Nondualism

• 1. Introduction

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  Nondualism begins, in one famous telling, with a temple bell. The Zen teacher Yasutani roshi described the moment this way: 'When I heard the temple bell ring, suddenly there was no bell and no I, just sound.' In that instant, the story goes, he no longer felt any line between himself, the bell, the sound and the universe.

  Nondualism, also called nonduality, is the name given to a family of ideas about moments like that one. It also names the philosophies built around them. The term grew out of Indian religion and philosophy, and it translates words that literally mean 'not two.' Writers have traced similar threads in Taoism, Christian mysticism and Sufism.

  Yet the word is slippery. One scholar, Gibbons, notes that in many circles it has become almost a synonym for spirituality itself. So what exactly is being denied when a tradition says reality is 'not two'? Did Hindu and Buddhist thinkers mean the same thing, or did they borrow each other's vocabulary for different ends? And can a state said to lie beyond concepts be described, sorted into types, or even studied by scientists?

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• 2. Translating Not Two

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  The Sanskrit word advaita is built from a, meaning not, and dvaita, which is usually rendered as dual. Fabian Volker, following Paul Hacker, argues that dvaita does not really mean duality. It means a state in which a second thing is present. That second is the world of conceptual multiplication, which Sanskrit calls prapanca, and it is also the world itself, called jagat.

  On this reading, advaita says that Brahman, 'the one,' is ultimately real, while the second is not fully real. The word does not count two items at all. It denies that the second has full standing. Volker concludes that a better English phrase would be 'that which has no second beside it.'

  Buddhist writers use a cousin word, advaya, which also means not two. It appears in Tibetan as gNis-med, in Chinese as bù'èr and in Japanese as fu-ni. It typically points to emptiness and to the Mahayana doctrine of two truths, especially in the Madhyamaka school. It also points to the Yogacara denial that the observer and the observed are truly separate.

  The scholar Hookham renders the related term nisprapanca as nonconceptual. In his account, emptiness in this setting does not mean a blank. It means an open, nonconceptual space in which appearance, bliss, clarity or awareness still shines vividly.

  The English word arrived through translation. Early translations of the Upanishads into Western languages other than English date from 1775, and they shaped how the term was understood. Max Müller, who lived from 1823 to 1900, rendered advaita as monism in the monumental Sacred Books of the East of 1879. Many recent scholars have kept his choice.

  Others object. Alan Watts is credited with popularizing the distinction, in The Supreme Identity of 1950 and The Way of Zen of 1957. In his view, monism tends to picture reality as one single thing. Nondualism points past any picture at all. Philip Renard agrees that nondual awareness is not graspable in an idea.

  Even with the translation debated, a harder question remained. The scholar T. R. V. Murti set out to ask whether the Hindu and the Buddhist words describe the same thing at all.

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• 3. Mapping the Flavors

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  T. R. V. Murti drew a sharp line between the two words. Advaya, he wrote, is knowledge freed from the extremes of 'Is' and 'Is not,' and from the pairing of Being and Becoming. Advaita is knowledge of a differenceless entity, Brahman. Later writers summarized his point as ontology on one side and epistemology on the other.

  David Loy, writing in the early 1980s, took a wider view. Because similar ideas turn up in so many ancient and modern spiritualities, he argued that no single definition of nonduality could suffice. He proposed instead five flavors.

  The first is the nondifference of subject and object, which Loy treats as the core doctrine. The second is the nonplurality of the world, the idea that the things in it are not truly distinct but together form an integral whole. The third is the rejection of binary opposites such as self and other, or good and evil. The yin-yang symbol of Taoism is his example.

  The fourth flavor is the identity of phenomena and the absolute, found in Madhyamaka, where conventional appearances and emptiness cannot be pulled apart. The fifth is mystical union with the divine. Loy's examples are the self-annihilation called fana in Sufism, Christian mystical union and the Kabbalistic Ein Sof.

  Loy took a perennialist stance, meaning he saw a shared experience of reality beneath the different religions. Since the late 1970s, Steven T. Katz has challenged that view. Katz argues that religious experience is shaped by the frameworks a person brings to it, and so takes different forms in different traditions. The perennial position is described as largely dismissed by scholars, yet it has lost none of its popularity.

