Non-Dualism and Early Buddhism

hello and welcome in today's video what i want to discuss is non-dualism in particular non-dualism in buddhism and early buddhism this is an enormous topic the topic of don dualism generally so i'm only going to be able to give a pretty quick overview in this video and even so it's going to be a lot of information here it's kind of a geeky topic but one that i know interests a lot of people because i do get a lot of questions in the comments of prior videos about discussing this very topic so i thought it's it's time for it it's something that i've actually been preparing for for a couple of years sort of getting ideas together it's something that's interested me as well as looking at the history of this so in today's video what i'm going to do is to we'll have four parts basically to begin with i'm going to have a quick look at what non-dualism is what it means secondly we'll turn to some of its origins in pre-buddhist india again we're looking at the indian context here so some of the origins before buddhism and then we'll look at early buddhism in particular and then we'll turn at the in the fourth part to some developments in later kinds of buddhism so first what is non-dualism now there are many ways to understand non-dualism so again i'm only going to be giving a quick overview of the possible ways that we can understand it here and i'm sure if you are an expert on this topic you can think of many many others but basically non-dualism means that there aren't two of something and now one way that there might not be two of something is if there's only one and this is known as monism so it could be for example a kind of non-dualism is that to hold that all things are made out of one kind of stuff that's a sort of philosophical kind of non-dualism and we'll find in various philosophies religions in india ideas of monism through the ages also non-dualism might mean that there are problems for example with our dualistic concepts that is to say that when we talk about a good and bad or right and wrong or skillful and unskillful or samsara and nirvana or enlightened and unenlightened and many many other such such dualities as these that all of these are basically in a sense illusory so that our concepts that involve comparisons like these are based upon some kind of fundamental mistake that they are get things wrong in some way that there only really is one way things can be or perhaps no way that things can be depending on how one sees it and so all of these uh dualistic kinds of concepts are in some way problematic that's one form of non-dualism or non-dualism may be specific to a particular topic so for example in much of buddhism it's it's understood that there isn't a permanent self so we might say that there is a dualism of self and other and this dualism of self and other is mistaken and illusory in some sense and so we might just say that all we mean by non-dualism is just that this particular duality of self and other is problematic but but perhaps other dualities are not problematic in other words again there are different ways of understanding non-dualism some of them are more limited some of them are more global some of them encompass certain features of reality or the way we think about things and other ways of understanding non-dualism are again quite encompass everything all of our concepts in some way i will say however that although this limited idea of non-dualism between self and other does indeed have a place in much of buddhist thought it's it tends to as they say ramify tends to expand over time into a more global sort of non-dualism about all things and we're going to get into some of that in today's video all of this said by talking about non-dualism it's not that there's something necessarily specifically wrong with the number two there's a problem wrong with with triples and quadruples as well so the idea is not that you know the twos are problematic that the dualistic dualisms are problematic but that there's sort of anything more than one or anything at all perhaps that there's any particular way we can understand things or in other words it's not just self and one other it's self and any other whether that's one or two or a dozen or a million so these things get get pretty complicated pretty fast here and i think we're going to have to keep that in mind as we move forward now second i want to get to some of the ancient history of this concept or where it may have originated within india it's of course impossible to say for sure a lot of well you know a lot of it depends basically upon our interpretations of ancient texts and of course the texts that we have now almost certainly or certainly don't reflect everything that was going on at the time in india so we're somewhat limited in our information but two places that we can find potential origins of this concept are in two of the earliest upanishads now the upanishads are texts the earliest ones of which were written perhaps one or two or three hundred years before the buddha's lifetime it's believed that much of what the buddha had to say was in opposition to some of the material in these upanishads the upanishads were written in the what's called the vedic brahman tradition that is that the vedas which were ancient texts written perhaps a millennium before the buddha or composed i should say they weren't written they were oral um oral oral texts oral recitations these stories that were in the vedas were then interpreted and reinterpreted over the centuries and eventually what what came to happen