Soham hamsa I am that Swan

Yes. And this one is especially interesting because So’ham / Soham / Sohang provides a very clear linguistic bridge from Sanskrit/Upanishadic usage into the Sant and Sikh vocabulary—but there are some important complications if we want to be historically and linguistically rigorous.

1. Start with the Sanskrit

The classical form is:

सोऽहम् — so’ham

It is normally analyzed as:

• saḥ / so = he, that one, that

• aham = I

• asmi = am — often understood rather than expressed in the compressed phrase

So so’ham is approximately:

“I am That” / “I am He.”

More literally, the grammatical order is something like “That—I”, with the copula am implicit.

This is quite different from the popular modern explanation that “so = I am, ham = that.” That latter division is not the Sanskrit grammar. The important linguistic division is so + ’ham, where ’ham is the contracted form of aham, “I.”

And there is a beautiful phonological point here: Sanskrit saḥ + aham → so’ham through sandhi. So the o isn’t simply an arbitrary mantra syllable—it arises from Sanskrit grammatical phonology.

2. It is genuinely ancient

This isn’t a medieval invention.

One of the strongest early textual occurrences is Īśa/Isha Upanishad 16, which concludes:

yo ‘sāv asau puruṣaḥ so’ham asmi

roughly:

“That Purusha who is there [in the sun]—I am he.”

The crucial word is so’ham.

And there’s an even more interesting parallel in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upanishad, where the primordial Self recognizes itself in essentially the same formula: “I am he/that.” So the fundamental idea is not merely a later yogic breathing mantra; it belongs to the much older Indian philosophical discussion of ātman and ultimate reality.

That gives us a very old conceptual chain:

Self → recognition → “I am That” → identity of individual consciousness and ultimate reality.

3. Then something fascinating happens: SOHAM ↔ HAMSA

This is where the quantitative/phonological analysis gets particularly interesting.

The same syllables can be reversed:

SO-HAM → HAM-SA

giving:

haṃsa / hamsa

which ordinarily means “swan” or sometimes goose.

But Indian yogic literature develops a deliberate phonological reinterpretation:

so’ham ↔ haṃsa

The relationship becomes:

So’ham = “I am That”

Haṃsa = “That am I” / “I am That”

And then the breath becomes involved.

Some yogic texts interpret the natural sound of breathing as haṃ-sa / so-ham, so that the living person is supposedly repeating the formula unconsciously with every breath. This develops into the concept of ajapa-japa—the mantra that is “recited” without deliberate recitation.

This is important for your earlier questions about Nāda, breath, and meditation: the tradition isn’t merely saying “repeat a Sanskrit sentence.” It eventually turns the physiology of breathing itself into linguistic/spiritual symbolism.

4. And then we reach the Sant tradition

This is where Soham/Sohang becomes particularly relevant to Sikh history.

The Guru Granth Sahib actually contains ਸੋਹੰ — sohaṃ.

For example, on Ang 1093, the line attributed to Guru Nanak says:

ਨਾਨਕ ਸੋਹੰ ਹੰਸਾ ਜਪੁ ਜਾਪਹੁ

nānak sohaṃ haṃsā jap jāphu

The accompanying traditional interpretation understands this as the Soham–Hansa formulation: essentially, “He is me, and I am Him.”

And the context is extraordinarily revealing.

The preceding lines say, in effect:

• when self-conceit (āp/haumai) disappears,

• doubt and fear disappear,

• through the Guru the invisible becomes known,

• and then comes Soham Hansa.

So this isn’t merely an isolated Sanskrit word dropped into Gurbani. It is being placed inside a specifically Guru-oriented transformation of consciousness.

5. Even more explicit: Kabir on Ang 1162

There is an even stronger piece of evidence because Bhagat Kabir uses the word:

ਸੋਹੰ ਸੋ ਜਾ ਕਉ ਹੈ ਜਾਪ

sohaṃ so jā kau hai jāp

The traditional English translation renders the sense as essentially:

the one who has the realization that the Divine and oneself are one.

The surrounding passage explicitly discusses spiritual realization and the overcoming of ordinary distinctions.

So we have:

Upanishadic so’ham

↓

medieval yogic so’ham/haṃsa

↓

Sant/Bhakti vocabulary

↓

Kabir

↓

Guru Nanak/Gurbani

↓

later Sikh/Sant traditions

That is a much more interesting historical trajectory than simply saying “Soham is a Hindu mantra.”

6. But “Soham” and “Sohang” need to be distinguished

This is where your spelling SoHung/Sohung is actually very interesting.

