 |
| No victory. No teaching posture. Just what remains when the question is over. |
The Question That Keeps Returning
Across the Kaula corpus, one encounters a sentence that appears with surprising insistence and in unexpectedly central places. It is not framed as an aside, nor as a speculative remark, but as a statement of the highest principle itself. Again and again, the supreme reality is described as that which is free from both duality and non-duality — dvaitādvaita-vivarjitam.
This formulation appears in the Kularṇava Tantra (1.110) when the text speaks of bondage and liberation; it reappears in the Kaulāvalīnirṇaya in a passage that distinguishes knowledge that liberates from knowledge that merely refines skill; it is echoed in Tantrāloka, where Abhinavagupta states that both duality and non-duality arise from conceptual construction; and it receives one of its most precise articulations in the Pratyabhijñā tradition, where Abhinava introduces the striking expression mahādvaita, “great non-duality,” to describe the realized state.
At first glance, this insistence is puzzling. Indian philosophical discourse is already rich with carefully developed positions defending either duality or non-duality, and these positions are not frivolous. Each arises from deep reflection, lived experience, and long traditions of practice and interpretation. Why, then, do Kaula authors seem unwilling to settle into either camp? Why do they persist in speaking from a place that refuses to be named by either category?
The question becomes sharper when we notice that the Kaula refusal is not merely rhetorical. These texts do not say that duality and non-duality are equally true, nor do they propose a middle position meant to reconcile opposing views. Instead, they suggest that the very act of choosing between these alternatives already belongs to a secondary level of understanding — a level shaped by conceptual stabilization rather than direct insight.
This essay does not aim to resolve a philosophical dispute between schools, nor to argue for a superior doctrine. Its aim is simpler and more difficult: to listen carefully to what the Kaula texts are doing when they refuse both duality and non-duality, and to ask what kind of understanding becomes possible when one no longer seeks refuge in either position.
Only after this question is allowed to stand, without premature answers, does it become meaningful to look at how dual and non-dual views arise, why they compel loyalty, and how the Kaula tradition quietly steps aside from both.
Two Fires
Some say the world is not two.
They speak from an experience where separation loosened, where the weight of being someone dropped for a moment, and what remained felt clean, simple, undeniable. From there, difference looks like strain. Relationship looks like effort. Devotion looks like waiting. Non-duality appears as mercy: nothing to defend, nothing to protect, nothing to lose.
Others say difference is real.
They speak from a place where love mattered, where another’s face could not be reduced to awareness, where responsibility did not dissolve under insight. From there, unity looks thin. Oneness sounds like bypass. Distance preserves reverence. Relationship remains sacred precisely because it does not collapse.
Both are speaking honestly.
And both are speaking from experience.
What is rarely noticed is how easily experience hardens into ground.
How quickly a glimpse becomes a place to stand.
How naturally the mind seeks shelter — even in truth.
Non-duality becomes something one has reached.
Duality becomes something one remains faithful to.
And in both cases, a quiet contraction appears:
this is where I am safe.
The Kaula texts do not deny either fire.
They do not say one burns purer than the other.
They simply stand back and watch what happens next.
They notice that once a view becomes home, it begins to exclude.
Once it excludes, it needs defense.
Once it needs defense, it is no longer free.
So they say something spare, almost indifferent:
Some want non-duality.
Some want duality.
The supreme truth is free from both.
Not as philosophy.
As observation.
Because what binds is not difference or unity,
but the moment they are taken as mine.
This is why the Kaula turn does not argue.
It does not persuade.
It does not replace one certainty with another.
It waits for the fires to burn themselves out.
Only then does the next movement become visible —
the recognition that both duality and non-duality arise from vikalpa,
from the same need to settle, to name, to stand somewhere.
And from that recognition, something quieter opens,
which Abhinava will later name — carefully, almost reluctantly — mahādvaita.
