A Question for my Twitter Sangha: is Non-Dualism the same as the doctrine of Emptiness? My experience with Dzogchen and Tibetan Buddhism confused the two (either they confused them or I did), but now I'm starting to see them as very different doctrines. What's your take on it?
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trying to get a sensible interpretation of what's meant by non-dualism is a bit of a hassle too of course. I haven't yet found much agreement on this either scripturally or exegetically. my favorite version of it is the Taoist idea of complementarity though.
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I think Taoist complementarity is even more radical (and even more useful/insightful) than Buddhist mutually arising phenomena. It's more than just a statement about causality but is a strong metaphysical claim of ontological necessity.
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The simplest statement of it is by example: have you ever seen a sheet of paper with only one side? would such a thing even be possible in principle? Front and Back are complementary out of absolute necessity.
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this is where the orthogonality to "non-essentialness" comes in. In fact, it's possibly even contradictory. It's essential for all beings to exist in complemented pairs. There is no other way for a thing to be. The pairs are inseparable and therefore not separate, but one thing.
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I don't have a good reconciliation of this with Emptiness. I've possibly misunderstood it or possibly it's meant to be far more domain limited of a claim. Best I've got is to note that we can imagine a front without a back. We do this all the time in mathematics, for example.
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So Emptiness is really a characteristic of thought and consciousness rather than a metaphysical or ontological claim about existing things. But then, do thoughts exist? I want to say they do. What is the complement of a thought though? Emptiness.
End of conversation
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