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Advaita Vedānta, Christian Wolff, Madhyamaka, mathematics, Meister Eckhart, nondualism, Rāmānuja, Śaṅkara, Śūraṅgama Sūtra, Upaniṣads
Monism is the idea that everything is, or is ultimately reducible to, one. This is not quite the same as nondualism, a term increasingly common in mystical circles. Nondualism is the idea that everything is not two or more – not more than one. Nondualism and monism are very similar concepts, but they’re not exactly the same.
I’m speaking here of each term’s deepest metaphysical meaning, where it refers to the ultimate nature of the universe (each term can be used in other ways as well). The general core idea of nondualism is quite widespread: that is, that the most ultimate reality should not be identified with the many plural distinct things we typically observe and the distinctions between them. The ultimate is not dual or plural, and especially, at the ultimate level there is no distinction between subject and object. Yet all of that still doesn’t necessarily mean that the ultimate is one.
The English word nondual (and thus nondualism) is a translation of the Sanskrit advaita, “not two”. The English word monism began as the German coinage of Christian Wolff, from the Greek word monos (“single”, which gives us all of our various mono- prefixes, like monotheism and monopoly). What Wolff had in mind applies to many Sanskrit versions of advaita, but not all of them.
The most famous Indian schools of philosophical nondualism are indeed monist. They are in the Vedānta tradition of the Upaniṣads, those ancient texts that proclaim ekam evādvitīyaṃ brahma: the ultimate is just one, without a second. That can mean different things: Śaṅkara, the leader of the Advaita – literally nondual – school, proclaimed that that ultimate one is the only thing real, and all the difference we perceive is mere illusion (māyā). His opponent Rāmānuja, who led the Viśiṣṭādvaita (“differentiated nondual”) school, said that the differences we perceive are indeed real; they are part of that one ultimate reality. Nevertheless, the two nondualists agreed on that basic claim of the Upaniṣads: everything is one.
But not every nondualist did.
If things are not two (or more), that doesn’t mean that they are one. They could instead be zero. And that is what Madhyamaka Buddhism insists: the ultimate reality of things, to the extent that it can be spoken of in words at all, is best characterized as śūnyatā. Śūnyatā is usually translated “emptiness”, but that’s not an entirely ideal translation, because “emptiness” has the obvious opposite of “fullness“, and śūnyatā by its nature must have no opposite. But when Indians first invented the mathematical concept of zero, the Sanskrit word they used was… śūnya. In most modern Indian languages, the word for zero remains śūnyā. Śūnyatā, then, is literally zero-ness – and that is a more precise translation, because zero, mathematically, indeed has no opposite.
Like Śaṅkara, Madhyamaka Buddhists believe that the differentiated world we see around us is ultimately illusion. Śaṅkara got the idea from them, and for that reason Rāmānuja pejoratively called him a pracchanna bauddha – a crypto-Buddhist. For both Śaṅkara and the Mādhyamikas, concepts themselves are part of the illusion and therefore words do not do justice to what lies behind it: what’s underneath is something ineffable, perhaps most effectively characterized by what it’s not. The Upaniṣads characterize it as neti, neti: “‘not’, ‘not'”. The Buddha in the Śūraṅgama Sūtra says of the words we use to describe: “This is like a man pointing a finger at the moon to show it to others who should follow the direction of the finger to look at the moon. If they look at the finger and mistake it for the moon, they lose (sight of) both the moon and the finger.”
But point the way toward the moon we must, if anyone is actually going to be able to follow the direction. So which way is the moon? In what direction is the finger pointing? That is where Śaṅkara and the Mādhyamikas differ from each other. For him, the ultimate behind the illusion is best described as one; for them, it is best described as zero.
Meister Eckhart, for his part, seems to straddle the difference. As I understand him, at some level all things are God, and he describes God as fundamentally one; yet he also describes God as a “pure nothingness”, ein bloß nicht. Negating the negation may be his complex attempt to have it both ways.
What difference does that difference make? In the Indian context, quite a lot. Śaṅkara is trying to establish the truth of the Upaniṣads, and those texts say that everything is one. The Mādhyamikas are arguing for the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtras, which claim that everything is zero. Those sacred texts in turn contain a lot of other things besides: the Upaniṣads, for example, affirm an existing social order with the hierarchy of caste, while Buddhist sūtras urge leaving that order to join a non-caste-based order of monks.
But we now are not bound by that context. I have enough Buddhist faith that I am much more predisposed to the Madhyamaka view myself. But faith or not, what, if anything, does the difference between ultimate oneness or zero-ness mean philosophically? The answers to that are complicated enough that I don’t feel I’ve yet fully worked them out myself. Here, I’m just pointing to the difference itself, as a start.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article “Monism” begins by saying that there are many monisms:
Would it work to substitute “nondualism” for “monism” and “nonseparateness” for “oneness” in the previous passage? I don’t know; let’s try it:
The quoted passage from the SEP reminds me of philosopher Ronald Giere’s thesis that people use models (and, we could say in the present context, they use philosophical doctrines) to represent aspects of the world for specific purposes. One purpose of Śaṅkara and the Mādhyamikas, mentioned in the post above, was to justify the claims of traditional texts. If you’re serious about leaving that purpose aside, then you need to think about what is your alternative purpose in attributing nonseparateness or oneness to some aspect(s) of the world.
In modern Zen Buddhist discourse that I have heard, the terms “nonseparateness” and “oneness”, and any associated models or philosophical doctrines, are primarily used phenomenologically, that is, to induce a change in one’s process of experiencing in a way that will be beneficial for the practitioner’s subjective well-being and objective behavior. I’m inclined to call it a psychotherapeutic purpose (but not in a narrowly medical sense). Insofar as either monisms or nondualisms could accomplish that purpose while cohering with the practitioner’s other developing knowledge, the difference is unimportant, and so you can hear some Zen teachers today use talk of “nonseparateness” and “oneness” interchangeably, but I’d say that nonseparateness/nonduality is more common because of the aversion to monism in much of Buddhist philosophical inheritance (as in the quote from Herbert Guenther below).
I have mentioned before that Herbert Guenther, the scholar of Tibetan Buddhism, thought that monism was too static to be compatible with Buddhist process-oriented thinking. (In light of the SEP statement that there are many monisms, I wonder whether all monisms are as static as Guenther believed, though I don’t doubt that many Buddhist thinkers wanted to avoid that pitfall.) Here’s a longer excerpt of the passage from Guenther that I quoted before (from From Reductionism to Creativity, Boston: Shambhala, 1989, p. 281):
What I’ve shared in this comment suggests a couple pieces of advice: (1) Since there are many monisms, and perhaps many nondualisms, be specific about details such as those targets and units mentioned in the quoted SEP article and about why (for what purpose) you are using a particular philosophical doctrine. (2) Consider that in Buddhist meditative traditions nonseparateness/nonduality is applied primarily to a process of experiencing. This is less apparent in Mādhyamika philosophers who, in Guenther’s opinion (p. 97), “became fossilized in the sterility of their own logical reductionism. This is not to say that they were not aware of the larger issues, but they prevented themselves from dealing with the rich flow of experience by using the blinkers of logical exclusiveness.” In Guenther’s account, the Mādhyamika thinkers were most useful for deconstructing the fixity of early Buddhist models.
I think this is reasonable, yes. There are many monisms and even more nondualisms – and this post is one way of helping to draw those distinctions, as was a previous one within monism. So while there are more ways of dividing them than target and unit, that’s one helpful way to approach them. For example Yogācāra wants to claim only the nonduality of subject and object, whereas Madhyamaka insists on the nonduality of everything.