A nondualist interpretation of the Bhagavad-gītā concludes part 2. Whereas part 1 developed a “core doctrine” about the nonduality of experience, derived from and compatible with Buddhism, Vedānta, and Taoism, the concern of part 2 has been to defend that core theory by resolving the main disagreements among the nondualistic (and some other) philosophical systems. I have done that in various ways. Chapter 5 addresses the ontological differences among the three most important Indian metaphysical systems (or sets of systems): Sāṅkhya-Yoga, Vedānta, and Buddhism. We noticed that the differences among them correspond to the three main ways of resolving the relationship between subject and object: sharp dualism (which fails because the two terms cannot be related back together), subject-only (the “all-Self” of Advaita) and object-only (the anātman of Buddhism). The second and third alternatives are somewhat more successful attempts to describe the nondual experience, but they adopt opposite approaches: Vedānta conflates object into subject, Buddhism conflates subject into object. The rest of chapter 5 points out the otherwise deep affinities, both historical and metaphysical, between Māhāyāna and Advaita, which need to be appreciated before turning to their disagreements.
An in-depth analysis of the main differences between Māhāyāna and Advaita is the concern of chapter 6. Their metaphysical starting points are so diametrically opposed, so much mirror-images of each other, that suspicions are aroused. We approached this disagreement through five sets of category-conflicts: self versus nonself, substances versus modes, immutability versus impermanence, the Unconditioned versus conditionality, and no-Path versus all-Path. In each instance we found that the surface conflict regarding the correct category-description masked a deeper agreement about the phenomenology of the nondual experience. What is important in each case is not to assert the superiority of either relative term (although it has often been understood that way) but to overcome the dualism between each pair of terms. Nondual experience is not characterized by the delusive dualism between self and other, between mind and world, for “my” mind is the world. Nor is there a dualism between substance and modes, between things and their attributes, for all phenomena are śūnya, empty, with a dreamlike māyā quality, except for that One which can never be experienced as a One. Third, the category-conflict between Parmenidean Being and Heraclitean Becoming is resolved by a double-dialectic that first dissolves all things into temporal flux and then turns that flux back upon itself, leaving an Eternal Now that is not incompatible with change when we realize that it is always now. “He to whom time is the same as eternity, and eternity the same as time, is free from all contention” (Boehme). Fourth, this double-dialectic was applied again to the dualism between the Unconditioned (Nirguṇa Brahman, nirvana) and “all-conditionality” (pratītya-samutpāda) to break down the dualism between self-sufficient things and the causal glue that relates them together. In nondual experience, the tension between freedom and determinism is resolved in an act that is not the dilemma of a dualistic ego but arises spontaneously from one’s śūnya nature. Fifth, the disagreement between Śaṅkara and Dōgen about the role of spiritual practices was seen to reflect their deeper agreement about the need to overcome any self-stultifying dualism between means and goal, for the nondual Self is not something that can be attained. Finally, this same double-dialectic was employed to criticize Derrida, arguing that his deconstruction is not radical enough because it adopts only the first of the two dialectical moments; his deconstruction misses the opportunity to deconstruct itself and attain the conceptual clôture that would allow a true opening to something else. I underscore the importance of this chapter, for it concerns more than the category-conflicts between Mahāyāna Buddhism and Advaita Vedānta. It was pointed out that the relation between Buddhism and Vedānta on these matters corresponds to the linguistic bifurcation between subject-based and predicate-based descriptions, a dilemma that has infected much philosophy, both Eastern and Western. Even more, it is a dilemma that plagues our lives, for our duḥkha can be expressed in terms of the tensions due to the sense of a separation between ourselves and others, between awareness of temporality and our “intimations of immortality,” between our sense of being determined and our need for freedom, between our meditative practices and spiritual goals.
Yet there is much more to Asian thought than the fraternal quarrel between Mahāyāna and Advaita. Chapter 7 broadened the scope of the discussion by approaching the issue of phenomenology/description in a very different way: suggesting an analogy, the Mind-space experience, which provides the opportunity for a wide variety of ontological responses. We were able to correlate these responses with the ontological positions of the main Indian systems and, just as interesting, these correlations were revealed to encompass all the main possible ontological alternatives. This raises the question whether the Mind-space analogy might in some sense be more than an analogy, but the main point is that it supports our general claim distinguishing the phenomenology of an experience from the variety of descriptions which may be applied to it after the fact. Again, the differences between descriptions seem less important than their agreement — in this case, about the phenomenology of the nondual experience, as opposed to our usual experience of the world as a collection of discrete, self-sufficient entities causally interacting in space/time.