The Kaula Turn: When Both Views Become Vikalpa
Up to this point, duality and non-duality can still be understood as responses to experience — as ways the heart and mind orient themselves after being touched by something real. But the Kaula texts do not remain at the level of orientation. At a certain depth, they change the question itself.
They no longer ask which view is higher.
They ask from where views arise at all.
This is the point at which Abhinavagupta introduces what can only be called a diagnostic move. Duality and non-duality are not treated as rival metaphysical positions, nor as partial truths awaiting synthesis. They are traced back to a common source: vikalpa — the movement by which experience is fixed, stabilized, and made inhabitable.
This claim is stated with striking economy in Tantrāloka (4.255), where Abhinava, citing the Bhargaśikhā, writes:
mṛtyuṃ ca kālaṃ ca kalā-kalāpaṃ
vikāra-jātaṃ pratipatti-jālam |
ekātmyanānātma-vitarka-jātaṃ
tadā sa sarvaṃ kavalīkaroti ||Death and time,
the entire array of kalās,
the mass of transformations and the web of cognition,
the whole tangle of thought based on oneness and multiplicity —
all of this he then swallows whole.
Immediately before this citation, Abhinava characterizes all of this as:
dvaitādvaita-vikalpottham — “arising from the conceptual constructions of duality and non-duality.”
The force of this passage lies in what it does not do. It does not rank duality below non-duality, nor does it suggest that non-duality corrects duality. Both are included in the same sweep. Both are treated as products of the same crystallizing movement.
What is described here is not a gradual refinement of views, but their collapse as final supports. For one whose knowing is complete (kṛta-dhīḥ), the entire lattice built from oppositions — one and many, unity and difference, knower and known — is not dismantled piece by piece. It is rendered unnecessary.
This is the quiet turn the Kaula texts make again and again. They do not replace one doctrine with another. They simply step prior to the point where doctrine becomes required.
From here, the repeated insistence that the supreme reality is free from both duality and non-duality is no longer a metaphysical provocation. It is a description of what remains when the need to settle experience into a view has burned itself out.
What follows from this is not silence for its own sake, but a shift of attention — away from positions, and toward the subtle act by which anything at all is claimed as mine.
That is where bondage and liberation will finally be located.
Mahā-Advaita: Overfull Non-Duality, Not Compromise
At this point, the Kaula refusal of both duality and non-duality risks being misunderstood in a very specific way. It can sound as if Abhinavagupta were proposing a balance, a middle position, or a reconciliation meant to soften the conflict between rival metaphysical camps. Nothing could be further from his intent.
When Abhinava introduces what he calls mahā-advaita, he is not qualifying non-duality, nor correcting it by reintroducing difference. He is naming non-duality carried to its extreme — so complete, so saturated, that it no longer needs to assert itself against anything.
This is why the word appears only after the standpoint of advaita has already been reached. Mahā-advaita is not an alternative to non-duality. It is what non-duality becomes when it is no longer held as a position.
In the opening mangala of the Īśvarapratyabhijñā-vimarśinī, Abhinava describes the realized condition in a way that quietly disarms both metaphysical instincts. Speaking of Śiva as He is known by those struck by intense śaktipāta (atitīvra-śaktipāta-āghrāta-hṛdaya), he writes:
svāntaḥ-kṛta-dvaita-advaita-rūpa-ati-pūrṇatā-svabhāvaṃ mahādvaitam
Mahā-advaita:
“great non-duality,” whose nature is excessive fullness,
containing within itself the internally generated forms
of both duality and non-duality.
Every element of this sentence matters.
Duality and non-duality are described here not as structures of reality, but as forms produced within awareness itself (svāntaḥ-kṛta). They are ways reality appears to itself — not ultimate determinations of what reality is. And they are not eliminated. They are included.
The decisive word is ati-pūrṇatā — over-fullness. Mahā-advaita does not negate difference, nor does it dissolve multiplicity into an abstract One. It exceeds the need to decide between them. Duality can appear without threatening unity, and unity no longer needs to assert itself by denying appearance.
