  What most clearly distinguishes Vedantic personalism from Western personalism is that the former builds on the fundamental teaching of all Vedanta that the true self exists beyond the limitations of the transient body and the mind, and beyond the tendency – called in Sanskrit the ahamkara, literally, the “I-maker” – to identify with these, whereas Western personalism is often characteristically defined in terms which from the perspective of Vedanta must be seen as pertaining to the mental level, or sometimes, in particular in the twentieth century, to the physical body.