Buddhist Nonduality

Buddhist Nonduality is the strand within the Buddhist tradition that points past concept and category to the bare nature of mind. Where popular Buddhism is sometimes presented as a programme of moral self-improvement, the contemplative core has always been something stranger and more radical: an investigation that takes apart the very assumption of a separate self doing the investigating.

The thread runs almost the full length of the tradition. The Buddha’s earliest teaching of anatta, no-self, and paticca samuppada, dependent origination, already dismantle the idea of a fixed personal essence. The verses of the Dhammapada carry this insight in compressed memorable form. Five centuries later, the Mahayana sutras radicalise it further: the Prajnaparamita literature, with the Heart Sutra and the Diamond Sutra at its centre, names sunyata, emptiness, as the underlying nature of every dharma. Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka, written in the second century, develops the same recognition into a tight philosophical instrument that demolishes every conceivable position the mind tries to hold. The Yogacara school answers in another voice: not emptiness, but mind-only. Both are doors to the same nondual recognition.

The koan tradition of Chan and Zen carries the inquiry into a different idiom altogether. Where the sutras argue, the koan refuses argument. A monk asks Joshu, Has a dog Buddha-nature or not? Joshu answers Mu. There is nowhere for the questioning mind to land. The forty-eight cases of The Gateless Gate, collected by Wu-men in 1228, are the most concentrated record of this method. The Tibetan traditions of Dzogchen and Mahamudra work the same recognition through pointing-out instructions and direct introduction to the nature of mind, in a vocabulary that overlaps strikingly with the Advaita masters of the same centuries.

What unites the Buddhist current with the rest of the contemplative library is the absence of a separate self at the heart of experience. What distinguishes it is the refusal of any positive ground. Where Advaita names what one is Atman or Brahman, the Buddhist analysis declines to name anything at all. Form is emptiness, and the very emptiness is form. Read alongside the Cloud author’s apophatic Christianity, the Madhyamaka turn looks like the same recognition reached by an even more uncompromising road.