mindyourmind wrote:How does non-duality end suffering? What if the non-dual state is a state of suffering?
As a newcomer to all of this, I cannot offer a profound and convincing answer to your questions. My sense is that there is a point of logic, though, rooted in basic Buddhist teaching.
1. The First Noble Truth, the truth of dukkha, is in essence that everything compounded (all sankhaara/samskaara) is dukkha, unsatisfactory, skew-whiff, "suffering". Sankhaara/samskaara, in the passive sense in which it is used here, means "that which is put together". It involves multiplicity, or the perception of multiplicity; and, at the level of the experience of dukkha, it is also dyadic:
Entity A (real in absolute terms or not) experiences
dukkha. This looks intrinsically dualistic to me: the perception, at least, involves a subject of experience and an object of experience, that is to say, what it is that is experienced.
2. The Second Noble Truth, dukkha-samudaya in Pali, is in essence that dukkha is caused to arise: it is experienced in dependence on a cause. Again, there is a binary: Cause C causes dukkha; or to put it in logical terms, the experience of dukkha arises if, and only if, C. In the classical formulation of the Second Noble Truth, what "C" -- the cause of dukkha -- stands for is craving (tanha) conditioned by ignorance (avijja/avidya). Craving is also binary:
Sally has a craving for
cheesecake, or whatever. It reflects at least the perception of a dualism of a subject of craving and the object or objects of craving; and something similar can be said about ignorance.
3. The Third Noble Truth, dukkha-nirodha, is in essence that when the causes of dukkha are eradicated, dukkha ceases. Logically, the experience of dukkha arises if, and only if, C; but not-C, therefore dukkha does not arise. The eradication of craving involves the eradication of the dualism of subject of craving and object or objects craved. The eradication of ignorance is, in a fundamental sense, the eradication of dualistic vision. When dualism is eradicated, involving as it does the ending of the
perception of a distinction between subjects and objects, between subject of experience and objects of experience and all that in any real sense, the very notion of experience of dukkha in real terms ceases to make sense: the distinction between the experiencer or perceiver and what is experienced or perceived no longer has any purchase, and dukkha turns out to be smoke and mirrors as it were. If I have it right, the very notion that the non-dual state
realised to be non-dual might be a state of dukkha, of suffering, is incoherent.
Apologies for drawing on Pali sources: I'm familiar with them, and with their formulation of basic Buddhist teachings, and am trying to make sense of this "brave new world" of Vajrayana and Dzogchen by drawing on things I know, for what they are worth.
Does this make sense?
