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Teacher of the Upanishads
वामदेव
The Rigvedic seer whose words 'I was Manu, I was the sun' the Upanishads read as 'I am Brahman', and who knew the births of the gods while still in the womb.
Vamadeva is older than the Upanishads that remember him. He is a seer of the Rigveda: tradition assigns the fourth of its ten books, or mandalas, to him and his family, and counts many of its hymns as his. By the time the Upanishads were composed he was already an ancient name, and they turn to him for something particular. In him they find a witness from the oldest layer of the Veda — a seer who, as they read him, had already known what they were now teaching.
The witness is a line of verse. In a hymn of that fourth book a voice says, in the first person, I was Manu, and I was the sun. Within the Rigveda the speaker of those lines is not certain, and readers have long asked whether it is the seer or the god Indra who speaks. The Upanishads heard Vamadeva. The Brihadaranyaka places the line inside its account of Brahman knowing itself as "I am Brahman", aham brahmasmi. Whoever among gods, seers or men awoke to this, it says, became it; and the seer Vamadeva, seeing it, declared: I was Manu, and the sun. Then it adds that this holds even now. Whoever knows "I am Brahman" becomes all this.
On this reading the claim is not a boast and not a memory of past lives. The "I" that can say it was Manu, the first man, and the sun that lights every world, is not the narrow self of one body. Vamadeva becomes the Upanishads' example of a person who has woken to that wider Self. Their use of him makes two points at once. The knowledge is old, as old as the hymns. And it is not locked in the past, because the same sentence that names him also says that anyone who knows it now becomes it.
The Aitareya Upanishad goes further and sets his knowing before his birth. It quotes another verse from the same Rigvedic book: while still in the womb I knew all the births of the gods; a hundred iron fortresses held me down, and like a hawk I broke out swiftly. Vamadeva spoke this, the Aitareya says, while lying in the womb. And knowing this, when the body fell away he rose up, gained all desires in the world of heaven, and became immortal. The Aitareya places him just after its account of the births a person passes through — conceived, born, and born again after death. Vamadeva is the one who sees through the whole round.
His name lives on in the ritual as well. A chant of the Samaveda, the Vamadevya, bears it, and the Chandogya gives a meditation on that chant. So Vamadeva is present in the Upanishads in three ways: as the name carried by a chant the priests sang, as the seer whose verse proves that "I am Brahman" was known from the start, and as the child who broke out of a hundred iron walls like a hawk and rose up free.
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