The tenth man

Ten men cross a river, count themselves, and find nine. The Upanishad takes five layers away from you and then says the layers were never separate.

By Sovandarapor (James) Kong · 2026-08-22 · Nondual

Ten men cross a river. On the far bank one of them decides to check that everybody made it, and counts. One, two, three, all the way to nine. He counts again and gets nine again. Somebody drowned. Another one takes over, certain the first man is an idiot, and also gets nine. So the ten of them sit down on the sand and cry for their friend.

A man walks past and asks what happened. They explain. He counts them in about a second, gets ten, and understands the situation immediately. He does not argue. He says line up, count again, and when the counter reaches nine the stranger takes his hand, turns it around and points it at his own chest. You are the tenth. Then the friend wants a go, and does the same thing, and gets the same result, and the story ends with ten grown men delighted on a riverbank.

The joke is that nobody was lost and nobody was found. What changed was the direction of the counting.

The Taittiriya Upanishad works the same problem in a more patient way. It hands you five layers and takes them away one at a time. First the body, which it calls the one made of food, and it means that literally. Rice becomes body, body becomes rice again. Then the layer of breath and the processes underneath it, blood moving, oxygen going where it is needed, none of which you are running. Then the mind, the weather of wanting and not wanting. Then the intellect, the part that decides and judges and is very proud of itself. And then a fifth one, which is the strangest, the blankness of deep sleep, where the other four have gone quiet and something is still on.

Each time the test is the same and it is not mystical. Whatever you can experience is not the experiencer. You look at your hand. Your hand does not look back at you. The body is what you are aware of, so it is not the thing that is aware. Same for the breath, the mood, the argument you are having with yourself right now. Everything on that list shows up in front of you, which means it is on the wrong side of the transaction to be you.

So you peel, and you peel, and at the end there is nothing in your hands. The old line about this is that you peel an onion looking for the onion and all you get is tears. And the honest reaction, which I had, is that the whole exercise has just proved there is nobody home. Five layers, none of them me, therefore no me. Case closed, and a slightly bleak Sunday.

Vidyaranya, writing seven hundred years ago, seems to have met a lot of people at exactly that point, and his replies are short and a little rude, which I like.

First, you are still looking for an object. You have been told the seer is not among the scenery, and you are searching the scenery. That is the ninth man being counted for the third time.

Second, you cannot know it the way you know other things. Sugar makes water sweet and sugar makes milk sweet, so to make anything sweet you add sugar. What do you add to sugar. Consciousness is how anything at all gets known, so asking to know it by the usual method is asking to add sugar to sugar.

Third, and this is the one that stuck, he says it is shameful to say out loud that you do not exist. Try saying I have no tongue. The saying of it refutes it. Whoever denies the self is the thing doing the denying.

Then the part I did not expect. Having got you to strip away the five layers to find what is underneath them, the text turns around and says the five are not separate from it anyway. Not a hidden watcher behind the body and mind. The wave does not have water somewhere deep inside it that you reach by digging. The wave is water in a shape, with a name attached. Body, breath, mood, argument, blank, all of it arising in the same one thing and made of it.

I cannot verify most of this and I am not going to pretend otherwise. The deep sleep step is where I feel the join. The argument is that you wake and report that you knew nothing, and a report of nothing requires somebody to have been there for it, which is neat but not airtight, since memory could be doing that work afterwards. I have read the counterarguments and I do not think they are conclusive either way.

What survives the doubt is smaller and harder to shake. Every version of me I can produce and inspect is one more thing on the list. The one producing and inspecting never turns up on it. Nine, every time, and I keep being surprised.