Shiva-Naṭarāja, Chennai Museum, India
Brahman is the central Dharmic posit. So what is Brahman?
From the Brihadäranyaka Upaniṣad [2;3;6]: ‘Now, therefore, the description of Brahman: ‘Not this, Not this’ (Neti, Neti); for there is no other and more appropriate description than this’.
The full formula, which originates with Vaiśampāyana’s distinguished disciple Yājñavalkya, reads: ‘Neti, Neti’: ‘It is not this! It is not: ‘It is not this!’ [around 1,500 BCE, Oral To Script].
Why repeat the Rule twice? It is not just an expression of emphatic negation. It is repeated twice because the full expression is a meta-statement. The deconstruction must finally turn in on itself. The rounding must complete. Else, the recursive rule will enter into an insidious and indefinite spin: The Self-Loop.
The original formula was as a verb [Neti!; ‘Not-This’], an Act that must scuttle [Negate; ‘Eat’] itself in the rounding. Ultimately, the term ‘Brahman‘ itself gets swallowed into the belly of the Algorithm.
‘Neti, Neti’: ‘It is not this! It is not: ‘It is not this!’ is the earliest algorithmic form of the logico-lingual Self-Eating Expression.
Yājñavalkya himself [as did Aristotle in Metaphysics] used a series of compounding contradictions to lay the stage: ‘An endless infinite reality’ which is also ‘an inner controller’. A: ‘mass of intelligence’ which is also: ‘the unattached and the undecaying’, and so on.
Yājñavalkya‘s was the tightest description of ‘Not-Two’ [a-dvaya]: ‘Neither inside nor outside; neither above nor below’. Much of what settles as ‘Method’ in the early literature originates with him. The Axioms of Sight and Self, the recursive negation rule, the marking of: ‘The Other Shore’, et al.
Every major Dharmic School expresses its truth using a variant of Yājñavalkya’s Algorithm. See Śaṅkarācārya’s Nirvāṇaṣatkam [around 800 CE], or a millennia later, Ramana Maharishi [1879-1950].
Yājñavalkya’s Algorithm is the origin of the Symbol ‘0’ in the Dharmic Tradition. [Neti {Not}; later as Śūnya, Pujya, Bindu et al]
The Decimal System of Number Representation [Sanskrit ‘Das‘, for Ten] births within 200 years of the oral-rendering of the ‘Diamond-Cutter’ Sūtra [Front Page]. See Posts.
Not-Two 
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