Finally, chapter 8 has tested our “core model” of nondual experience by seeing what light it sheds on the Bhagavad-gītā, that very popular but philosophically problematic Vedāntic text. We looked at the two main issues it raises: the relations among the various margas (spiritual paths) and the relationship between personal (God) and impersonal (e.g., nirvana and Nirguṇa Brahman) Absolutes. The three main margas advocated in the Gītā correlated very nicely with working on three different aspects of experience, intellect, emotion and action; the path in each case involves “transforming” these from a dualistic to a nondualistic mode. The second section dealt with a controversy that continues to be important within the Western religious tradition. Many modern theists (e.g., R. C. Zaehner, Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson, Joseph Marechal) have argued that the nondual experience of undifferentiated union is distinct from and inferior to the dualistic awareness of a loving God. Others, such as Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Underhill, Ninian Smart, John Hick, and Frits Staal, believe that mystical experiences are basically the same, and in their complete and highest form nondual. The proponents of this view acknowledge the difference in mystical claims, particularly between theist and nondualist, but explain these differences by distinguishing between the immediate experience and its interpretations — variously termed “doctrinal structures” (Deikman), “credal ramifications” (Ninian Smart), “superstructures” (Staal) and so on. Needless to say, this study falls into the latter camp. In particular, the conclusion of chapter 8 suggests that the theistic mystical experience might be understood as an “incomplete” nondual one. In it, there is the awareness of consciousness pervading everywhere, but insofar as the experience is an awareness of . . ., it is still tainted with some delusion; whereas complete union — as in Advaita’s Nirguṇa and Eckhart’s godhead — is to become that ground which is literally nothing in itself, but from which all issues forth. So this chapter, too, concerns issues wider than just the Bhagavad-gītā. It shows how our model of nondual experience may be used to explain much about the nature of the spiritual path. And I hope that the discussion of theism may contribute to the burgeoning dialogue between religions, a conversation whose importance can hardly be overemphasized.
To complete this study, we shall briefly consider the implications of nonduality, and our model of it, for three other areas of our experience. These are the three fields of value-theory: ethics, aesthetics, and social theory. A recurring difficulty in each is what is sometimes called the Is-Ought Problem, the problem of how to derive any value claim from a factual one. We have already noticed that the value–fact distinction is another corollary of the bifurcation between mind and matter, between subject as source of value and object as brute fact, and that opens the door for new approaches to some resistant problems — or, more precisely, for a new understanding of some old approaches.
Ethics. The problem of morality has become less abstract now that we are experiencing the nihilism that Nietzsche predicted a century ago. “God is dead; now all is permitted.” If God and all other transcendental principles of unity evaporate, what remains to bind our dualized selves together? There is a similarity between this and our discussion of causality. Just as our concepts of self-existing entities and their causal relations are relative to each other, so our concepts of God as the source of moral law and of ourselves as amoral (if not immoral: “original sin”) agents feed on each other. If God is the only source of good, this results in the religious struggle to impose a moral code upon ourselves and others, necessary to control our sinful nature. The problem is conceiving of God (and, derivatively, morality) as an external (hence dualistic) relating-principle, a sort of transcendental glue sustaining the moral connections between us. Nāgārjuna deconstructed self-existing things by emphasizing their causal relativity, but our social problem, in the West at least, is becoming the opposite: society is dissolving into a collection of autonomous individuals each “looking out for number one.”
The nondual experience undercuts this atomism by denying the ontological reality of the ego. “He who sees all beings as the very Self and the Self in all beings in consequence thereof abhors none” (Īśā Upaniṣad, v. 6). But this is not strong enough; Vidyaranya puts it better: “The knowledge of the Self leads to the identification of oneself with others as clearly as one identifies oneself with one’s body.”393 This realization cuts through the tendency to treat others primarily as competitors or objects to be manipulated and shows that the Bodhisattva doctrine has a metaphysical basis: if one is the whole world, one cannot be fully enlightened unless all others are as well.
But the most important thing to notice is that the whole issue has been transposed from a matter of morality to one of understanding. The problem is no longer evil, but delusion, and the solution is not a matter of applying the will but of reaching an insight about the nature of things. (Blake: “There can be no Good Will. Will is always Evil.”) Socrates is vindicated: bad conduct is indeed due to ignorance, for if we really knew the good we would do it. The catch, of course, is in the really, for the type of knowledge necessary is neither the “correct” moral code nor any other merely conceptual understanding. As usual, William Blake hit this nail right on the head, in Vision of the Last Judgment:
Men are admitted into Heaven not because they have curbed & govern’d their Passions or have No Passions, but because they have Cultivated their Understandings. The Treasures of Heaven are not Negations of Passion, but Realities of Intellect, from which All the Passions Emanate Uncurbed in their Eternal Glory.
