Wilber on Advaita Vedanta

On pages 201-205 of One Taste, after indulging in his typical penchant for hyperbole, Wilber offers us his "Introduction" to Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi. He says:

Ramana, echoing Shankara, used to say:

The world is illusory;
Brahman alone is real;
Brahman is the world.

The world is illusory, which means you are not any object at all -- nothing that can be seen is ultimately real. You are neti, neti, not this not that. And under no circumstance should you base your salvation on that which is finite, temporal, passing, illusory, suffering-enhancing and agony-inducing.

Brahman alone is real, the Self (unqualified Brahman-Atman) alone is real -- the pure Witness, the timeless unborn, the formless Seer, the radical I-I, radiant Emptiness -- is what is real and all that is real. It is your condition, your nature, your essence, your present and your future, your desire and your destiny, and yet it is always ever-present as pure Presence, the alone that is Alone.

Brahman is the world, Emptiness and Form are not two. After you realize that the manifest world is illusory, and after you realize that Brahman alone is real, then you can see that the absolute and the relative are not-two or nondual, then you can see that nirvana and samsara are not-two, then you realize that the Seer and everything are not-two, Brahman and the world are not-two -- all of which really means the sound of those birds singing!...

I would like to know where in his works Shankara speaks this way. The fact of the matter is that Wilber's presentation of Shankara is completely backwards to how Shankara orders the teachings of Advaita.

For Shankara, the teaching that "Brahman is the world," as found in the Chandogya and Brhadaranyaka Upanishad, is merely a propaedeutic teaching. This is to say that it is preliminary to the final teaching that Brahman and the world are absolutely distinct (vivikta).

Shankara says that the teachings of Vedanta make use of both assertion or imputation (aropa) as well as negation (apavada). As Shankara says in his Upadeshasahashri, first the student is taught oneness (aiktva). Then the student is taught the specific nature of Brahman or the Self. This means that the teaching of oneness preceeds the subsequent teaching that negates the limiting adjuncts (upadhi) of the Self -- the mind, body, etc -- by way of discrimination (viveka), that is, by way of the neti neti.

Now, the heterogeneous Vivekachudamani, which contains both the classical teachings of Advaita and later tantricized elements, teaches that the world is distinct from Brahman, just like Shankara, and also that the world is the same as Brahman. But since Mr. Wilber is not a scholar of Shankara, he thinks that the Vivekachudamani was written by the Acharya Shankara. But it was not; it was written in the 15th century, since it contains language that could not have come from the period of Shankara.

Wilber's presentation of the teaching of Ramana is interesting. It parallels, almost exactly, Vivekananda's presentation of the classical Advaita. Vivekanananda offers us three "great sayings" (mahavakya) of Advaita:

"You are Brahman (tat tvam asi)."
"I am Brahman."
"Brahman is the world."

The last saying is presumably a reference to the Chandogya Upanishad, which says in the third chapter, "all (sarvam) this (idam) is brahman." And yet, this saying is not one of the "great sayings" of classical Advaita. Vivekananda has made that up. He derives this idea about Brahman and the world from Ramakrishna's tantricized version of Vedanta. And he puts it toward a specific use: he wishes to say that since the world is Brahman, it is worth "saving." This is to say, it provides him a metaphysical backdrop against which he will figure his "practical Vedanta." I will deal with this idea in greater detail at my site shortly.

But what about Ramana? Is Wilber's characterization of Ramana fair and accurate?

Notice, first of all that it completely contradicts Godman's description of Ramana's teachings about "creation theories." According to Godman, the final teaching, for Ramana, is the teaching of ajata-vada. But a-jata, non-arising, is clearly a reference to negation. On the other hand, drshti-srshti-vada, which according to Godman is merely propaedeutic, is clearly a form of affirmation. It says: the world is the same as "seeing," the same as mind, which ultimately means that it is the same as consciousness.

So what is going on here?

Maybe both presentations are correct. My own sense is that the teachings of Ramana are themselves heterogenous. This is to say that they are a mixture of the classical Advaita of Shankara, as well as elements from tantricized forms of Advaita. Ramana also made use of Tamil Shaivism in his teachings, as is well known. This being the case, it is no accident that Ramana chose to translate the Vivekachudamani. It too is a heterogenous work, as I have noted above.

The "logic" or dialectic that Wilber makes use of here ultimately derives from the Samdhinirmocana Sutra, which is a foundational text of the Yogachara. There, three "turnings" of the wheel of Buddhist dharma are described.

