Liberation Through Non-Clinging Across Buddhist Traditions

How approaches from different Buddhist traditions can complement and support each other on the path to awakening
By Joseph Goldstein

Part 1 of 3

Other Paths of Practice that Cultivate Nonduality

Many paths of practice may not explicitly emphasize nonduality, yet may lead to that understanding, even if it is described as “selflessness” or “emptiness of self.” Although the explicit term nonduality gained prominence in early Mahayana Prajnaparamita texts (1st century BCE–1st century CE), several hundred years after the Buddha lived, the experience it points to is already present in the well-known Bahiya Sutta from the Pali canon:

Then, Bahiya, you should train yourself thus:
In the seen there will be merely the seen;
in the heard, merely the heard;
in the sensed, merely the sensed;
in the cognized, merely the cognized.
That is how you should train yourself.
When, Bahiya, for you in the seen there is merely the seen . . .
then, Bahiya, you will not be with that.
When you are not with that, you will not be in that,
When you are not in that,
then you will be neither here nor beyond nor in between the two.
Just this is the end of suffering.

Perhaps the term selflessness, then, more clearly reflects what the state of liberative nonduality reveals.

Right Effort

This raises interesting questions about different modes of practice. H.H. the Dalai Lama has recounted how even Milarepa, one of the greatest Tibetan yogis, faced tremendous difficulties and needed arduous effort over many years to attain complete enlightenment. In vipassana practice, significant emphasis is placed on mindfulness of the body, as it is the first of the four foundations of mindfulness the Buddha declared to be the direct path to awakening. Some teachers in this tradition emphasize the importance of strong effort to penetrate the object of meditation as a means of going beyond our conceptual understanding of it. However, this strong effort can sometimes reinforce the sense of someone actively exerting that effort.

Effortless Awareness

But even within methods that emphasize strong effort, proper practice naturally leads to a state of effortless awareness. From this state, the mind can open to what is called “gaining the vision of the dharma,” or the “opening of the dharma eye.” That marks the point at which the belief in self has been completely uprooted.

A salient point emerges here in both vipassana and explicitly nondual practices: how to rest in effortless awareness (however we arrive there) without identifying with that awareness, without making awareness the home of self, the last hold-out of “I.” Sometimes awareness feels boundless and centerless, yet this too can mask a subtle identification with self. Even in this wonderfully expansive state, there can be a subtle identification with awareness or a faint sense of someone experiencing it.

Mahasi Sayadaw, a renowned vipassana meditation master of the 20th century, highlighted one aspect of this in his talk “The Purification and Progress of Insight”:

At times there is nothing to note, with the body disappearing and the sense of touch lost. However, at this moment, knowing consciousness is still apparent. In the very clear, open space of the sky there remains only one very clear, blissful consciousness, which is very clear beyond comparison and very blissful. The yogi tends to delight in such clear, blissful consciousness. But this consciousness is not going to stay permanent. . . . It has to be noticed as “knowing, knowing.”

We see the same caution about identification with awareness in Dzogchen and other nondual traditions as well. In Dzogchen and Mahamudra, although using different terminology, the fundamental nature of mind is expressed as the union of clarity and emptiness. Thrangu Rinpoche observed that the nature of mind is sometimes obscured because the clarity aspect (knowing) obscures the emptiness aspect.