The Combats of Good & Evil is Eating of the Tree of Knowledge. The Combats of Truth & Error is Eating of the Tree of Life. . . . Satan thinks that Sin is displeasing to God; he ought to know that Nothing is displeasing to God but Unbelief & Eating of the Tree of Knowledge of Good & Evil.
I do not consider either the Just or the Wicked to be in a Supreme State, but to be every one of them States of the Sleep which the Soul may fall into in its deadly dreams of Good & Evil when it leaves paradise following the serpent.
Not Good & Evil, but Truth & Error! “If God is anything, he is Understanding.”
The nondualist traditions make the same point as part of their critique of dualistic categories. The tendency to evaluate all acts as good or bad, pure or impure, is a classic example of the delusive vikalpa that needs to be eliminated. To eliminate all delusion therefore means to eliminate all moral codes as well. But this does not excuse selfishness, for a true elimination of delusion will also eliminate all those self-centered ways of thinking that motivate selfish behavior. Deeper than the imperfectly flexible strictures of any moral code (which may still have value as “rules of thumb”) is the concern for others that springs up spontaneously within those who have realized their true nature. This is the heart of the Taoist critique of Confucianism, which sees Confucian emphasis on such doctrines as righteousness and propriety as an attempt to close the barn door after the horse of natural feeling has already run away. Nietzsche was right when he argued that such codes are ultimately motivated by fear, which gives rise to the need to control others and to control ourselves. The alternative to that fear is love, which, if it is to be genuine, is something no moral code can legislate. “Christ acted from impulse and not from rules” (Blake). He and the Buddha exemplify how compassion arises and manifests itself naturally when we have overcome our sense of separation from the world.
Spinoza concluded the Ethics by proposing that blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself. The other side of this is that suffering is not the punishment for evil, but evil itself. The essence of our duḥkha is the sense of separation — between myself and God, says the theist, who defines hell in precisely those terms; between myself and the objectified world, says the nondualist, whose doctrine of karma embodies a similar realization. The problem of “evil” is that it aggravates one’s sense of alienation. Someone who manipulates the world merely for his own advantage increasingly dualizes himself from it. Those who live in this way cannot help expecting the same from others, leading to a life based on fear and the need to control situations. The vicious circle that this can entail leads to a hellish solipsism. The point of the karma doctrine is that our thought-constructions and -projections actually change the quality of the world we live in; thoughts may gain a life of their own and come back to haunt us.
For a blissful condition of man it would by no means be sufficient that he should be transferred to a “better world,” but it would also be necessary that a complete change should take place in himself. . . . To be transferred to another world and to have his whole nature changed are, at bottom, one and the same. (Schopenhauer)394
Enormous “moral” consequences follow from the fact (discussed in the causality section of chapter 6) that the entire universe exists just for the sake of this single flower to bloom, and for the sake of me to appreciate it. For the nondualist, life is nothing but a series of such timeless śūnya experiences: a sip of coffee, a few words with a friend, a walk down a path. Someone who cannot trust his world enough to “forget himself” and become these situations is condemned — or condemns himself — to watch his life ooze away.
This suggests the connection between the ethical question and the aesthetic one, for “in the mind of a man who is filled with his own aims, the world appears as a beautiful landscape appears on the plan of a battlefield” (Schopenhauer again).395
Aesthetics. The aesthetic experience is nondual, because nonintentional; but this is nothing new. As far as I know, Kant was the first to emphasize that the aesthetic experience is nonintentional in the sense discussed in chapter 3, where it was argued that nonintentionality is the essential quality of nondual action. Nor is it coincidental that the example of music was used, and lines of poetry cited, to discuss nondual perception in chapter 2. Schopenhauer, whose aesthetic sense was more sensitive than Kant’s, also expressed the point better: in aesthetic perception, a man “ceases to consider the where, the when, the why, and the whither of things, and looks simply and solely at the what.”396 We distinguish art by putting a frame around it, in various ways, to protect this canvas and this time in a theater from our usual utilitarian preoccupations; these frames help us to “keep the sabbath of the penal servitude of willing” by keeping certain ways of thinking out of them. (An illuminating comparison may be made with the worship of idols, which seem to function in the same way.)