was that there were a number of philosophers we might call them that thinkers who went off into the forest to speculate about grand topics and these philosophers these thinkers composed these early upanishads that were basically it's too much to call them commentaries on the opponent on the vedas but they were at least responses to the whole vedic tradition in any event the early the earliest of these upanishads that we're going to be looking at the first of them was called the brihadaranyikupanishad which was composed sometime around 700 bce and the other the chandogyopanishad which was composed sometime between 700 and 600 bce and in the briharanyakupanisha which we'll look at first which is the earlier one at least it's generally believed to be earlier there is a there are a couple of passages that are of interest when it comes to non-dualism one of these discusses the word well the word advaita comes up in this upanishad advaita is the sanskrit word that can be translated non-dualism and it says an ocean a seer alone without duality that is advaita becomes he whose world is brahma now this to be fair is one translation of this passage by by hume there is another contemporary translation by patrick olavel where he translates it he becomes the soul seer that is to say he's not a seer alone without duality but he's the seer alone he's the soul seer and here we all we see the one of the problems with translation here because in translating the text we have to in a sense interpret what that text is supposed to be telling us so as we see one of the translate translators here thinks that the the concept of non-duality comes up here that this sasir is seeing in a non-dualistic fashion they're in in a sense seeing their identity with brahma which is part of in the upanishadic tradition how we again awakening how we gain liberation is through an awareness a seeing and understanding that we ourselves are identical to the world to the to the to the universe however we also see that there's a different translator who translates it somewhat differently and doesn't think that the concept of non-dualism really matters here and that is something we're going to have to keep in mind that a lot of these early texts really do depend on how we translate them how we interpret them because these are such early attacks such early times in which these concepts appear that it's not clear that they're there or not now there's another passage in the brihadiranyikapanishad which which runs like this when one has seen and heard oneself when one has reflected and concentrated on oneself one knows the whole world and in a sense this procedure of coming to know yourself and through the self coming to know the world is indeed exactly the same one that the buddha used in at least in one interpretation except that the buddha came to see when he looked into where his self should be what he found was non-self that anywhere he looked he couldn't find a self so in that way the buddha in a sense took this this direction that the bri hitaraniku punished was going in this practice of the early upanishads and turned it in a different direction now we can turn to a different a slightly later upanishad again appears to be before the buddha's lifetime called the chandraga and in this one a man named udalika aruni talks to his son shveta ketu and tells his son to cut up a banyan fruit and when the sun cuts up the banyan fruit there are seeds inside of it and then udalika tells his son to take one of the seeds and cut it up into parts and then he says what do you see there nothing sir then he told him this finest essence here son that you can't even see look how on account of that finest essence this huge banyan tree stands here believe my son the finest essence here the constant that constitutes the self of this whole world that is the truth that is the self and that's how you are sveta ketu and the word that that's how you are translates the the sanskrit tattham asi which is very a very important phrase in early brahminic uh philosophy that's how you are so what uddalaka is telling his son sveta ketu is that basically your essence your soul yourself your atman is the same as that of the whole world that your soul is the world's soul if you like that you are identical with brahman now there are various ways many ways of interpreting this very deep kind of claim but one classic way of interpreting it is what we might say non-dualistically where that is to say that we would ordinarily think of the distinction between the self and the world as a dualism as two different things but in fact what uddalaka is saying is that there aren't two different things they're the same thing so we interpret it as i say non-dualistically and it's through that deep understanding it's believed that we attain liberation now having gone through some of these pre-buddhist ideas of non-dualism let's turn instead and turn really to the meat of the point here which is about early buddhism what was the view of early buddhism to to non-dualism and what we're going to without what i want to do in this section here is to begin with the ways that not that early buddhism can be seen as opposed to the idea of non-dualism as not non-dualistic if you like and then later on i'm going to turn to certain ways in which non-dualism can be found in aspects of early buddhism so let's turn to early buddhism and if we look at these early texts one of the things that we find there is that the buddha argues strenuously against any attempt on our part to identify ourselves with the world indeed