Tat Tvam Asi in Context

Joel P. Brereton's Tat Tvam Asi in Context, published in the peer reviewed Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenlandischen Gesellschaft in 1986, is a scholarly philological study arguing that the word tat in the Chandogya Upanishad's famous refrain refers back to the immediately preceding illustration rather than to an ultimate cosmic reality, giving the phrase a sense closer to that is how you are. Its authority rests on peer review by a leading Orientalist journal and Brereton's direct Sanskrit textual analysis. Its reading runs against the more familiar Advaita Vedanta interpretation of the phrase, so it is best cited as one significant scholarly voice in a genuinely contested question of Sanskrit philology and interpretation, not as having settled it.