To the Western mind, one of the most disconcerting things about Oriental teachings as found in the Vedanta and Buddhism is their negative language. We receive the impression that they think of God, the ultimate reality, as a void, and of man’s final destiny as an absorption in this void with the consequent loss of his unique personality. In the Vedanta, Brahman is almost always described by negations—the nondual, the nonfinite, the formless, the nonparticular. At the same time, the finite world of forms and individual beings is described as the unreal, the maya, which must disappear from the awakened consciousness.
In Buddhism, the highest reality is called sunyata, the empty, which is neither being nor nonbeing, which is so ineffable that every statement about it must be false. It appears that the way to a realization of the ultimate involves the strict denial of one’s own and every other form of existence. Most Western people think that “variety is the spice of life,” and therefore do not take at all kindly to a view of the highest good that seems to require the obliteration of all finite experiences. A state of “consciousness,” which is neither “conscious nor unconscious,” in which all particular things seem to vanish into a luminous haze, does not appeal to them as anything but extremely boring. Furthermore, they cannot see that such ideas of the highest reality have any philosophical cogency. For how can the basis, the ground, of these very solid, concrete, and particular finite experiences be so much of a nothing? How can something so startling, so real-seeming, so simultaneously wonderful and tragic as the everyday world, emerge from so impalpable a void?
The problem here is almost entirely one of language, for it has never been clear to the Western mind in what sense these negations are intended. By contrast, the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic religions appear to be very positive, for their statements about the highest reality are affirmations rather than denials. Instead of speaking coldly about the “nondual infinite” they speak warmly of the Righteous Father, who is a living, personal Being, whose nature is unbounded justice and love. So long as it is imagined that, say, the Vedanta and Christianity are speaking the same kind of language, their ideas must seem to be utterly opposed.
If we do not know the ultimate reality, we stand in somewhat the same relation to it as blind men to color. If I am to describe color to a blind man, I can do it in one of two ways. I can tell him what color is like, or I can say what it is not. I cannot possibly tell him what it is. I can compare it to variations in temperature, speaking of red as “warm” and blue as “cold,” though this will perhaps mislead the blind man into thinking that red is warm. On the other hand, I can say that color is not hard or soft, round or square, liquid or solid. The danger here is that the blind man may easily suppose that I am talking about nothing, for I have denied to color every positive quality that he knows.
To some extent, this is the difference between the religious doctrines of the West and the metaphysical doctrines of Asia. The former wants to say what reality is like, and the latter what it is not, but the average mind supposes that both are trying to say what it is. Hence the confusion.
But the negative mode of approach to the ultimate reality involves rather more than this, and to understand it properly we must try to see exactly what is being negated. Another principle that both the Vedanta and Buddhism hold in common is that, in reality, “all this”—the whole world of experience, including myself and others—is in essence identical with sunyata or Brahman. In other words, there is no reality but the absolute, nondual, and ultimate reality. This is taken to be a radical denial of the everyday world, as if distinct people and things had no value or meaning whatsoever.
It is therefore tremendously important to realize that the negative way is not making a negation about reality—about the real “something” that is the basis of everyday experience. The denial applies strictly to the ideas, the concepts, the theories, and the fixed categories of thought whereby we try to understand and grasp what we experience. The metaphysical doctrines of the Orient are saying that you cannot grasp reality in any fixed form of thought or feeling; you cannot nail it down and possess it. We try to do this because almost all of us feel insecure. We have identified our consciousness with a seemingly fixed form—a structure of memories called “I.” We discover that this structure is impermanent, and are therefore afraid. We therefore cling all the more tenaciously to life, to “I,” and become still more afraid, involving ourselves in a vicious circle of clinging that is called samsara—the “round” of existence.
But the real world, which is the basis of everyday experience, cannot be “fixed”—and every attempt to do so results in frustration and vicious circles. Yet this world, this reality that we experience at every moment is Brahman. For example, I point to a tree and say, “This is a tree.” Obviously this and tree are not actually the same thing. Tree is a word, a noise. It is not this experienced reality to which I am pointing. To be accurate, I should have said, “This (pointing to a tree) is symbolized by the noise tree.”
If, then, the real tree is not the word or the idea tree, what is it? If I say that it is an impression on my senses, a vegetable structure, or a complex of electrons, I am merely putting new sets of words and symbols in place of the original noise tree. I have not said what it is at all. I have also raised other questions: “What are my senses?” “What is a structure?” “What are electrons?”