in a very famous early text which i've discussed many times in this channel called this the suta on the snake the water snake the buddha specifically says that one of the standpoints of wrong views is lies in identifying the self with the world that kind of identification is in other words a kind of illusion elsewhere in the first text in the majimini kai which is a very important deep kind of philosophical text the buddha also argues against our tendency to identify ourselves with the all with unity or with diversity for that matter in other words any kind of attempt to identify the self with anything is a problem because for the buddha to do that would be to assume that there was such a thing as the self that we had found by inspection and the buddha thinks we cannot find such a self by inspection if we look in to our experiences all we find are things that are always changing we don't find anything permanent and so therefore there is nothing to identify with either with unity with diversity with the world with the all all of these things are sort of like wrong turns that we can take so to put it another way the buddha didn't believe that we could identify anything with the self so therefore it was doubly wrong to think we could identify everything with the self also when talking about non-dualism as we mentioned before it doesn't just mean that twos are a problem but that sort of anything more than one or maybe even anything at all is a problem the buddha's general teaching style and learning style was analytic in other words in terms of analyzing things into their parts and to that extent any kind of a non-dualistic approach would be opposed to the way he ordinarily reacted to things he analyzed things into kinds into degrees he distinguished right from wrong skillful from unskillful good from bad these are the kinds of distinctions that really ground the the dharma the teaching of the early i should say that the early buddhist teachings one very famous early text is the the suta on the two kinds of thought where the buddha talks about the how important it was in the time that he was before he was awakened or enlightened that he as a young person distinguished thoughts into two types skillful thoughts and unskillful thoughts and having made that important distinction then got to work trying to foster the skillful ones and trying to denourish the unskillful ones that's kind of the path that he saw for himself as he worked towards enlightenment over many many years so once he became enlightened much of the heart of the teaching of the buddha is in terms of numbers of things right the three marks of existence the four noble truths the five aggregates the eightfold path and so many other things are divulged or taught in terms of numbers where what he's trying to do is analyze things into parts or degrees or stages along a path so that we can understand them in a fuller way by understanding each of their parts individually and then to look at some of the texts that are remained to us the the first chapter of the dhammapada if we look at the first chapter it's often translated as dualisms the this one that i have by gil fransdale translates it's translates it dichotomies but basically that means the same thing and this text here the numerical discourses of the buddha the anguttara nikaya in pali is one of the nikayas one of the basic groups of early buddhist texts and this group of texts is organized in terms of numbers so we have all the ones all the twos all the threes and so on and so on and so on again all of these suggest that the buddha did not think in non-dualistic terms but rather in terms of analysis of things into parts and degrees and kinds as a way to help us conceptually understand them and so put them into our put that understanding into practice now all of this kind of awareness that i've gone through here about how early buddhism is not non-dualistic is sort of in the background when bhikkhu bodhi a very famous translator indeed translated the angutto nikaya and many other things scholar and monk he wrote many years ago or several years ago a an essay a very famous essay called dhamma and non-duality where he took on this very question of whether early buddhism the buddhism that we find in the teachings of at least as far as we know the historical buddha and bikuboti says this he says the teachings of the buddha as found in the pali canon does not endorse a philosophy of non-dualism of any variety nor would i add can a non-dualistic perspective be found lying implicit within the buddha's discourses the buddhist approach does not aim at the discovery of a unifying principle behind or beneath our experience of the world in other words a principle of non-dualism could be thought of as a kind of again a unifying principle a sort of a single principle that unifies all of the teachings and we will indeed find that in some later interpretations of buddhism or obviously other non-buddhist kinds of philosophies but as as bikubodi says we don't find that kind of principle in early buddhism now bigubodi's point is that we don't find any non-dualism in early buddhism at all and i think there are a couple of possible responses here i think in the main bhikkhubodhi is certainly right however there are ways of understanding aspects of early buddhist teachings in which non-dualism does play a role in particular when it comes to this idea of a unifying principle in early buddhism again you know really we don't find much of one but if we wanted to try to look for one we might for example there is the