Three questions, one answer

Philosophy has three oldest questions. Vedanta gives the same one word answer to all of them, which is either very bold or a trick.

By Sovandarapor (James) Kong · 2026-08-21 · Nondual

Chapter 04 of 18 in Ninety minutes with a swami

Swami Sarvapriyananda says it occurred to him only a couple of years ago that Vedanta's one word answer lines up exactly with philosophy's three oldest questions. I had not noticed it either, which is slightly embarrassing given how often the word gets used.

The questions. What is real, which is ontology. How do we know anything, which is epistemology. And the bundle of value questions, what is good, what is beautiful, what is the point, which now gets the label axiology.

The Vedantic answer to the first is not existing things but existence itself, sat. The answer to the second is not a theory of knowledge but consciousness itself, chit, the thing by which any knowing happens at all. The answer to the third is ananda, usually translated bliss, the thing everyone is actually after underneath the things they say they are after. Satchidananda is those three words run together, and the claim is that they are not three. One reality, which is what the screen was in the cinema story, and it is also what you are.

He is direct about the last part. You ask where this thing is, and the answer is, you. Not the universe in general, though that too. You in particular, which is why the tradition keeps sending people back to look at themselves rather than at the stars.

I like that it can be said in one sentence. I also distrust things that can be said in one sentence, and I notice that the word bliss is doing a lot of work that my Tuesday afternoons do not obviously support. He deals with that directly, with a dying man, two chapters on.

For now it is the shape I wanted to record. Three questions people have argued about for three thousand years, and a tradition that says the reason they feel like three is that you are standing in the wrong place.