Zen Buddhism vs Advaita Vedanta

[rousseau]

I made this thread a few weeks ago, but had it removed as I figured it wouldn't get much traction or interest. But I'm going to give it another go, mainly to work through and write about these ideas (and hopefully they're helpful to some).

A few years ago I studied Zen Buddhism over the course of a couple months, mainly via D.T. Suzuki. At the time I became quite absorbed in, and took a lot away from it. Then about a year later I discovered Advaita Vedanta Hinduism, which seems to have some similar elements as Zen, but a slightly different approach. After studying Advaita I found myself even more influenced by it than I was Zen.

To me one of the takeaways from both of these philosophies (I'm going to call them philosophy rather than religion), is that they attempt to see the world and reality as it really is, in order to quell the human tendency to obsess over the minutiae of life. In other words, they aim to cut through the noise of the mind, and in some respects let that noise go.

But to me there are a few key differences which I'll outline here:

Zen Buddhism

In Zen we're making an attempt to quiet the mind by looking underneath conceptual thought. In Zen there is a kind of focus on nothing, the lack of human frameworks, which frees us from the bondage of our day to day stress.

Advaita Vedanta

Whereas in Advaita we're still trying to remove ourselves from day to day stress, but instead of looking interior to conceptual thought, we're recognizing the wholeness of the universe. This sounds a bit cheesy and stale at first, but when you apply scientific concepts to it, it makes more sense. In the Advaita view the mind shouldn't be quiet, the mind perceiving problems is what it's supposed to be doing, and what it's always going to do, and isn't something we need to hide from.

So while it's useful to not ruminate on problems, in this view you recognize negative thinking as something that's helpful for us, not wrong so to speak. Just another part of what we are.

Obviously Advaita is a bit more complicated than what I'm suggesting here, if anyone's interested I'd recommend this free version of I Am That. But this basic realization via Advaita has been revelatory for me, and pretty much the ultimate mindfulness technique. To just let the mind do it's work.

In a lot of ways I believe the two, Zen and Advaita, are very similar, but Advaita came chronologically later and is a bit more sophisticated, it dives a little more deeply into what Zen hints at.

 

[untermensche]

Q: What benefit is there in knowing that I am not the body?
M: Even to say that you are not the body is not quite true. In a way you are all the bodies, hearts and minds and much more. Go deep into the sense of ‘I am’ and you will find. How do you find a thing you have mislaid or forgotten? You keep it in your mind until you recall it. The sense of being, of 'I am' is the first to emerge. Ask yourself whence it comes, or just watch it quietly. When the mind stays in the 'I am' without moving, you enter a state which cannot be verbalised but can be experienced. All you need to do is try and try again. After all the sense ‘I am’ is always with you, only you have attached all kinds of things to it -- body, feelings, thoughts, ideas, possessions etc. All these self-identifications are misleading. Because of them you take yourself to be what you are not.

I see this as a con.

There are many ways to waste time in your life.

Some of this is mental practice and practicing using the mind to calm the body and that has value.

You could just use biofeedback and jettison all the mumbo jumbo though

 

[rousseau]

Q: What benefit is there in knowing that I am not the body?
M: Even to say that you are not the body is not quite true. In a way you are all the bodies, hearts and minds and much more. Go deep into the sense of ‘I am’ and you will find. How do you find a thing you have mislaid or forgotten? You keep it in your mind until you recall it. The sense of being, of 'I am' is the first to emerge. Ask yourself whence it comes, or just watch it quietly. When the mind stays in the 'I am' without moving, you enter a state which cannot be verbalised but can be experienced. All you need to do is try and try again. After all the sense ‘I am’ is always with you, only you have attached all kinds of things to it -- body, feelings, thoughts, ideas, possessions etc. All these self-identifications are misleading. Because of them you take yourself to be what you are not.

I see this as a con.

There are many ways to waste time in your life.

Some of this is mental practice and practicing using the mind to calm the body and that has value.

You could just use biofeedback and jettison all the mumbo jumbo though

Advaita isn't a mental practice, it's a perspective.