This is why mahā-advaita is not a synthesis. A synthesis still depends on the terms it reconciles. Mahā-advaita depends on neither. It is non-duality that has outgrown the anxiety of being contradicted.
From this standpoint, difference continues to shine, but it no longer fractures. Unity is not denied, but it is no longer defended. The world is not rejected, and it is not reduced. It is simply not held apart from awareness, nor collapsed into it as a concept.
This is also why mahā-advaita cannot be stabilized as a doctrine. The moment it is asserted as the correct view, it contracts back into ordinary advaita — and from there, into vikalpa once again. Mahā-advaita can only be indicated from within a posture that has already relinquished the need to stand anywhere.
In this sense, mahā-advaita is not the resolution of the problem posed by duality and non-duality. It is what remains when that problem has quietly exhausted itself.
Ramana: Neither Dvaita Nor Advaita, But the Source of the ‘I’-Sense
Sri Ramana Maharshi was asked — or confronted with — the traditional categories of dvaita (duality) and advaita (non-duality). In response he did not defend one view over the other as ultimate. Instead, he pointed attention to the simple source of both: the sense of I. This moves the focus from doctrine to the living presence that gives rise to any doctrine at all.
His typical response (from 'Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi', Talk 433):
“‘Dvaita’ and ‘advaita’ are relative terms. They are based on a sense of duality.
There is actually neither dvaita nor advaita.”
This is not rhetoric. It is an implicit diagnosis aligned with the Kaula turn: both duality and non-duality depend on the arising of the I–other structure. If the sense of separate self disappears, the very terms on which the categories dvaita and advaita depend no longer apply.
In Ramana’s core teaching — ātma-vicāra (self-inquiry) — the attention is drawn to where the I arises and where it dissolves. He said that the “I-thought” is not the same as the unconditioned Self, and when the mind abides in the source of this thought, the usual dualities fall away naturally. The practice he gave was:
Ask “Who am I?” —
notice who this “I” refers to —
and inquire at its source until the sense of a separate self collapses.
In this frame, dvaita and advaita are not competing final answers. They are descriptions of different ways the mind fixes itself in relation to the sense of self and other. When the source of the I-thought is directly recognized as itself not separate, the need to choose between duality and non-duality simply falls away.
This is the quiet heart of Ramana’s stance — not a philosophical synthesis, but a posture of enquiry that dissolves the very conditions under which either position could take root.
What remains is not a new doctrine nor a higher category.
It is the simple absence of the separate one who needs a position.
When Even the Answer Is No Longer Needed
At the end of this arc, nothing new needs to be asserted.
Duality has been seen.
Non-duality has been seen.
Their arguments, their seductions, their comforts have been allowed to speak — and to tire themselves out.
What remains is not a higher position, but the absence of urgency that once demanded one.
The Kaula refusal does not culminate in a final insight.
Mahā-advaita does not stand as a banner.
Even non-appropriation, once named, is quietly released.
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes only after sincerity has run its full course. Not the exhaustion of collapse, but the exhaustion of no longer needing to prove, clarify, or resolve. The fire that once demanded answers has done its work and withdrawn.
At this point, difference may still appear.
Unity may still be spoken.
Practices may still be performed.
Words may still be used.
But they no longer carry the weight of salvation.
Nothing needs to be protected from contradiction.
Nothing needs to be defended against its opposite.
Nothing needs to be carried forward as mine.
This is not indifference.
It is intimacy without grasping.
Not silence as an achievement,
but silence as what naturally remains
when even the need to speak truthfully has come to rest.
The Kaula texts do not promise this state.
They do not describe it in detail.
They simply refuse to interfere once it appears.
And perhaps that is their final instruction:
to recognize when the question has truly spent itself,
and to have the restraint not to replace it with another.
What remains after that does not ask to be named.
It does not announce itself.
It does not argue with anything that still appears.
It simply abides,
without claim,
without fatigue,
without need.
And there is nothing more to add.
No comments:
Post a Comment