very famous statement in early buddhism that all dharmas are non-self s and that can be interpreted pretty clearly as potentially non-dualistic in the sense that all dharmas dharmas is another word for well there's many ways of interpreting the word dharma and that's part of the problem but it can be interpreted as simply events that happen in the world or dharmas it can also be interpreted as our experiences our dharmas all of our experiences our non-self but either way we interpret it this seems to unify all of the dharmas all of the experiences perhaps even all of the events of the world as being of one particular type non-self and if we look at it that way and many people did over the centuries and millennia after the buddha's lifetime we can we might begin to see the the germ the kernel of a non-dualistic philosophy right there and indeed we'll get more to that coming up it's also the case that many people have found a kind of non-dualistic practice within concentration meditation in particular the achievement of particular kinds of jhana and jhana meditation is a kind of absorptive meditation it takes many many many hours of practice over long periods of time but eventually the mind becomes absorbed in a particular kind of experience and that experience can be thought of as or can be approached as or can seem to be non-dualistic in particular in one of the early texts the nun damadina when asked about meditation when asked about particular concentration meditation she says that concentration meditation which is exemplified in particular by janna aims at the unification of the mind now there are many ways to understand again unification of the mind what that potentially means that sort of one pointed mind that occurs in this kind of a deep meditation but one way to interpret that is to interpret it again non-dualistically so the mind becomes unified which is to say not dualist right so it becomes unified in the sense that it understands everything in terms of of one of everything being the same kind and usually this kind of experience of non-dualistic or non-dual non-dualistic mindfulness as analio calls it uh anglo being another uh wonderful a translator and interpreter of the early texts a scholar and also a meditator analyte talks about how the fourth jhana which is the deepest of the four jhanas is often thought of as sort of a non-dual mindfulness kind of experience where the boundaries between self and other break down i was also in a talk a while ago at new york insight with bodhi paksha who is another wonderful a teacher and meditator who talked in a very similar kind of way about his experience of the fourth jhana being a kind of non-dualistic experience of the world where again the boundaries between self and other break down and one stop seeing the world in terms of that kind of dualism now it's also the case that some quite obscure early texts there are a few texts in the early tradition that are quite obscure and difficult to interpret some of these are taken non-dualistically in particular there's an essay by john amaro where he discusses i believe it's called the buddha on non-duality i have a link to all these texts down in the notes by the way and he takes three texts that he looks at two of them are obscure texts in the early tradition out of the udana which is a collection again of early texts and then he also looks at another text from the later tradition which i'm not going to focus on here but in any event in the two early texts what i think typifies both of the texts that he looks at and i don't have time to go into both of them today because it would take me too long a video but neither of them actually talk explicitly of non-dualism so what a john amaro here is interpreting them as expressing a non-dualistic philosophy even though the texts don't actually say that one of them is a very famous text to bahia of the bark cloth who was a a renunciant of a different tradition who comes to the buddha and wants a very quick sort of encapsulated dharma talk and the buddha gives him a talk basically telling him when you experience something stay only with the experience don't proliferate around that experience basically don't obsess about it don't sort of let that experience take your mind off in this direction and that but just stay with the experience itself that's basically what the buddha tells him now this could potentially be interpreted non-dualistically but it doesn't necessarily have to be that way it could be interpreted simply as the buddha again telling bahia that the problem that you have to overcome in in attaining awakening is this problem of overcoming mental proliferation so and the same thing is true of again of the other texts where these can be interpreted in different ways basically the term non-dual which in pali would be advaiung that term is very rarely used in the early texts so if we want to look for i mean if we're interested in whether or not non-dualism is held in early buddhism what we would do is look for it or is it mentioned there very very few times is that term used so far as i can tell if you know of some particular place that i haven't mentioned here please let me know in the notes but now basically in for the most part there's well there's one particular form of the discussion of non-dualism that occurs many times sort of repeated this is something that happens in the early text that you have a kind of a template of a discussion that is made in one place and then repeated word for word in many other places or almost word for word and one of these