1. The Hinayana teachings, which are realist and therefore a form of assertion (samaropa)
2. The Madhyamika (and Prajnaparamita) teachings, which are a form of negation (apavada).
3. The Yogachara or Vijnanavada teachings, which are again a form of assertion (samaropa).

First off, notice that the terminology here precisely parallels the language of the Advaitins. As we noted above, and as we saw in Sarvajnatma, Shankara spoke of "aropa" and "apavada." The only difference in the terminology here is the slight variation on the term "-ropa."

Now notice that whereas Shankara and the Madhyamika stress negation and discrimination, the Yogachara stresses affirmation and non-discrimination. As I noted in a post some time ago, in his translation of the Lankavatara Sutra, which is a Yogachara work, D.T. Suzuki stresses time and again, this aspect of non-discrimination. This, I noted, and I have found a review of Conze that raises a similar point, is rather misleading. Suzuki is here translating "vikalpa," dualistic thought, as "discrimination." This misleading since discrimination is usually rendered as "viveka." But I have found a passage in the Lankavatara Sutra that also criticizes "viveka," so Suzuki is not entirely off base.

As I theorized in that post, I believe that Da was influenced by Suzuki's rendering of the Lanakavatara Sutra. Throughout his earlier works, Da stresses that the so-called "seventh stage" texts, such as the Lankavatara Sutra and Ashtavakra Gita, are all "non-discriminative." This is actually a fair representation of such works, even if we don't accept Franklin's distinction between sixth stage (discriminative) and seventh stage (non-discriminative) texts.

Historically, what happened was that the Buddhist Tantrikas took over the dialectic that had first been presented by the Yogacharas. In their self-understanding we get the following idea of a kind of "progressive" revelation of the Buddhist dharma.

1. Hinayana
2. Mahayana
3. Vajrayana

Da takes this idea over in his book Nirvanasara. There, he essentiallly collapses the Vajrayana into the Mahayana, and introduces his own term, "Advaitayana" in its place. But this had already been done by the Buddhist Sahajikas, who rebelled against the institutionalization of the Vajrayana. They used the term "Sahajayana" for their final term. In any case, the "logic" of affirmation-negation-affirmation remains the same in every case.

Tantrism in general stresses this "affirmation" that the Yogacharas spoke of. In its various Hindu forms, it tends to stress the idea that the world, represented by Shakti, is non-different from the transcendent absolute, represented by Shiva. The classical Advaita of Shankara, on the other hand, tends to emphasize the transcendence of Brahman or the Self. Tantrism, as I say, tends to emphasize the immanence of the absolute, or the "non-duality" of transcendence and immanence, the absolute and the relative, as the tantric term "saha-ja" signifies. This term derives from the same root as the term "a-jata." Basically, "saha" means "together" and the idea is the the absolute and the relative "arise" (ja) together.

This "dialectic" that both Wilber and Da notice and make use of is not something they are making up. It is actually there in the self-understanding of the Yogachara and in Tantrism. As I say, this is most plainly evident in the Samdhinirmocana Sutra. This same "dialectic" has also been noticed by the well known and well respected Japanese scholar of Madhyamika and Yogachara, Nagao. Over and over he points to various instances of this three fold dialectic in Yogachara works. According to Nagao, for the Yogacharas, there is something "remaining" in emptiness. And that positive "thing" is the fact of cognition, or "vijnana."

This "dialectic" is a powerful and pursuasive rhetorical tool precisely because it works on two levels: the ontogenetic and the phylogenetic. Ontogenetically, it offers a kind of map for the path. This logic-that-moves can, for example, be found in the 10 ox-herding frames. We start with the world, then move to emptiness in the 8th frame, then move back to the world in the tenth frame, "entering the market with open arms." It can also be found in the Zen saying:

at first mountains are mountains.
then mountains are not mountains.
then mountains are mountains again.

Or as Trungpa used to say:

at first form is form and emptiness is emptiness.
then form is emptiness,
and emptiness is form.
then form is form again.

What is being described here is a kind of circular movement. First, there is the path of return to the source. This is the "upward" arc on the left hand side of the circle moving toward the top of the circle, the transcendent absolute. Then there is the "downward" arc back to the bottom of the circle, back to the world as it were. This kind of dialectical description offers a way of understanding the history of tradition. It is as I say, put to use by both Wilber and Da. But whether or not one "buys into" such a scheme depends on whether or not one buys into the idea that "affirmation," non-discrimination, immanence, and "inclusiveness," is superior to negation, descrimination, transcendence, and exclusion.