For Kant, a judgment of taste cannot be cognitive, because it is not objective. With Schelling and Schopenhauer we find an appreciation of the aesthetic experience as both nondual and cognitive. For Schelling:
Every true work of art is a manifestation of the Absolute. . . . Subject and object, freedom and nature, are united and made one in the work of art, so that the Absolute, the infinite identity of subject and object, is finitely represented in the artist’s creation. . . . Beauty is thus the Infinite represented in finite form.397
Schopenhauer’s description of subject–object union is more to the point: “both have become one, since the entire consciousness is filled and occupied with a single perceptual image.”398 His philosophy of art is brilliant but, from our point of view, somewhat vitiated by its role within his metaphysics of will and the will’s negation. For a deeper understanding of the connection between the aesthetic and spiritual experiences, we must return to our nondualist philosophies.
In a recent monograph on comparative aesthetics, Eliot Deutsch comments on Indian, Chinese, and Japanese aesthetic theory. He uses the famous rock garden at Ryoanji, a Zen temple in Kyoto, to discuss the Japanese concept of yūgen.
The concept of yūgen teaches us that in aesthetic experience it is not that “I see the work of art,” but that by “seeing” the “I” is transformed. It is not that “I enter into the work,” but that by “entering” the “I” is altered in the intensity of a pristine immediacy.399
To explain Chinese aesthetics, he quotes Chuang Tzu: “Only the truly intelligent understand the principle of identity. They do not view things as apprehended by themselves subjectively, but transfer themselves into the position of the thing viewed.” Deutsch’s gloss: “for the Sung painter, following Chuang Tzu, there is no real or enduring distinction between subject and object, between man and nature, insofar as they are in perfect rhythmic accord with each other.”400
According to Deutsch, much the same point is implied by the Indian concept of rasa, a Sanskrit term variously translated as “flavor, desire, beauty, that which is tasted in art.” This naturally raises the question where is rasa located. Does it involve the discernment of objective qualities or is it due to a special response in the experiencer? These alternatives were put forth by classical Indian theorists but “summarily dismissed by Abhinavagupta” (whose “formulation of the theory is generally considered to be the most interesting”):
Rasa is not limited by any difference of space, time and knowing subject. When we say that “rasas are perceived” (we are using language loosely) . . . for the rasa is the process of perception itself.401
Deutsch’s comment on this brings out more clearly the claim of subject–object nonduality:
The essential quality of aesthetic experience, it is maintained, is neither subjective nor objective; it neither belongs to the art-work nor to the experiencer of it; rather it is the process of aesthetic perception itself, which defies spatial designation, that constitutes rasa. This view that the locus or āśraya, as it were, of rasa is nowhere, that rasa transcends spatial and temporal determinations is, I believe, the only way open to us to understand the nature of aesthetic experience.402
This explains why both objectivist explanations (e.g., formalist theories emphasizing “significant form”) and subjectivist explanations (e.g., romanticist and expressionist theories) fail to account for the aesthetic experience in a satisfactory way. Deutsch also discusses the connection between the aesthetic experience, understood in this way, and the spiritual one: “Śāntarasa [silent rasa], according to Abhinava, is just that transcendental realization of unity that is joy-ful and peaceful. It is grounded in the Self and is realized as a kind of self-liberation.”403 Later Deutsch almost equates the two: “A work of art is not a means to a non-aesthetic state, but precisely to an aesthetic apprehension, which apprehension, when fully realized, is nevertheless spiritual in character.”404
This is such an important point, and so well put, that I do not want to hurry past it; yet I wonder if we may take it one step further. Deutsch, who is best known for his work on Advaita Vedānta, assumes here the Advaitic distinction between Reality, understood as completely contentless, and all phenomena, including aesthetic ones. Therefore, although he says that the fully realized aesthetic apprehension becomes spiritual, he also wants to distinguish them. Whereas the highest aesthetic experience for him is still temporal, “in spiritual experience the call is from that which is Real without division or object or time. The art-work, in the fullness of its experience as śāntarasa, points to Reality and participates in it. In pure spiritual experience there is only the Real.”405 In contrast to this Advaitic view, we have seen that the Mahāyāna standpoint accepts no such “pure Reality” apart from the emptiness of phenomena, whether aesthetic or otherwise. The significance of this difference is that it allows us to draw a somewhat different conclusion about the meaning of the art work. The point may be made with greater effect if we first offer a more extreme version of the dualism we want to criticize. This is Heinrich Zimmer discussing the Indian work of art as a symbol pointing to and representing the spiritual:
In India the beauty of images is not intended for the aesthetic enjoyment of the secular beholder; it is a contribution to their magical force as “instruments” or “tools” (yantra).406
It is an important insight that the Indian work of art is often used as a means to self-transformation. But what may be questioned is the assumption that the pleasure of the aesthetic experience must be denied for the bliss of the “pure” spiritual one. If we do not take for granted that all true spiritual experience is completely nirguṇa, neither do we need to assume a difference in kind between the aesthetic and spiritual experiences. According to Coomaraswamy, the function of art for Plato is “to attune our own distorted modes of thought to cosmic harmonies, ‘so that by an assimilation of the knower to the to-be-known, the archetypal nature, and coming to be in that likeness, we may attain at last to a part in that “life’s best” that has been appointed by the gods to man for this time being and hereafter.’”407 Then perhaps the profound pleasure we sometimes experience from listening to a Bach fugue or a Mozart piano concerto is not a distraction from that process of attuning, nor even a side effect of it, but is that attuning. What is the nondual experience if not such an attunement? Nor need that enjoyment be understood subjectively. If the whole of creation groans and travails in pain together, does it not also leap for joy together, in us — or rather, as us?