  Volker criticizes Loy for lacking a systematic typology. He offers three types of his own. Asymmetric-vertical nonduality posits a transcendent yet immanent reality that grounds the world, and it comes in nontheistic and theistic personal forms, plus a death-like trance. Symmetric-horizontal nonduality rejects any unchanging ultimate reality but still dissolves the line between observer and observed. Existential nonduality is the experience of the everyday world after awakening.

  Other voices pull the term in other directions. Kazuaki Tanahashi suggests that what people call nonduality is really nonplurality, and should be called singularity. Glenn Hartelius insists that interconnectedness is not the nondual teaching of Advaita Vedanta. He also disputes Judith Blackstone's definition, which stresses an embodied realization of nonduality in the body. Michael Taft offers a tidy split. Nondual awareness is an experience, and nondualism is the philosophy that talks about it.

  There is also a psychological argument. The authors Henning and Henning observe that the split between a mental subject and its objects is a precondition for abstract thought, a sense of time, narrative, tools and symbols. In absolute nonduality, they say, that split breaks down.

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• 4. Roots in the Upanishads

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  The Chandogya Upanishad, dated to the 8th to 6th century BCE, may hold the oldest traces of nondualism in Indian thought, according to Gombrich. It pre-dates the earliest Buddhism. Cohen looks earlier still, to Vedic hymns such as the Nasadiya, the 'Non-Being' hymn of the Rigveda.

  The word advaita itself appears in verse 4.3.32 of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, dated to the 8th to 5th century BCE. The Mandukya Upanishad, composed somewhere between 500 BCE and 200 BCE, uses it in verses 7 and 12. The Brihadaranyaka passage reads, 'An ocean is that one seer, without any duality Advaita; this is the Brahma-world, O King. Thus did Yajnavalkya teach him.'

  Alongside this monistic current ran a dualistic one. In the first millennium BCE, ascetic circles developed what scholars call proto-Samkhya, centered on Purusha, the witness-consciousness. Evidence for it appears from the 8th or 7th century BCE onward, in the middle Upanishads, the Buddhacarita, the Bhagavad Gita and the Moksadharma section of the Mahabharata. Systematic Samkhya was fixed much later, with the Samkhyakarika of the 4th century CE.

  Larson thinks both trends may share one origin. The dialogue between Uddalaka Aruni and his son Svetaketu, and Yajnavalkya's teaching on the Self, describe a knower who is himself unknowable, a seer who cannot be seen. From such enumerations, Larson says, both the monistic trends and dualistic Samkhya could have grown.

  The Katha Upanishad, dated to about the middle of the first millennium BCE, gives a practical picture. It says the highest path is reached when the mind and the five senses stand still and the intellect does not waver. This, it says, is what people call Yoga.

  The Isha Upanishad, from the second half of the first millennium BCE, turns to paradox. Its divine being is immovable yet swifter than the mind, far and near, within and outside. The term eka, one, signals that this being transcends wisdom and ignorance, existence and non-existence, creation and destruction. Seekers of immortality, the text insists, must also drop their dualistic way of seeing.

  Sengaku Mayeda argues that Indian thought leaned toward monism from the Rigveda onward. By the first millennium CE, Madhyamaka, Yogacara and Advaita Vedanta were all reaching for an underlying basis of unity. The thinker who gave that reach its most famous Hindu form was Adi Shankara, working from the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita and the Brahma Sutras.

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• 5. Vedanta and Shaivism

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  Adi Shankara did not build his school from nothing. Strict nondualism took shape in a young Advaita Vedanta that reacted against Samkhya and Mimansa and moved closer to the Mahayana thought of Nagarjuna. Shankara then gave those influences a Vedantic base, in which only Atman-Brahman is ultimately real and the individual self is not different from it.

  Scholars still argue about how much Buddhism lies underneath. Mahadevan suggests that Gaudapada borrowed Buddhist terminology and bent its doctrines to Vedantic goals, just as early Buddhism had borrowed Upanishadic words. Michael Comans insists the difference is fundamental, since Gaudapada accepts the Upanishads as his premise. Dasgupta and Mohanta take a middle road. They see Buddhism and Shankara as different phases of one nondualistic metaphysics.

  One famous idea may belong less to Shankara than to his successors. The claim that the world is an illusion is often tied to him through the word maya. According to Hacker, however, the word carried hardly any terminological weight for Shankara, who took a realistic stance. It was Prakasatman, a 13th century scholar who founded the Vivarana school, who introduced the notion that the world is illusory.