 

[untermensche]

Q: What benefit is there in knowing that I am not the body?
M: Even to say that you are not the body is not quite true. In a way you are all the bodies, hearts and minds and much more. Go deep into the sense of ‘I am’ and you will find. How do you find a thing you have mislaid or forgotten? You keep it in your mind until you recall it. The sense of being, of 'I am' is the first to emerge. Ask yourself whence it comes, or just watch it quietly. When the mind stays in the 'I am' without moving, you enter a state which cannot be verbalised but can be experienced. All you need to do is try and try again. After all the sense ‘I am’ is always with you, only you have attached all kinds of things to it -- body, feelings, thoughts, ideas, possessions etc. All these self-identifications are misleading. Because of them you take yourself to be what you are not.

I see this as a con.

There are many ways to waste time in your life.

Some of this is mental practice and practicing using the mind to calm the body and that has value.

You could just use biofeedback and jettison all the mumbo jumbo though

Advaita isn't a mental practice, it's a perspective.

That's the con part.

 

[rousseau]

Advaita isn't a mental practice, it's a perspective.

That's the con part.

How so?

 

[untermensche]

Advaita isn't a mental practice, it's a perspective.

That's the con part.

How so?

It's a bunch of mumbo jumbo like what I showed.

Go deep into the sense of ‘I am’ and you will find.

This is a con.

It is not wisdom.

Show me the substance and not the con.

 

[rousseau]

How so?

It's a bunch of mumbo jumbo like what I showed.

Go deep into the sense of ‘I am’ and you will find.

This is a con.

It is not wisdom.

Show me the substance and not the con.

Let me know when you're on page 60 of the book, have understood it, and get back to me

 

[untermensche]

It's a bunch of mumbo jumbo like what I showed.



This is a con.

It is not wisdom.

Show me the substance and not the con.

Let me know when you're on page 60 of the book, have understood it, and get back to me

That's fine if you have nothing of substance to show me.

There is no wisdom there.

That is not what I have found but what you have provided.

 

[untermensche]

Q: How do I get at it?
M: You need not get at it, for you are it. It will get at you, if you give it a chance. Let go your attachment to the unreal and the real will swiftly and smoothly step into its own.

Q: What made you so dispassionate?
M: Nothing in particular. It so happened that I trusted my Guru. He told me I am nothing but my self and I believed him. Trusting him, I behaved accordingly and ceased caring for what was not me, nor mine.

From page 60:

Q: Are there not good desires and bad, high desires and low?
M: All desires are bad, but some are worse than others. Pursue any desire, it will always give you trouble.

This is a con job.

 

[rousseau]

From page 60:

Q: Are there not good desires and bad, high desires and low?
M: All desires are bad, but some are worse than others. Pursue any desire, it will always give you trouble.

This is a con job.

Thanks for doing some of the work, but you forgot to read the pages between 1 and 60.

 

[untermensche]

From page 60:

Q: Are there not good desires and bad, high desires and low?
M: All desires are bad, but some are worse than others. Pursue any desire, it will always give you trouble.

This is a con job.

Thanks for doing some of the work, but you forgot to read the pages between 1 and 60.

I read it all.

Some true mundane observations. None were news to me.

And a bunch of mumbo jumbo BS.

What of value is there in it?

This kind of crap appeals to young minds that know little.

Like the Bible.

 

[rousseau]

Thanks for doing some of the work, but you forgot to read the pages between 1 and 60.

I read it all.

Some true mundane observations. None were news to me.

And a bunch of mumbo jumbo BS.

What of value is there in it?

This kind of crap appeals to young minds that know little.

Like the Bible.

Unlike some of our resident retirees my time is limited, so I'll need more substance from you if this is going to continue.

 

[untermensche]

Thanks for doing some of the work, but you forgot to read the pages between 1 and 60.

I read it all.

Some true mundane observations. None were news to me.

And a bunch of mumbo jumbo BS.

What of value is there in it?

This kind of crap appeals to young minds that know little.

Like the Bible.

Unlike some of our resident retirees my time is limited, so I'll need more substance from you if this is going to continue.

What can I say.

I get nothing from it.

The sound of one hand clapping is gibberish that creative humans endow with subjective meaning.

Meditation, what I call mental practice, has value.

I see no wisdom in claiming all desire is bad.

 

[abaddon]

rousseau,

What I took away from reading about mostly Zen and a little Advaita, is they emphasize the first-person, subjective experience over the third-person objective view.

As I understand it, it's not so much about seeing "reality as it really is" as seeing who or what it is that sees.

