What's so bad about duality? Some Buddhist answers

Dr Leesa Davis (Deakin University )

In the Mahayana school of Buddhism non-duality is equated with The Middle Way itself. The claims that “the condition of existence is not of mutually-exclusive character” and that “all things are not two” are at the heart of Buddhist meditative strategies and central to understanding the underlying metaphysics of Buddhist thought.

Buddhist philosophical discourse posits dualistic thinking as being ‘only half the picture’ and it is in articulating and understanding the non-dual relationship between dualistic and dichotomous ontological and epistemological structures that philosophical and spiritual insight is achieved. Focusing on the second century Indian Buddhist master Nagarjuna and the thirteenth century Japanese master Eihei Dogen, this talk will outline some Buddhist critiques of dualistic ways of thinking and explore the significance of “all things are not two” in the light of key Buddhist metaphysical pre-suppositions: impermanence, emptiness, and dependent co-origination.

Leesa S Davis is a lecturer in philosophy at Deakin University. She is the author of Advaita Vedanta and Zen Buddhism: deconstructive modes of spiritual inquiry (Continuum UK 2010) and has written on Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, meditative experience, Buddhist ethics, and Buddhism in Australia. Her current research is on the use of paradox in Zen Buddhism and the interaction of tradition and modernity in the work of Bob Dylan.