discusses ten different kinds of meditation which among other things are are called non-dualistic meditations and the buddha discusses each of these and then particularly highlights one as being paramount and the buddhist says about that paramount form of this non-dualistic meditation the best of these 10 universal dimensions of meditation is when someone perceives the meditation on universal consciousness above below across non-dual and limitless and here we have perhaps the closest thing to an example of non-dualism in the early texts where again the buddha is describing and indeed promoting a kind of non-dual consciousness a meditation that involves a consciousness presumably that does not see distinctions in things or perhaps does not see distinction between self and other however after having made this point the buddha then goes on to elaborate further and says that this form of non-dual meditation should not be identified with enlightenment it's not enlightenment it's a form also of conditioning it's a conditioned thought it's a conditioned form of meditation and as such while it is a good form of practice there's nothing wrong with it we will have to eventually become disillusioned with it in order to attain enlightenment so again while non-dualism does exist in the early texts it's not to be confused with enlightenment itself also non-dualism occurs in one place in the the text that describes the end of the buddha's life at the mahaparinibana suta where ananda who is the buddha's close attendant is said to practice a form of loving-kindness that's so pure that it's a form of non-dualism that it's non-dual and sort of a non-dual practice and here that's not elaborated upon again in that suta but i think we might understand it to mean that he has a form of kindness and compassion that's so pure and general that it doesn't recognize distinctions between he him himself and other people in other words that he holds other people with as much kindness as he holds himself and as much compassion and so on but again otherwise so far as i can tell this term for non-dualism doesn't appear in the early suttas and as bikubodi expressed earlier on there doesn't seem to be a way to easily interpret the buddha's dharma the early buddhist dharma in non-dualistic terms in any kind of global sense so having said that now let's turn to some later interpretations and later developments in buddhism and later buddhism gets very complicated very fast so i'm only again going to be talking about this on a very basic level but in general much of the problem in later buddhism comes up with this interpretation of shunyata of emptiness of the emptiness of all things and now emptiness is a way of expressing non-self that is to say that the self is or i should say that the this being is empty of a self let's say there is that breaks down as we've already seen and discussed any kind of distinction between self and other that is uh fundamental should we say uh but it goes further than that the ramifications go further and this idea of breaking down this distinction between self and other is kind of like a a wedge that opens up a larger kind of doorway to a a different way of seeing the entire dharma because if we think of each of everything that we see every all of our experiences all of our concepts as essentially like little selves then each of them is individually open to just this same kind of move right so just as this being here does not contain a permanent essential unchanging self so we might say that each of our experiences each of our ideas our thoughts our concepts all of them are the same way that they're that there isn't anything essential permanent unchanging in them either and so each of them is empty of a self each of them is empty of any kind of inherent permanent nature and if we begin to see things that way then all kinds of ordinary distinctions seem to break down these ideas began in the early centuries of the common era in what are called the prajnaparamita sutras or the very end of the period before the common era and they were eventually put together in a in a very elegant way by the philosopher nagarjuna and then interpreted and reinterpreted in arguments back and forth from different schools over the centuries at this point once we get to nagarjuna and even just before before nagarjuna even we really are in a period of what we might call sort of professional buddhist thinkers uh people in large established monasteries who really could spend all of their lives in contemplation in reasoning and thinking in arguing and debating in trying to find deeper truths underneath the the surface descriptions of the dharma and of all of the buddha's teachings and so as a result things get again very complicated very fast very deep very recondite the arguments become more and more difficult to follow because you really have to know every step along the way but one important distinction that comes up is kind of a distinction between what we might term ontological non-dualism and experiential or epistemological non-dualism ontological non-dualism has to do with the features of reality that reality itself is non-dualistic whereas experiential or epistemological that is how we know about things that kind of non-dualism doesn't talk about the external world or the way things really are but just talks about the way things seem to us that our experiences are in some sense non-dualistic and this kind of distinction is then discussed argued over refined in various schools of the mahayana mahayana buddhism as well as in schools