![]() ![]() ![]() What he’s pointing at, I think, is that we shouldn’t be seeking nirvana in some other place - that there are other ways of experiencing this world, right here and now. He is most famous for this denial of any duality between nirvana and samsara. Nāgārjuna was one of the first to emphasize shunyata, the term usually translated as emptiness. IJ: Can you say more about who Nāgārjuna is?ĭL: Nāgārjuna is one of the progenitors of the Mahayana, and in my view he’s the most important person in the Buddhist tradition, after the Buddha. Then the Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna comes along and says “the place that is samsara is the same place that is nirvana, they are not different.” So how can we understand the relationship between what the Pali Canon seems to be saying and what Nāgārjuna is saying? In early Buddhism, this world is samsara – a realm of suffering, craving and delusion – and the goal is to escape by achieving nibbana and not being reborn here. There are many other examples, such as the nonduality of samsara and nirvana in some Mahayana traditions. But that’s not the only type of nonduality. IJ: Yes, the whole concept of duality frames our world so that we split things up into separate sides.ĭL: Exactly. You end up with heresy trials, and burn witches at the stake, and suppress other religions as demonic - all that kind of stuff. And then the world can be seen as the site of this great struggle between the forces of good and the evil forces that oppose the good. If God is all-good, you have to find a separate evil influence in order to explain why there is so much suffering in the world, so you invent a Satan, or an original sin in the Garden of Eden. Historically, good versus evil seems to be the fundamental polarity of Christianity and the other Abrahamic traditions. Good is what is not evil, evil is what is not good. Maybe the most problematic version of bipolar concepts is good versus evil, because, again, you can’t have one without the other. One of the great Chan masters, Hui Hai, said that “true purity is to live beyond the duality of purity and impurity.” It’s one of the ways we “bind ourselves without a rope,” to use the Zen expression. Purity/impurity is a good example of how seeing the world in terms of such bipolarities creates problems for us. They only have meaning in relation to each other. Since the meaning of each of these concepts is the negation of the other, to live purely is to avoid impure things. That implies you are going to live your life preoccupied with impurity, because you’ll need to be constantly looking out for impure thoughts and acts. Suppose the most important thing for you is to live a pure life, whatever purity means for you. This may sound like an abstract logical point, but in fact it is psychologically important as well, because if the most important thing in your life is to become rich, it also means that you are preoccupied with poverty - afraid of being poor.Īnother useful example is pure versus impure. If you don’t understand what poor means, you don’t know what rich means, and vice versa. Rich and poor seem to be two different concepts, but if you think about it, they are really not separate - you can’t have one without the other. IJ: So, first determine what you are denying when you hear the term nondual.ĭL: To make it less theoretical, one example that we’ll be talking about in the course is the nonduality of bipolar concepts, such as rich/poor, or good/evil. So whenever we read the word “nonduality,” we should ask “okay, what’s the context? What duality is being denied?” They are so dependent upon each other that they are, in effect, two different sides of the same coin. Can you explain to me if there is a difference between nonduality, non-self, or emptiness? There are so many different terms in the Buddhist tradition that seem to me to be the same thing, but I wanted to find out your perspective on the differences.ĭavid Loy: Actually, nonduality was more the focus of my first book, titled - appropriately - Nonduality! That book discusses nonself and emptiness, but in fact the concept of nonduality is much broader than that. It literally means “not two,” that two things we have understood as separate from one another are in fact not separate at all. I really loved your book on the subject: Awareness Bound and Unbound. Insight Journal: Nonduality is one of my favorite topics, and there are so many different ways of looking at it. Wisdom Publications will be releasing a second edition of David Loy’s book N onduality: A Study in Comparative Philosophy in 2019. He will be teaching “ Nonduality” in Buddhist Teachings and Practice at BCBS September 28-30, 2018. Insight Journal interviews David Loy, a professor, writer, and Zen teacher in the Sanbo Zen tradition of Japanese Zen Buddhism. Partial Glossary of Terms to Better Understand Racialization in America.Everything You Need to Know About Residential Programs.
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