We tend to feel like we are a thinker inside the head and it's this thinker who possesses awareness. So the thinker... ie, the purported "self" inside the head... is considered to BE the mind itself. In all western thought, we pretty much NEVER talk about consciousness without conflating it with its contents.

If one looks closely and goes with what's there in direct experience (as opposed to conceptions about reality), then what's found is that thinking is not the entirety of awareness. The thinker is not a unitary self but a variety of come-and-go processes. If you seek to "find yourself" then you don't find it and have to rethink what "self" is.

IOW there is no self... not in the way commonly understood. "I" gets nebulous when you look for it.

Science backs this up. But the realization of this should not be some mere information, another tidbit of data to stick inside our conceptual categories. I've seen atheists here in this board talk about how neuroscience says there's no self... but they never apply the realization in everyday life. They just treat it like a tidbit of mere information.

Whereas these eastern philosophies make a life practice of this realization. And the way of practicing it is a radical empiricism. One looks for the self and forgoes merely speculating about it. (Which is what phrases like "direct perception" and "seeing reality as it really is" mean).

Zen talks about "no mind". Which is them downplaying the significance of the cogitating thinker. Zen tends to be cagey about the realization - it's not this and not this and not this. The aim is that by elimination you get to the embodied realization rather than just some mere information about it. So they beat around the bush a little and drop hints at you: "a finger pointing at the moon", "your face before you were born", and similar. In my understanding, when fleshed out these metaphors mean consciousness is prior to the thinking/emoting tidbit of the mind. The moon that's pointed at is unclouded consciousness, it's that which lights the sky and clouds. It's always there whether apparent or not. Thoughts are like the clouds that obscure the moon yet are lit-up by it.

That doesn't make thoughts something to silence. All admonitions to quiet the mind do not mean to have no thoughts but rather to find the open "sky" in which that mental busywork does not possess all of one's awareness. When we want, we can let beliefs/opinions/hopes/dreads float by like clouds across our clear and inherently trait-less (thus calm) light of awareness.

Advaita more directly identifies consciousness with self. Here too you're not this little ego-self that's a content within consciousness; rather you're that consciousness in which "the world" happens. Maybe it's a clearer statement than Zen because they skip the thought-confounding hinting and just say "this is what it is". (Though this directness unfortunately includes the danger that the student will just say "oh, ok... interesting info" and take up the assertions as new beliefs, a prideful acquisition of the little-s self).


Anyway, that's my take on it all.

I highly recommend Sam Harris's book Waking Up. And more especially his website and phone app of the same name. There are several mindfulness experiments to try, and a growing number of fascinating talks with teachers of "nonduality" (mostly secular folk, in fact), Buddhists, Advaitans, psychedelic researchers, neuroscientists.

I enjoyed your post. I'm not disagreeing with you. Just my looking into this subject resulted in a few instances of mildly different POV.

 

[untermensche]

The idea of "no self" is an irrational idea as I see it.

What makes the judgement there is no self?

What experiences all that can be experienced besides a self?

 

[abaddon]

The idea of "no self" is an irrational idea as I see it.

What makes the judgement there is no self?

What experiences all that can be experienced besides a self?

Exactly. What does?

 

[untermensche]

The idea of "no self" is an irrational idea as I see it.

What makes the judgement there is no self?

What experiences all that can be experienced besides a self?

Exactly. What does?

What do you mean?

"I" experience all that can be experienced.

"I" make judgements as to the existence of all things.

 

[rousseau]

rousseau,

What I took away from reading about mostly Zen and a little Advaita, is they emphasize the first-person, subjective experience over the third-person objective view.

As I understand it, it's not so much about seeing "reality as it really is" as seeing who or what it is that sees.

We tend to feel like we are a thinker inside the head and it's this thinker who possesses awareness. So the thinker... ie, the purported "self" inside the head... is considered to BE the mind itself. In all western thought, we pretty much NEVER talk about consciousness without conflating it with its contents.

If one looks closely and goes with what's there in direct experience (as opposed to conceptions about reality), then what's found is that thinking is not the entirety of awareness. The thinker is not a unitary self but a variety of come-and-go processes. If you seek to "find yourself" then you don't find it and have to rethink what "self" is.

IOW there is no self... not in the way commonly understood. "I" gets nebulous when you look for it.