The Gurmukhi spelling is:

ਸੋਹੰ

not ਸੋਹੰਗ.

The final ੰ represents nasalization/anusvāra. Depending upon transliteration and pronunciation, this can be represented as:

• sohaṃ

• soham

• sohang

• sohung

• sohung

especially when the nasal sound is realized phonetically.

So “Sohang” is not necessarily evidence of a completely different Sanskrit word. It can be a vernacular/transliterational representation of sohaṃ.

But there is another historical layer: Sant Mat writers sometimes consciously distinguish “Soham” from “Sohang.”

For example, the writings associated with the Sant tradition of Baba Somanath explicitly describe Sohang as the Saints’ expression “I am Thou,” while distinguishing it from the yogic Soham associated with the breath.

That distinction is later sectarian terminology, however. It shouldn’t be projected backward into the Upanishadic period.

7. There is a really important linguistic correction to make

You’ve probably encountered the explanation:

So = That

Hung/Ham = I am

That’s conceptually understandable but linguistically imprecise.

A better historical-linguistic decomposition is:

Form

Function

saḥ

he / that

so

phonological form of saḥ in sandhi

aham

I

’ham

contracted aham

so’ham

“I am That/He”

haṃsa

swan; also reinterpreted through reversal as ham-sa

sohaṃ / soham

vernacular/phonetic representation

sohang/sohung

later transliteration/vernacular pronunciation

So your intuition that “SoHung means ‘I am That’” is basically right, but the underlying linguistic story is considerably richer.

8. And here is the really intriguing Sikh connection

There is a remarkable line on Ang 1093:

ਸੋਹੰ ਹੰਸਾ

sohaṃ haṃsā

That puts the two complementary forms right next to each other.

And this is exactly the ancient yogic conceptual pair:

SO-HAM ↔ HAM-SA

So the Sikh text appears to preserve not merely the word Soham, but the Soham–Hamsa conceptual complex.

Traditional Sikh commentary explicitly glosses the expression as:

“ਉਹ ਮੈਂ ਹਾਂ” — “That/He is me”

and

“ਮੈਂ ਉਹ ਹਾਂ” — “I am That.”

That is almost a linguistic fossil of the older Indian aham/saḥ → so’ham ↔ haṃsa tradition.

9. But we should NOT conclude that Sikhism simply “borrowed Hinduism”

That would be historically much too crude.

By the time of Kabir and Nanak, these expressions had traveled through a huge Indian religious vocabulary involving:

Upanishadic Vedanta → Yoga → Nāth traditions → Bhakti/Sant traditions → Kabir/Ravidas → Punjab → Nanak → Sikh scripture.

The Sikh tradition could therefore inherit a pre-existing Indian technical vocabulary and reconfigure its meaning around Guru, Shabad, Naam, and the overcoming of haumai.

And that is exactly what seems to be happening in the Ang 1093 passage: the expression occurs after the disappearance of “I-ness” (haumai).

That creates an interesting philosophical paradox:

“I am That” becomes possible only when the ordinary egoistic “I” disappears.

So Soham is not saying “my ego is God.” It is saying almost the opposite: when the egoic self disappears, what remains is not separate from the Divine.

That interpretation fits remarkably well with the surrounding Gurbani.

10. And this connects directly to your earlier “Jot Niranjan / Onkar” investigation

There is potentially a larger linguistic map here:

OM / OṂKĀRA

→ primordial sacred sound

JYOT / JOT

→ light

NIRANJAN

→ stainless/pure/unblemished

SO’ HAM

→ “I am That”

HAṂSA

→ the complementary/reversed form of Soham

NĀDA / SHABAD

→ inner sound/current

These aren’t necessarily synonyms. They belong to different layers of India’s enormous religious vocabulary, which later Sant and Sikh traditions sometimes weave together.

And Soham is particularly valuable historically because we can actually watch the phrase change from a Sanskrit grammatical sentence into a yogic mantra, then into Sant vocabulary, and finally into Punjabi/Gurmukhi Sikh scripture.

If you’d like, the next step would be even more interesting: I can trace “Soham/Sohang” chronologically from the earliest Sanskrit/Upanishadic occurrences → Yoga Upanishads → Nāth/Gorakhnath → Kabir → Ravidas → Guru Nanak → Bhai Gurdas → later Sant Mat/Radha Soami, and at each stage examine the actual original word, pronunciation, grammar, meaning, and whether it is being used as philosophy, mantra, or breath/Nada practice. That would give us a genuine historical-linguistic “family tree” rather than relying on modern explanations.