“Nonduality” (advayatva) = “Middle Path” (madhyamapratipat) = freedom from extremes of being and nothingness (antadvayavivarjita). For numerous references, see Lamotte, pp. 301-302, n. 1.

Nonduality is experienced as the nature of Mind — in which thought and the absence of thought are no longer mutually exclusive. This is ro-gÇig – the one taste.

The nonduality of seer and seen: there is no philosophical or religious assertion more striking or more counterintuitive, and yet claims that there is such an experience, and that this experience is more veridical than our usual dualistic experience, are not rare in the Western tradition. Similar statements have been made, in equally stirring language, by such important Western mystical fgures as Meister Eckhart, Jakob Boehme, and William Blake, to name only a few. Philosophers have generally been more hesitant about committing themselves so decisively, but a claim regarding the nonduality of subject and object is explicit or implicit within such thinkers as Spinoza, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Bergson, and Whitehead—again naming only a few; later I shall argue that similar claims may be found among important contemporary fgures like Nietzsche, Heidegger, and perhaps Wittgenstein.

Our normal experience of action is dualistic—there is the sense of an “I” that does the action—because the action is done to obtain a particular result. Corresponding to the usual tripartite division of perception into perceiver, perceived, and the act of perception, there is the agent, the action, and the goal of the action. Parallel to the superimposition of thought on percept, the mental “overlay” of intention also superimposes thought on action and thereby sustains the illusion of a separate agent; but without such thought-superimposition no distinction is experienced between agent and act, or between mind and body. Nondual action is spontaneous (because free from objectifed intention), efortless (because free from a reifed “I” that must exert itself), and “empty” (because one wholly is the action, there is not the dualistic awareness of an action).

We might suppose a thinker necessary in order to provide the causal link between various thoughts, to explain how one thought leads to another; but in fact there is no such link.

My approach supports the Mahāyāna claim that saṁsāra is nirvana. There is only one reality—this world, right here and now—but this world may be experienced in two diferent ways. Saṁsāra is the relative, phenomenal world as usually experienced, which is delusively understood to consist of a collection of discrete objects (including “me”) that interact causally in space and time. Nirvana is that same world but as it is in itself, nondually incorporating both subject and object into a whole.

The nondual experience subverts the ground of the ethical problem, both by denying the existence of the ontological ego and, more radically, by challenging all moral codes as deluding superimpositions.