Science backs this up. But the realization of this should not be some mere information, another tidbit of data to stick inside our conceptual categories. I've seen atheists here in this board talk about how neuroscience says there's no self... but they never apply the realization in everyday life. They just treat it like a tidbit of mere information.

Whereas these eastern philosophies make a life practice of this realization. And the way of practicing it is a radical empiricism. One looks for the self and forgoes merely speculating about it. (Which is what phrases like "direct perception" and "seeing reality as it really is" mean).

Zen talks about "no mind". Which is them downplaying the significance of the cogitating thinker. Zen tends to be cagey about the realization - it's not this and not this and not this. The aim is that by elimination you get to the embodied realization rather than just some mere information about it. So they beat around the bush a little and drop hints at you: "a finger pointing at the moon", "your face before you were born", and similar. In my understanding, when fleshed out these metaphors mean consciousness is prior to the thinking/emoting tidbit of the mind. The moon that's pointed at is unclouded consciousness, it's that which lights the sky and clouds. It's always there whether apparent or not. Thoughts are like the clouds that obscure the moon yet are lit-up by it.

That doesn't make thoughts something to silence. All admonitions to quiet the mind do not mean to have no thoughts but rather to find the open "sky" in which that mental busywork does not possess all of one's awareness. When we want, we can let beliefs/opinions/hopes/dreads float by like clouds across our clear and inherently trait-less (thus calm) light of awareness.

Advaita more directly identifies consciousness with self. Here too you're not this little ego-self that's a content within consciousness; rather you're that consciousness in which "the world" happens. Maybe it's a clearer statement than Zen because they skip the thought-confounding hinting and just say "this is what it is". (Though this directness unfortunately includes the danger that the student will just say "oh, ok... interesting info" and take up the assertions as new beliefs, a prideful acquisition of the little-s self).


Anyway, that's my take on it all.

I highly recommend Sam Harris's book Waking Up. And more especially his website and phone app of the same name. There are several mindfulness experiments to try, and a growing number of fascinating talks with teachers of "nonduality" (mostly secular folk, in fact), Buddhists, Advaitans, psychedelic researchers, neuroscientists.

I enjoyed your post. I'm not disagreeing with you. Just my looking into this subject resulted in a few instances of mildly different POV.

You've stated a lot of my feelings on the subject a little more eloquently than I can (or maybe have the time for). I think I'm pretty much at a point where I've fully internalized the experiential aspect of some of these Eastern philosophies. Or in other words, I 'get' them.

Being entirely honest, both Zen and Advaita (and The Happiness Trap, which I believe you suggested to me) have had an overwhelmingly positive influence on my life. Much more than I ever would have expected a couple years ago. In my opinion 'I Am That' specifically, is a phenomenal book. The Essential Suzuki compilation I've got is pretty good too.

 

[abaddon]

What do you mean?

"I" experience all that can be experienced.

"I" make judgements as to the existence of all things.

IME, awareness is an expansive space not crowded into the defensive little want- and fear-machine that is the "I" that most people mean when they say "I". That "I" is an object within awareness, it's more occasional and temporary than awareness, so it's not the possessor of awareness.

But the word "I" can apply also to expansive awareness too.

1. "I hate how things are!" 2. "I embrace all experience". Those are two different sorts of self.

Zen and Advaita are a retraining in the sense of I, from the first me-centric sort, to the second more expansive sort.

So I don't know in what sense you're using "I". You say your "I" experiences all that can be experienced so maybe we're more in agreement than we know.

Nobody said there's no self. I said it's nebulous. And am now adding a bit more about how the sense of self is trainable.

 

[abaddon]

You've stated a lot of my feelings on the subject a little more eloquently than I can (or maybe have the time for). I think I'm pretty much at a point where I've fully internalized the experiential aspect of some of these Eastern philosophies. Or in other words, I 'get' them.

Being entirely honest, both Zen and Advaita (and The Happiness Trap, which I believe you suggested to me) have had an overwhelmingly positive influence on my life. Much more than I ever would have expected a couple years ago. In my opinion 'I Am That' specifically, is a phenomenal book. The Essential Suzuki compilation I've got is pretty good too.

I'll have to read those books then. Thanks for mentioning them.

And about positive influence... me too. Though I only use these old philosophies as a reference anyway. But because I feel less caught up in rumination, I also feel I opened a door to something pretty awesome and will go on exploring in my informal and eclectic way.