We can never say what these things are. We can symbolize them by sundry noises and patterns of thought. We can, in turn, symbolize these noises by other noises—“Tree is a word,” or “A pattern of thought is an idea”—but this does not really explain anything. We still do not know what a tree, a word, a noise, or an idea actually is. And yet we have experienced mysterious “somethings,” which we have arbitrarily paired off with each other—the sight of the tree with the noise tree, the process of thinking with the noise idea, and the noises tree and idea with the noise words.
Human beings are very much bewitched by words and ideas. They forget that they are mere symbols. They tend to confuse them seriously with the real world that they only represent. The reason for this confusion is that the world of words and ideas seems to be relatively fixed and rational, whereas the real world is not fixed at all. Thus the world of words and ideas seems to be so much safer, so much more comprehensible than the real world. The word and idea tree has remained fixed currency for many centuries, but real trees have behaved in a very odd way. I can try to describe their behavior by saying that they have appeared and disappeared, that they have been in a constant state of change, and that they flow in and out of their surroundings.
But this does not really say what they have done, because disappear, change, flow, and surroundings are still noises representing something utterly mysterious.
Our problem, then, is that so long as we try to fit the real world into the “nice little, tight little” world of definitions, ideas, and words (nama-rupa), we shall never succeed in doing so, save in the most approximate and impermanent way. On the other hand, to know Brahman, to see God, is to be aware of the real world in its undefined (i.e., infinite) state. This is to know life without trying to capture it in the fixed forms of conventional words and ideas. It is only by convention that the aspect of reality called man is separated off from all other aspects—the earth, the air, the sun, moon and stars. It is convenient to do this (which is what “convention” means), but it does not fully correspond to the facts, which are that man is a process continuous with every other process, and that the boundaries between these processes are fixed arbitrarily by the human mind. For example, who is to say whether a man begins and ends with birth and death, or with conception and the final decay of his corpse? Is he limited in space by his skin, or does he extend out to the distance to which he can hear, smell, and see? All these boundaries are as conventional and arbitrary as the length of an inch or the weight of a pound: you can put them anywhere you like, so long as you agree about them with others.
At root, then, to cling to oneself is as absurd as cleaving passionately to an inch. It just cannot be done, and the attempt is pure frustration. To say, then, that reality is not any particular thing, and that individuals are unreal, is in principle exactly the same thing as pointing out that two yards have no existence apart from a real piece of cloth or wood. You cannot make a dress out of two, or two million, abstract yards.
We have to learn, then, to take all conventional distinctions and definitions for what they are—purely arbitrary and unreal conveniences—and to be keenly aware of life as it is (yatha bhutam) apart from all definitions, measurements, and arbitrary boundaries. To see the world in this way is to see Brahman, the undefinable. In this sense, every one of us has already an obscure and neglected knowledge of Brahman—but it is not knowledge in the ordinary meaning of the word. Ordinarily, we mean that to know something is to be able to define it. In fact, however, we know a whole world that we cannot define at all, but we do not make friends with it. We are afraid of it, and are always trying to tie it up safely in watertight packages.
When St. Augustine was asked what time was, he replied, “I know, but when you ask me I don’t.” The same is true of reality. We know it all the time, but when we begin to think about it, it vanishes. Thus it is said in Zen Buddhism, “If you want to see into it, see into it directly. When you begin to think about it, it is altogether missed.” For the same reason the Kena Upanishad says, “He who thinks that Brahman is not comprehended, by him Brahman is comprehended; but he who thinks that Brahman is comprehended knows It not. Brahman is unknown to those who know It, and it is known to those who do not know It at all.”
Brahman, then, is the real world as it is in itself, before we begin to describe or define it in any way, before we split it asunder into millions of arbitrary distinctions called feet, inches, stars, trees, men, ounces, pounds, and mountains. A Chinese poem expresses it thus:
Plucking chrysanthemums along the east fence;
Gazing in silence at the southern hills;
The birds flying home in pairs
Through the soft mountain air of dusk—
In these things there is a deep meaning,
But when we are about to express it,
We suddenly forget the words.
I know, but when you ask me I don’t. If you want me to show you God, I will point to the ash can in your back yard. But if you ask, “Then you mean that this ash can is God?”—you will have missed the point altogether.
From Vedanta and the West, 1951, 4(4), 97–101. Copyright © 1951 by Vedanta Society of Southern California. Reprinted with permission of Vedanta Press.