Confused Horizons, Part 1: Shankara and Nagarjuna Collide

Discovering metaphysics through phenomenology

Some of my earliest articles on this substack touched on Indian metaphysics: non-dualism in particular. Since then, I have written precious little on Indian philosophical thought, despite the fact that “Vedanta” is in this publication’s description! This lack of writing on the subject has certainly not been due to any lack of interest, but rather largely because I have been continuing to research and educate myself on the topic.¹ (Anantanand Rambachan’s The Advaita Worldview, in particular, was a great read and an excellent resource to anyone who might be interested in learning from an actual practitioner of Vedanta.)

I certainly think that Vedanta philosophies are some of the most subtle, penetrating, and philosophically sound of any of the world’s great spiritual philosophies. The principal Upanishads, in particular, are extraordinary for their concise yet deep reflections on both human self-awareness and the nature of ultimate reality:

The Everlasting is shapeless, birthless, breathless, mindless, above everything, outside everything, inside everything.

'From Him are born life, mind, sense, air, wind, water, earth that supports all.'

He is the inmost Self of all.²

This short quote contains a nearly infinite metaphysics that calls the reader to both a consideration of the absolute’s transcendence, but also of its necessary immanence, and the ability to recognize these profound truths within oneself. Anyone interested in a serious reflection on God would do well to read all ten of these Upanishads—which could easily be done on an afternoon. And this is to say nothing of the wisdom of the Brahma Sutras, the Bhagavad Gita, or any of the immense tomes of commentary upon all three of these foundational texts.

In short: I have immense appreciation for Vedanta, as well as that other major stream of Indic spiritual philosophy, Buddhism (about which more in a bit).

Consulting Shankara

Even so, as I have continued to read and learn, questions have arisen along side my appreciation. In particular, I wonder if one of the greatest strengths of Vedantin (and, for that matter, Buddhist) philosophy also reveals one of their primary weaknesses: as the conclusion of the above quote states, Vedantin philosophy (at least and especially in its oldest, Advaita (“non-dualism”) form) holds that the very absolute and ultimate reality that grounds, causes, and sustains all of existence is discoverable not only through metaphysical speculation, but also through pure attention to one’s own consciousness: “He is the inmost Self of all.”

Indeed, Shankara, the founder of Advaita Vedanta, held that the inmost conscious “self” of the human person, that very ground or spark of phenomenal consciousness itself, just is Brahman, the ultimate and absolute reality. Shankara’s claim here is not that we can find God (in the full, classical, western sense of that capitalized noun) through a spiritual process within our mind, soul, or spirit, but that our mind, soul, and spirit, at its most phenomenologically fundamental, just is God. Hence, the classic motto of Advaita Vedanta: “I am that”; the atman (the base phenomenal conscious awareness) is Brahman (the ultimate reality that causes and sustains all existence).

It is important to note that the English word “self”, which is often used to translate the Sanskrit atman, can be very misleading. What we in the West often mean by “self” is what Husserlian Phenomenologists would call the “empirical ego”: that collection of memories, opinions, desires, and other traits that we associate with the human person we are: so, Scott Lipscomb is that self that likes coffee and bourbon, spicy Thai food, who loves his wife and children, was born in Virginia, etc., etc.

But the atman refers to none of this at all! Instead, the atman refers to something much “deeper” in the person. A Husserlian might try to equate the atman with the “transcendental ego”, that base structure of relations that allows the differing content of the empirical ego to be properly organized (for example, the “rules” that govern how sense impressions are gathered and then organized to yield concepts, such that I look outside and recognize a tree rather than just some splotches of gray and green). But the atman is probably even deeper than this, and my own sense is that it refers to the base possibility of any phenomenality at all: in Husserlian terms, something like the “stage” upon which phenomena are presented. In the past, in this publication, I have referred to this as “phenomenality itself”; one might offer a more robust definition such as “the condition of possibility for immediate, qualitative experience”. Vedantin thought helpfully supplies the term “witness consciousness”, and I think that’s very appropriate: the atman does not act; it bears witness. All the elements of agency reside in “higher” layers of the self, which are themselves, though, dependent on the atman to exist at all.

