Why it matters
Step 1 left a disagreement standing, and honesty requires returning to it. Advaita Vedānta says the witness is the true Self, identical with the ground of being: all is Self. Buddhism, after three waves, says no self of any kind survives inspection, awareness included. All-Self against no-self: as ontologies, these flatly contradict each other.Textual
David Loy’s book is built on a thesis about this contradiction, and it should be labeled as his thesis, not as settled fact.Interpretation Both traditions, he argues, are describing the same nondual experience (the collapse of the subject–object split) from opposite ends. Language forces a choice on whoever tries to say it: a sentence needs the split, so to deny the split you must sacrifice one side. Advaita subtracts the observed until only awareness remains and calls that the Self. Buddhism dissolves the observer until only the flowing observed remains and calls that no-self. Two incomplete translations of the same event, each losing what the other keeps: wrong about each other’s vocabulary, united in what they deny — the split.
The Skeptic’s suspicion deserves a straight answer, and Loy gives an unusually honest one. He concedes that the nondualist traditions make ontological claims on the basis of an experience most people have not had and which resists conceptual description. Their asymmetry argument runs: from the nondual side one can explain how dualistic delusion arises, but no argument from dualistic premises can prove nonduality, because the instrument under investigation is the one doing the investigating. That is a claim, not a proof, and this site presents it as one.Interpretation Loy’s counterpoint cuts the other way with equal force: the confident dismissal (“meditative experience is anomalous, only ordinary cognition counts”) is also circular, using one mode of experience to certify only itself. Neither side gets to stand outside the question. A website certainly does not; we said so on page one and it is still true here.
Mahāyāna Buddhism, the broad later movement, put a capstone on the arc that sounds, at first, like a riddle: saṃsāra is nirvāṇa. The world of restless becoming and the peace of release are not two places but one reality, met in two ways.Textual After the ladder it reads plainly enough. Nothing needed to be escaped; the cage was drawn by the same hand that read the drawing as bars.
Then comes the part that keeps the whole subject from curdling into a metaphysics
museum: every one of the three books ends in the same unexpected place. Ethics. Loy ends
in ethics, aesthetics and social thought; Armstrong’s final part argues that compassion is
not an add-on to emptiness but what emptiness feels like from inside; Connelly reads
Vasubandhu’s last verses as a manual for compassionate action. The pattern is the
tradition’s oldest self-description: asked what he was, the Buddha called himself
tathāgatatathāgata Sanskrit · “thus come, thus gone”
The Buddha’s self-description: a flowing occurrence rather than a fixed person. — thus coming, thus going.Textual
Read after the ladder: a flowing occurrence whose visible form was availability to others.
Why would seeing through the watcher issue in kindness? The traditions’ answer is almost geometric: the walls between self and other were load-bearing parts of the self-structure. What defended me against you was the same construction that defended the watcher against the watched. Where it thins, what remains is not a superior vantage (step 2 already exposed that as one more room for the ego) but fewer walls, and meditators report that the practical residue is warmth rather than detachment.Practice-report
That report can be examined on any cushion, which is where this site hands over. The map ends here. The books — and the sitting — are the territory.