Sat-chit-ananda is the nearest thing Vedanta has to a positive description of the absolute, and it is careful about how it offers it. Sat is being, existence, that which does not depend on anything else to be. Chit is consciousness, not thought but the awareness in which thought appears. Ananda is usually rendered as bliss, which is misleading if it suggests a strong pleasant feeling, because feelings come and go and this is meant to name what does not.
The crucial move is that these are not three qualities possessed by a thing, in the way that a mango is sweet and yellow and heavy. Vedanta insists they are not attributes but the substance itself, described from three angles because language cannot approach it from one. A quality can be separated from its bearer at least in thought. These cannot: existence that is not aware, or awareness that does not exist, are not coherent ideas. The three terms converge on a single referent, which is why the compound is written as one word.
Ananda is the term most often misread. It is defined less as an experience arriving than as what remains when the sources of disturbance are absent, which is why deep sleep is used as the standard illustration. Nothing is happening, no object is being enjoyed, and yet people report having rested well, indicating that something registered the absence of trouble. That something is what Turiya, the fourth state, is meant to point at: not a fourth experience alongside waking, dreaming and sleeping, but what all three occur within.
Sat-chit-ananda is a description written from the inside of the thing described, which is why it reads oddly from outside. To see how the fourth state extends the same claim, explore more of The Living Sanatan Timeline.
Part 17 of 100 — Series II: To the Eternal
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