  Rival readings of the same texts soon appeared. Ramanuja founded Vishishtadvaita, a qualified nondualism in which Brahman alone exists but is marked by multiplicity. The world is real, and all things are attributes of one unity. Vedanta Desika summed it up by saying that Brahman, as qualified by the sentient and insentient modes, is the only reality. Madhvacharya went further the other way and held that experienced reality and God are two and distinct. Even the Brahma Sutras were largely bhedabheda, treating the individual self and Brahman as both identical and different.

  In Kashmir, Abhinavagupta called his own school paradvaita, the supreme and absolute nondualism. Its line of teachers ran from Somananda to Utpaladeva, who was the grand-teacher of Abhinavagupta, who in turn taught Ksemaraja. Vasugupta received the Siva Sutras by revelation.

  Kashmir Shaivism parts ways with Shankara on the world. Advaita Vedanta compares the world to a snake glimpsed in semi-darkness, which is really a rope lying there. Kashmir Shaivism holds instead that all things are real manifestations of Universal Consciousness, called Chit or Brahman. It drew on Vedanta, Samkhya, Patanjali Yoga, the Nyayas, Tantra, the Nath tradition and Buddhist schools including Yogacara and Madhyamika.

  That Nath tradition leads to a further current. Nath yogis such as Gorakhnath introduced Sahaja, a spontaneous spirituality, and Ken Wilber says that this state reflects nonduality.

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• 6. The Silence of Vimalakirti

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  In the Vimalakirti Sutra, a chapter on the 'Dharma gate of non-duality' stages a kind of contest. Characters in turn name pairs of extremes that must be dropped, among them birth and extinction, 'I' and 'mine,' defilement and purity, samsara and nirvana, and form and emptiness. The last to speak is the bodhisattva Manjushri. He says ultimate reality is 'in all beings wordless, speechless, shows no signs, is not possible of cognizance, and is above all questioning and answering.' Vimalakirti answers by saying nothing.

  The Buddha himself does not use the word advaya in the earliest Buddhist texts. It surfaces in Mahayana sutras like this one. Earlier ideas may nonetheless point the same way. Harvey describes a nirvanic consciousness that is objectless, infinite, unsupported and beyond time and place. In the 1930s the Polish scholar Stanislaw Schayer argued that the Nikayas preserve an archaic Buddhism close to Brahmanical belief. Lindtner agrees that early nirvana may have been an actual existent. The Theravada tradition regards nibbana as an unconditioned dhamma beyond ordinary dualistic ideas.

  The Anguttara Nikaya adds an image of light. It says, 'Luminous, monks, is the mind. And it is freed from incoming defilements.' The Dhatuvibhanga-sutta compares meditative equanimity to refined gold, pure, bright, soft and workable. Later schools tied this luminous mind to bodhicitta and to tathagatagarbha, the 'Buddha womb' that lets beings become Buddhas. Sally King reads that idea as a nondual Thusness that transcends the duality of self and not-self.

  Nagarjuna, the founder of Madhyamaka, pushed in another direction. For him the two truths, conventional and ultimate, are not separate. Even emptiness is not an absolute, which is why the tradition speaks of the emptiness of emptiness. In his Mulamadhyamakakarika he writes, 'The limit (koti) of nirvana is that of samsara. The subtlest difference is not found between the two.' Nancy McCagney stresses that this does not make them one thing, as in Advaita Vedanta. Both are empty. Jay Garfield adds that treating the truths as wholly separate would lead either to nihilism or to eternal essences.

  Yogacara took the question inward. It held that the split between grasper and grasped is a false superimposition, and that only mental cognitions exist, a view called vijnapti-matra. Yet it never became an absolute idealism, since it kept individual mindstreams. For Jonathan Gold, its ultimate truth is not consciousness but an ineffable thusness. Its three natures run from the imagined, through the dependent, to the fully accomplished, and the passage between them is a 'revolution of the basis.' Dan Lusthaus calls that change radical and psycho-cognitive.

  From the 6th century onward, Buddhist Tantra drew on all of this. Its commentator Lilavajra called Buddha nature the 'utmost secret and aim.' Tantra treated sacred and profane as inseparable, and some rites used repulsive substances to test whether a practitioner had truly dropped the split between pure and impure. This tradition would become the main form of Buddhism in the Himalayan regions.