To put this in less technical terms, we might equate atman with the Abrahamic/Hellenic category of “spirit” in the most general sense. And that might help us to make more sense of Shankara’s claim that this human “spirit” just is identical to the divine Spirit, which, in a very general sense, is a decent, if vague, translation of Shankara’s claim (though only when we use “spirit” and “divine” in their most Neoplatonist-Abrahamic sens).

It’s certainly a bold and provocative claim. And, in many ways, it mirrors the basic position of Buddhist philosophy, even if it was this very Buddhist philosophy that Shankara was most at pains to oppose and defeat.

Consulting Nagarjuna

Now, Buddhist philosophy is itself a great collection of vast, complex, sophisticated doctrines, many of which are deeply opposed to each other: Abhidharma metaphysics, most prevalent in Theravada Buddhism, for example, is in many ways diametrically opposed to the Madhyamika doctrine most prevalent in Mahayana Buddhism. For our purposes today, though, I want to focus on the latter position, both because it is by far the most influential in contemporary Buddhist thought (outside of Sri Lanka and Thailand, Madhyamika philosophy is the philosophical ground for nearly all practicing Buddhists) and also because it is the most metaphysically daring Buddhist philosophical position.³

The heart of Madhyamika thought, which was pioneered by the Indian Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna, is the doctrine of sunya, “emptiness” or “void”. Indeed, Madhyamika is often referred to as the Sunyavada, “the doctrine of emptiness”. To summarize massively (and probably a bit haphazardly, but this is substack, not an academic journal, so I ask your patience, dear reader!) this doctrine is arrived at through careful meditation practice: a meditating monk, as they advance in their method and are able to calm and quiet the mind, find that “below” all the sense impressions, conceptualizations, affectations (emotional feelings), willings and desires, there is just a sort of “space” or “stage”, a bare consciousness that is, well, empty of any content—precisely, of course, because the meditator has removed all the content.

This phenomenological discovery—that, devoid of content, consciousness reveals itself to be a kind of empty vessel, a place where existing things can appear, but which itself has no features at all—is at the heart of Madhyamika thought. Having discovered this emptiness, the committed Buddhist is meant to realize that this emptiness just is what reality is (or, reveals that reality just is not…depending on how we want to look it). All the content of conscious thought is, by its very nature, temporary and contingent: it comes and goes, and every existing thing only exists because it is caused by some other existing thing (the doctrine of “dependent arising”).

Thus, through proper meditation, the Buddhist discovers that, at its core, reality is just empty: there is no-thing there at all. What’s odd, though, is that it seems to me that this very emptiness at the heart of conscious subjectivity is precisely what Shankara understood as the atman. One man’s emptiness, it would seem, is another man’s infinite fullness. That is perhaps an unexpected outcome—but it’s one of immense importance.

Plumbing the Horizon

We saw above that both Nagarjuna and Shankara seek the truth not only of the conscious self but of reality itself through what we westerners might call “introspection”: both engage in practices of meditation and contemplation, not taking mental content for granted but instead trying to understand the nature of phenomena themselves. And, in so doing, both found that “beneath” the mental appearances of phenomena, there is a more fundamental reality. Crucially, though, since both were seeking understanding of that which stands “under” or (logically) “before” the appearances, of course what they found there did not appear as anything at all: if we assume there is some ground state which is necessary for anything to appear at all, then that ground state itself can not appear as anything, since it is itself the very condition of possibility for any appearance. So, beneath sense impression, conceptualization, affect, will, desire, etc. we discover the atman or sunya: an empty vessel, a “space” or “stage” which itself has no content.

So much then depends, of course, on how one interprets this “ground state”. As we saw above, two different Indian traditions came to radically different metaphysical conclusions from more-or-less the same phenomenological realization: Shankara, and the broader Vedantin tradition both before and after him, interpreted this bare state of pure consciousness as a kind of radical and divine fullness: here was not just atman, the witness consciousness of the individual human subject, but in fact also this same atman just was also Brahman, the ultimate and absolute reality before, behind, within, and beyond all existence.⁴ For Shankara, all that mental content which had qualities (the sense impressions, conceptualizations, affect, etc.) were just a kind of constructed illusion (maya) which was, just as the Buddhists say, a temporary and contingent play of cause and effect. This had no final reality, and indeed was mostly a distraction that kept conscious beings in a cycle of suffering (Samsara).

