Adam asks, does Buddhism share any similarity with non-dualism, ideas like we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, or that everything is nothing and nothing is everything, etc.?
Hmm.
There are many different views about that.
I would say there is in Mahayana Buddhism certainly they do say these things that everything is one and we are all one and there are other
sects.
They say there's nothing and everything is nothing and nothing is everything and so on.
It should
probably not be just so generalized because it is both true.
It just depends on the level in which you look at it.
There are certainly experiences of
being one with everything in meditation.
And there are experiences of nothingness.
So I think to be fair with it, to be objective,
we should consider that everything is possible but there is only one truth in the end and that is that things are arising and ceasing no matter what we think about them no matter if we think oh we are all one or if we think oh everything is nothing
It's just thinking and it's just an experience and it's impermanent.
So, it's thinking.
The argument kind of reminds me of
This one discourse, the Vedana Vibhanga Sutta or something, I don't remember the name, I'm horrible with this scholarly stuff.
But there's this one Sutta where these two monks, I think, or a monk and a layperson were fighting over this.
It's not the same question, but a similar question.
It's a similar numbers question, similar in the sense that it's just numbers.
One of them said there's three types of feeling.
He said, the Buddha has taught that there's three types of feeling.
The monk said, no, no, layman, the Buddha taught that there are five types of feeling.
And they argued back and forth and back and forth, and then they went to the Buddha.
They went to Ananda, I think, and then Ananda brought it to the Buddha.
And the Buddha said, actually there are 108 types of feeling.
And I think it goes because of the past, present, future, because of the six senses, you can multiply it out.
The idea of non-duality is...
I mean, it's really, as Polignani says, it's just a thought.
It's just a theory and a concept.
It has nothing to do with what's real.
So why I thought of this is because I was thinking, well, actually there are six things.
We don't have one thing or two things.
We have six things.
Seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking.
If you want to say there's one thing, there's only experience.
Or there's only reality.
The one sense that I don't agree with things like non-dualism is the idea that nibbana is the same as samsara.
Because to me that's a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between an arising and a ceasing, or an arising and a non-arising.
Phenomena do arise.
The non-arising is nibbana.
The arising is samsara.
There are cases where it seems fundamentally untrue, but the whole idea of us being one, well, you know, you could say that we are two, or you could say that we are three, or you could say that we are six.
In the end, it is what it is.
As Palnyani says, it's just experience.
I don't know, maybe that wasn't such an important point, but the most important point is that it's all just thinking, or it's all just...
ideas and views, really, about whether things are dualistic or non-dualistic.