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• 7. Essence, Function and Naked Awareness

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  In China, the philosopher Jizang discussed the nonduality of the two truths, and the Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana, possibly a Chinese composition, blended tathagatagarbha and Yogacara. Chinese thinkers also recast the two truths as essence and function. The absolute is essence, the relative is function, and the two interpenetrate. Korean Buddhism echoes this with a metaphor from the Platform Sutra, a lamp and its light.

  The Tiantai school added a third truth, the nondual union that transcends the other two. Huayan flourished in the Tang period and taught that every phenomenon exists only within the whole network of all others. It called this 'perfect interfusion,' and its metaphor of Indra's net is considered nondual by some scholars.

  Zen turned these doctrines into practice. The Heart Sutra states that form is emptiness and emptiness is form. The Diamond Sutra insists that emptiness must be realized totally or not at all. A break-through koan, pondered continuously, can lead to kensho, a first glimpse of Buddha-nature. Victor Sogen Hori sees a central theme of many koans as the identity of opposites.

  Zen training does not stop at kensho. Practice goes on to deepen the insight and show it in daily life. The path is mapped by Linji Yixuan's Three Mysterious Gates, Hakuin's Four Ways of Knowing, the Five Ranks of Tozan and the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures. In Japan, Shinran, the founder of Jodo Shinshu, held that the ultimate shows itself not by erasing ordinary reality but by experiencing it differently.

  In Tibet, the Gelugpa school follows Tsongkhapa in the Prasangika Madhyamaka view. All phenomena are empty of self-nature, and that emptiness is no concrete absolute. This is called rangtong. The rival shentong view, held mainly by the Jonang school and taught also by the Sakya and Kagyu, says ultimate reality is empty of what is false but not empty of its innate Buddha qualities.

  Dzogchen centers on the natural state, called rigpa. The practitioner watches thoughts rise and fall, finds that they have no substance, and then asks where the mind itself resides. Karma Lingpa, who lived from 1326 to 1386, revealed a pointing-out text that lists the many names for this one reality. Some call it Atman, some Chitta, some Mahamudra, some simply 'ordinary awareness.'

  Garab Dorje, around the year 665, is said to have compressed the teaching into three statements as his last words. The first is 'Introducing directly the face of rigpa itself.' The second is deciding on one thing only. The third is confidence in the liberation of rising thoughts. Jigme Lingpa, who lived from 1730 to 1798, carried them into the Longchen Nyingthig.

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• 8. Modern Echoes

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  The 19th century saint Ramakrishna taught that formless and form, personal and impersonal, are 'the same thing, like milk and its whiteness.' His student Vivekananda carried this outlook into Neo-Vedanta, a modern Hinduism shaped in response to western colonialism and orientalism. Its development drew on Unitarian Universalism and western esoteric movements, especially Transcendentalism, New Thought and Theosophy.

  Radhakrishnan, another leading Neo-Vedanta voice, accepted the reality and diversity of the world, grounded in Brahman. He read maya as a subjective misperception of the world as ultimately real. Neo-Vedanta found a warm reception among Theosophists, Christian Science and New Thought. Christian Science in turn influenced the self-study teaching A Course in Miracles.

  Neo-Advaita is a newer movement, a modern Western reading of Advaita Vedanta that leans on Ramana Maharshi. It stresses direct insight and has grown strongly in popularity since the 2000s. Its notable teachers include H. W. L. Poonja and his students Gangaji, Andrew Cohen and Eckhart Tolle. Arthur Versluis files it under a wider current he calls immediatism. Critics fault it for thin philosophical grounding and for skipping preparatory practices.

  Comparisons with the West run through Greek Pyrrhonism, the Neoplatonism of Plotinus, Hermeticism, Sufism and Jewish Kabbalah. The Christian mystics Meister Eckhart and Julian of Norwich are often cited for a nondual experience of oneness with the Divine. Sikhism is contested. Many contemporary Sikhs separate human souls from a monotheistic God, but Bhai Vir Singh read the scriptures as teaching nonduality, and the older Faridkot Teeka describes a nondual, panentheistic universe.

  Science has recently joined the conversation. Nondual awareness also goes by names like pure awareness, contentless consciousness, the Pure Consciousness Event and Minimal Phenomenal Experience. Josipovic describes it as a non-representational mode of consciousness. Gamma and Metzinger, in 2021, proposed that it can be mapped by features such as luminosity, absence of egoic boundaries and self-reflexivity.

  Robert Sharf warns that such studies risk treating nonduality as a purely neurocognitive event. That reading, he argues, would strip away the cultural and soteriological contexts in which the teachings arose.

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