This implies that there is no such thing as art for the completely attuned individual:
Could the artist attain perfection, becoming one with God, he would share in God’s creation from time everlasting, natural species would be his image in time as they are in God’s, nothing would remain but the ever-present world-picture as God sees it. There would be no occasion for works of art, the end of art having been accomplished. (Eckhart)408
Yes, but only because here we have another version of the paradox that has recurred repeatedly throughout this book: “To the enlightened — but only to the enlightened — all experience is śāntarasa.” (Deutsch).409
Society. From the nondualist perspective, what is most striking about the present world situation is the curious parallel between it and our perennial personal situation. The personal situation is, of course, the subject–object dualism, which, as analyzed in these pages, is delusive and unsatisfactory — a problem that can be resolved only in the nondual experience. Once the correspondence between this and the collective social problem has been noticed, the natural question is whether the latter problem too may be subject to a parallel solution.
In this century it has become clear that the fundamental social problem is now the relationship between humankind as a whole and our global environment. It is because of our alienation from the earth that we are destroying it. Philosophically, this is what Heidegger identified and criticized as “humanism.” But this is nothing other than the individual situation writ large: besides the problem of the individual ego, there is now the collective problem of a “species-ego.” In both cases the problem is a delusive sense of duality between oneself and the world one is “in.” “The same dualism that reduces things to objects for consciousness is at work in the humanism that reduces nature to raw material for humankind.”410
When we look for the historical roots of this problem, we must go back to ancient Judea and Greece. In classical Greece an especially dualistic way of experiencing the world was nurtured by the Parmenidean and Platonic split between the ever-changing, hence delusive senses and reason, their master; we may have misunderstood Parmenides and Plato, but they have nonetheless led to science and technology. The moral justification for transforming the world was provided, albeit unintentionally, by the Old Testament: God created the world and placed man in it. When God eventually disappeared, this trinity became a duality, and there was no longer anything to stop us from befouling our own nest. What should now be clear is that we cannot be satisfied with any religion that elevates a God above his creation without seeing the Infinite in all things. If spirit is anything other than the true nature of this world, then the world is devalued and we too insofar as we are of it.
In both these dualisms, the self is understood to be the source of awareness and therefore of all meaning and value, which is to devalue the world/nature into merely that field of activity wherein the self labors to fulfill itself. Then the problem is the same for both: the alienated subject feels no responsibility for the objectified other and attempts to find satisfaction through projects that usually merely increase the sense of alienation. The meaning and purpose sought can be attained only in a relationship whereby nonduality with the objectified other is re-established. Some who despair over our collective rapacity see homo sapiens only as a cancer, an evolutionary error by which our ecosystem may have doomed itself. But a tendency to look upon man as merely parasitic is another manifestation of the problem, reflecting the same general feeling of alienation that causes exploitation in the first place. Only by discovering our true home, in both senses, can we realize why we are here and what we are to do.
The nondualist systems that we have studied do not provide us with ready-made models to cope with this new ecological problem, which is the product of a very different worldview. In traditional Asia, oppressive political and economic systems were taken as much for granted as the weather, an attitude that encouraged spiritual withdrawal from the social world, although a withdrawal tempered by the compassion of many Bodhisattvas. In a relatively “steady-state” social system, such indifference was possible, but it is not now. Unfortunately, when humankind collectively “forgets itself” it is not in Dōgen’s sense. So perhaps new forms of spiritual practice need to be developed, which temper the yin of spiritual practice with the yang of grass-roots social activism. The last two centuries have shown us that it is naive to expect the necessary changes through political or social revolutions alone. Both the personal and the species dualisms are due to delusions that cannot be behavioristically “conditioned” out of existence but that require the desire and effort to develop an awareness that transforms one’s life. Perhaps the future of our biosphere depends to some extent on the quiet, unnoticed influence of those working to overcome their own sense of subject–object duality.