of what is called advaita vedanta which is the the form the the form in which these kinds of ideas enter hinduism um advaita vedanta may go back uh into the uh into the past quite a bit before this it's not entirely clear there's all kinds of arguments about how that began and that's not really the topic of this video anyway but there are many similarities between the philosophies of advaita vedanta and some of these early mahayana philosophies there probably was a lot of cross-cultural interchange there but in mahayana buddhism this non-dualism is perhaps best typified by the non-dualistic consciousness we find in what is called yogachara buddhism yogachara was a reaction against some of the ideas of nagarjuna and of the madhyamaka which is the school that nagarjuna founded their belief was that the emptiness that was expressed in the madhyamaka was sort of too empty that there was it was too close to nihilism and that what really had to what was much more accurate in expressing the dharma was this understanding that it wasn't that there was literally nothing or at least that's how they interpreted the emptiness of nagarjuna but rather that there was this consciousness in a sense that underlay everything a non-dual consciousness a consciousness without distinctions now as i say there are a couple of different ways that this can be interpreted this yogachara philosophy it could be interpreted ontologically as saying that there is this real objective non-conditioned field of reality out there out of which conditioning arises that is to say this real ontologically real external field of non-dualism out of which all of our dualisms all of our comparisons and and analyses arise in some sense that's one way to interpret it another way to interpret it as i've said is more experiential or epistemological so if we interpret it this way there the yogacharans aren't making any claims about the external world as such what they're saying is that our appearances are non-dualistic in some sense that is to say we look everything around us we see we seem to see distinctions between things certain things are white and other things are black certain things are bad and other things are good but when we really get into deep meditation or deep philosophical analysis these distinctions seem to break down and so we can no longer hold them and we begin to see that these distinctions are in some sense illusory so if we understand the yogicara in that sense again there's no they're not making any claim about the external world what they're making is a claim about how experience seems to us how appearances appear to us if you like now i should say that yogachara recently has been interpreted in both ways by different scholars that is to say paul williams has said in one of his books that he believes that the yoga chara in its essence is a form of ontological non-dualism whereas dan listhouse another contemporary scholar has argued the the reverse that in fact if you look at it deeply yogachar is not ontological but just making expressions about our appearances um i'm not going to try to answer that question my guess would be and this is only a guess is that it's probably both in the sense that you would probably have different texts different uh thinkers over the millennia who would have taken both sides of that issue just because it's you know both sides are available to philosophers or thinkers who want to to express their thoughts and so probably there are ones who express both but that's a question for deeper scholarship and what i should say also is that this feeds into a different kind of early or a different kind of idea that comes up in these forms of later buddhism that is to say the idea of two truths so there the idea of two truths is this idea that there is a conventional truth the truth of every day if you like and there is an ultimate truth the way things really are or the way things are at a deeper level of understanding in conventional truth therefore there are these dualities right so there are the dualities of self and other there are the dualities that we see in the world around us or seem to see whereas if we get deeper we find that these conventional dualities disappear and that indeed is found in both madhyamaka and yogachara buddhism madhyamaka is seeing that they dissolve into shunyata into emptiness and the yogachara seeing that they dissolve into well it's also can be called emptiness but their interpretation of that is a kind of a non-dual consciousness that that seems to lie behind our experiences of things in the world and indeed that this very distinction between a conventional and ultimate is itself a duality which also must be seen to be conventional in a sense and i did an earlier video on this question about these two truths in fact two videos and i'll put a link to the first one where i get into the the early uh history of it up here on the screen and if you like that you can see the second one too on the later developments if you're getting something out of these videos of mine take a look over at my patreon page and see if you want to join us and help support the channel thanks so much to all of you and we'll catch you on the next one and meanwhile all of you be well

Channel: Doug's Dharma

Views: 8,801

Rating: 4.9912853 out of 5

Keywords: non dualism buddhism, non-duality buddhism, advaita

Id: 43v6lLweukg

Length: 40min 45sec (2445 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 19 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/NoFee8]

Very informative video by Doug's Dharma.