But the unqualified, featureless witness consciousness atman which was the condition of possibility for this play of maya was itself very real, non-illusory, and indeed eternal. For Shankara, the goal of both spirituality and philosophy was for the atman to simply realize that it is Brahman, that it already is the ultimate reality, and for the human subject to no longer identify itself with its body (which is mediated to the atman through all those less-than-truly-real mental appearances), but to embrace its true and ultimate reality. In this sense, for Advaita Vedanta, the conscious subject already is liberated, already has achieved moksha—but we just need to realize this state in order to actualize this truth and exit the cycle of suffering through repeated rebirths (Samsara).

So it’s interesting to note just how similar Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka position is in many ways, despite the fact that the eventual metaphysical conclusion reached by each thinker is indeed quite different. Like Shankara,⁵ Nagarjuna recognized the mental appearances as temporary and contingent, lacking any meaningful or final reality. And, like Shankara, Nagarjuna felt that a careful meditative and contemplative practice could allow one to not only think that the mental appearances were unreal, but actually come to existentially realize this truth in an immediate, existential, spiritual way.

Nagarjuna also found himself facing the very “ground” of conscious subjectivity. But as we saw above, for him, this ground was not some kind of unqualified fullness, an infinite and absolute reality shining forth in luminous darkness, but rather precisely what it looked to be: a pure emptiness, a no-thing. For Nagarjuna, then, the unreal play of cause and effect that we witness as the presentation of mental appearances is itself built on nothing-at-all. Contingent existence somehow just exists, or happens, but has no ultimate or absolute cause or explanation.

Thus, we see that Shankara and Nagarjuna found the same base reality, and yet interpreted their findings extremely differently. Even so, it is worth pointing out that both thinkers did think that the conscious subject could exit the cycle of suffering (Samsara) through the realization that one was not one’s body and that the existing things of one’s consciousness were not real. For Shankara, this meant abiding for eternity not so much in but as the ultimate absolute reality, Brahman. For Nagarjuna, it meant slipping into the void, achieving Nirvana (“snuffing out”). Metaphysically, these two states seem to be quite different. But spiritually and existentially, they are both the goal of genuine spiritual and philosophical practice—and both deliver the crucial goal of all Indian spirituality, the cessation of suffering in the cycle of endless rebirths.

So, OK…which one was right? Or, does it even matter? As I said above, I have immense respect for both of these thinkers, and my own spirituality and philosophy have been greatly enriched by these lines of thought. Even so, I think they both make a critical error—which I will discuss, next week in part 2:

Confused Horizons, Part 2: Levinas Enters the Fray

1. Although I have quite a bit of academic training in Christian theology and western philosophy (especially Phenomenology and Peircean semiotics), I have no formal training in Vedanta whatsoever—though I did take a course in Indian Buddhist thought, which gives me some small leverage on the topic.

2. Mundaka Upanishad, Book II.1

3. Along with the Abhidarma position, which often boils down to a kind of quasi-materialism, and the Madhyamika position, which I will discuss below, there is also the Yogachara position, which is largely defunct but does seem to survive in some form in certain sects of Tibetan Buddhist thought.

4. It’s important to note that beginning with Ramanuja’s Vishishtadvaita thought, new schools of Vedantin thought would arise that disagreed with Shankara’s identification of the atman with Brahman. But for our purposes here, I am sticking with Shankara’s Advaita Vedanta.

5. I have been discussing Shankara’s position first in this discussion because I find this conceptually smoother, but it’s worth noting that Nagarjuna was born hundreds of years earlier. So if there is a line of influence between the thinkers (and there almost certainly is), it runs from Nagarjuna to Shankara, not the other way around. However, the principal Upanishads, which were so essential to Shankara’s thought, were all likely written before or just around the same time as the life of Siddhartha, the Buddha (who himself lived many centuries before Nagarjuna). And it stands to reason that these texts impacted Buddhist thought, even if often dialectically. So the lines of cause and effect here get knotted quickly.