami Sivananda set each against its opposite: sat against asat, the unreal; chit against jada, the insentient; ānanda against duhkha, pain. And they can’t be pulled apart, he wrote, “just as you cannot separate light, heat and luminosity from fire.”

Where it comes from

The idea is older than the word. The Upanishads, the philosophical texts at the end of the Vedas, describe the deepest reality, Brahman, in these terms:

  • “In the beginning, my dear, this was Being only, one, without a second.” (Chandogya Upanishad 6.2.1, sad eva somyedam agra āsīd ekam evādvitīyam)
  • “Consciousness is Brahman.” (Aitareya Upanishad 3.1.3, prajñānaṃ brahma)
  • “Brahman is real, consciousness, infinite.” (Taittiriya Upanishad 2.1, satyaṃ jñānam anantaṃ brahma)
  • “He understood that bliss is Brahman.” (Taittiriya Upanishad 3.6, ānando brahmeti vyajānāt)
  • “Knowledge, Bliss, Brahman.” (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 3.9.28, vijñānam ānandaṃ brahma)

The single word came later. It isn’t in the works securely attributed to Shankara, Advaita’s great teacher; one of its first clear uses is Sarvajñātman’s Saṃkṣepaśārīraka, around the eleventh century, likely built on the Brihadaranyaka’s “Knowledge, Bliss, Brahman” with being added. By the fifteenth century it opened Sadānanda’s Vedāntasāra, a handbook of Advaita, which begins by taking refuge in the undivided Self, being, consciousness and bliss, beyond the reach of speech and mind. It became the shortest description of Brahman, and of the self that was never separate from it.

Other traditions use the word in their own way. In the devotional Brahma-saṃhitā, Krishna’s form itself is sac-cid-ānanda: being, consciousness and bliss (5.1).

How teachers have put it

Swami Vivekananda, translating the Nirvāṇa Ṣaṭkam, a hymn traditionally given to Shankara, ends every verse: “I am Existence Absolute, Knowledge Absolute, Bliss Absolute / I am He, I am He.”

Ramana Maharshi, asked “Who am I?”, answered: “Knowledge itself is ‘I’. The nature of knowledge is sat-chit-ananda.” (Who Am I?, translated by David Godman)

Paramahansa Yogananda, in his first talks in America, called it “ever-existing, ever-conscious, ever-new Bliss.”

Swami Satchidananda, who opened the Woodstock festival in 1969, carried it as his name: his teacher, Swami Sivananda, gave it to him in 1949.

Michael Singer calls it “eternal, conscious, ecstasy,” the name for God in the Hindu and yoga traditions. This collection takes its name, and its gloss, from his words. At his Temple of the Universe, one of the chants sings it: Om namah shivaya gurave, satchidananda murtaye, salutations to the guru, who is Shiva, whose form is being, consciousness and bliss. It’s an old verse in praise of the guru, sung in many ashrams.

In these meditations

The meditations here don’t ask you to believe it. They look for it, gently: being, in simply being here; consciousness, in noticing; joy, in a gladness that needs no reason.

Further reading