Saturday 16 May 2015

Bhikkhu Bodhi's essay on non-dualism and the Buddha's pragmatic philosophy

Dhamma and Non-duality

In contrast to the non-dualistic systems, the Buddha's approach does not aim at the discovery of a unifying principle behind or beneath our experience of the world. Instead it takes the concrete fact of living experience, with all its buzzing confusion of contrasts and tensions, as its starting point and framework, within which it attempts to diagnose the central problem at the core of human existence and to offer a way to its solution. Hence the polestar of the Buddhist path is not a final unity but the extinction of suffering, which brings the resolution of the existential dilemma at its most fundamental level.

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/bodhi/bps-essay_27.html