There are philosophical diversities about the role of Atman in the various Hindu perspectives, but all think of atman in the same fundamental terms.stong gzugs wrote: ↑Thu Mar 23, 2023 6:25 pm There was a fair amount of diversity in what "atman" meant in the early pre-Buddhist Upanisads, especially around whether the atman functions as a doer (karta) or enjoyer (bhokta) or more of a witness (sakshi).
If you want a somewhat mind-bending read on how the atman was understood in the time of the Buddha, I'd recommend Kamaleswar Bhattacharya's The Atman-Brahman in Ancient Buddhism.
This is the basics of human communication, a word can only admit a restricted number of meanings, and all of them are related, otherwise the word ceases to fulfill its communication function.
See, we can talk about "God" for example. But some societies believed/believe in a diversity of gods, others only believe in a single god, some think that the gods are emanations of a single god, and so on. In addition, there are diverse perspectives such as pantheism, panentheism, theism dualistic, and so on. But at the end of the day in all these perspectives the word "god" has the same meaning: something positioned hierarchically above the "created" world, that is, something that is above us.
There is no society that thought of gods inferior to human beings, for example, we are always the ones who need their help and they never need our help.
Even in Buddhism, when devas submit to the Buddha, they only do so when Bhagavan attains a higher position.
The same is with regard to the concept of Atman. We can discuss the nature of Atman, we can discuss the functions of atman, but all this can only be done by starting from a common meaning of the word.
Atman, in any view, is always something eternal, immortal, self-sufficient, essential, unconditioned, etc., which is supposed to exist in sentient beings according to the view of the vedas and upanishads.