The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (287 page)

(Skt.). For Hindus and Sikhs, the real or true Self, which underlies and is present in human appearance. In the Vedas, that sense had not developed. In the
g Veda
it means breath, or the whole body, as opposed to parts of it. It may even simply be a reflexive pronoun (cf.
nafs
in Arabic). It was only in the period of the
ra
yakas
and
Upani
ads
that attempts were made to define and describe the nature of this ‘self’ more precisely.
Brih
daranyaka Upani
ad
1. 3. 22 states that the vital force,
tman (now much more than breath) is present and operative in every form of life, not just in humans.
tman is therefore necessarily identical with
Brahman
.
In Buddhism, this idea of
tman was profoundly contradicted: see
AN
TMAN
(=
anatta
). For Sikhs, the immortal
tman is the means of relation to God—indeed, the union (for those who attain it) is so close that it comes close at times to identity: ‘God abides in the
tman, and the
tman abides in God’ (
di