Vedanta, Yoga And Buddhism

[Shanmugam]

The aim of this post is to show that  Vedanta as we know today and Yoga which is practiced today are incomplete when taught independently. They have lost a lot of essential teachings of ancient rishis by evolving into two separate schools.  It also  aims to show that these modern schools have deviated much from the teachings of Ancient India.

Vedanta and Yoga were never separate during the time of Upanishads. There were no two different schools. Instead, the teachings of Ancient India mainly included the following two aspects:

Insight

This constitutes getting insight into the nature of reality and seeing that the separate self is illusory in the moment to moment experience. Practices like self-inquiry and  Buddhist mindfulness are essentially the same and are mainly insight practices. The Advaita Vedanta that we know now focuses mainly on insight.

Concentration

This is often neglected in traditional Advaita but it was once advocated as a necessary skill to develop along with insight. Concentration and insight complement each other. There are some seekers who can do well by focusing on concentration and developing the insight later. But there are also seekers who are comfortable in doing insight practices first and achieve one pointed concentration later. Upasana in Vedanta (which is not taught in the modern days), Yogic samadhi and Buddhist Shamatha are practices that develop concentration.

It is definitely possible to bypass concentration practices altogether and practice insight alone. Concentration will automatically develop as a by product. But this is not true for all people. Some people are more comfortable and capable of starting with Yogic practices.Also, practicing both of them together can be very helpful towards liberation.

Because of this, yogic concentration practices and insight practices were both taught in Upanishads. In fact, there are certain upanishads which are dedicated to Yogic practices alone. They were never considered as separate schools of thought. Even Adi Shankara has elaborated on yogic and tantric practices on his text Soundarya Lahari.

The theory part of both Advaita and Yoga were adopted from Samkhya karika written by an ancient rishi called Kapila. In Bhagwad Gita, Samkhya is mentioned as another term for Gnana yoga, which is nothing but self-inquiry practices  and Nidhidhyasana of Vedanta that we know today. The terminology of Samkhya appears to be dualistic but in essence, it was not; It was actually a path for non-dual wisdom. Otherwise it would not have been mentioned in Bhagwad Gita, which is actually considered to be an authoritative text of Vedanta, along with Brahma Sutras and Upanishads. Samkhya mainly focused on discrimination between Purusha and Prakriti (satya and mithya in Vedanta) and offered insight into the reality which actually resulted in  seeing Purusha and Prakrita as one non-dual reality, even though it was not explicitly stated in Samkya sutras.

So in essence,  Vedanta, Yoga and Samkhya were not really separate schools of thoughts.  These were words used to represent the aspects of the same essential teaching.  But after the period of Upanishads, people started giving more importance to Vedic rituals rather than focusing on the core teachings that help individuals towards their liberation.

Wisdom by Buddha

The first rebellion against this growing importance of pointless rituals was done by Buddha. He established the core ancient teachings of insight and concentration but just used different terminology. He categorized the teachings into two main paths, which are complimentary to each other.

1)Vipassana (Insight)

This is essentially the same as Vedanta. Buddhist mindfulness is a practice to examine each thought and experience that arises each moment and look into the nature of their absence of a separate self, impermanence and suffering. This is exactly what self-inquiry does when you inquire the nature and origin of each thought. What was called as Nirguna Brahman (absolute reality that is empty of attributes) in ancient India was named as ‘Sunyata’ (emptiness) by Buddha. Since Buddha took a psychological approach, he intentionally used negative terminology so that people don’t form mental concepts about the absolute reality.

2)Shamatha (Concentration)

Buddha didn’t ignore the yogic practices of concentration. He introduced Jhana meditations which are essentially the same as Dhyana, Dharana and Samadhi. But he also explained how practicing either insight or concentration can automatically improve the other.

Buddha took an empirical approach in understanding the nature of mind. The deep psychological insights found in Apidhamma in Pali Canon, is very unique to Buddhism which is completely absent in the traditional schools of Advaita and Yoga which developed later as separate schools.The psychological wisdom found in Buddhism is compared to modern Psychology because of so many similarities between the two.

Traditional Vedanta, Samkhya and Yoga talk about three gunas which are sattva (balance), rajas (restlessness , too much activity in the mind), Tamas (inertia or mental dullness) to show how rajas and tamas are hindrances to insight and concentration. Buddha went further and added three more to the two hindrances (panca nivaranani): Restlessness, Dullness and sloth, sensory desire, ill will and doubt.

Finally, Buddha went one step above in handling the mere curious people who wanted to accumulate factual  and theoretical information. He very well understood that such an accumulation of unnecessary knowledge may reinforce the idea of a separate self. So, contrary to the ancient teachings which taught different theories of creation (Ajativada, drishti-shristi vada, shristi-drishti vada), Buddha asked people to ignore such questions and theories and told them that these questions do not lead people to true knowledge. These questions have been termed as ‘Avyakata’ (unfathomable)  by Buddha. Sometimes, he was silent when people asked such questions which is popularly known as ‘Noble silence’in Buddhism.

 

Wisdom by Shankara

Any form of teachings get clouded and polluted overtime by people when they add new interpretations, ideas and speculations. This is mainly done by curious scholars who were not enlightened and had no interest in liberation.

When it comes to Buddhism, it faced two major problems:

There was a strong political pressure in Indian kingdoms to eliminate Buddhism since Buddhists didn’t practise Vedic rituals. But people were clinging so much to Vedas that were not be able to accept or understand the revolutionary teachings of Buddhism. Because of this pressure Buddhism was widely eliminated from India but became very popular in China, Japan and South Asian countries.

Due to lack of teachers and proper guidance, many Buddhists in India became deluded and began to misunderstand the core teachings of Buddha.

Adi Shankra was not against Buddha’s core teachings or Yoga. But he reestablished the core teachings of ancient India by writing commentaries on texts on both insight and concentration practices, debating with ritual oriented Mimamsa scholars and deluded Buddhist scholars.

Realizing that vedic rituals and worshiping personal deities could not be easily removed from Indian tradition, Shankara had no choice but to compromise on certain things. He accepted the worship of personal God but popularized the concept of Ishwara and taught people that they can revere their favorite personal deity as Ishwara. He divided the sects of such deity worships to six categories (shanmata), based on the six popular deities, but insisted that any personal God is the representation of Absolute reality.

But since he was pretty much aware of what was  happening to the core teachings of Buddha, he had to debate with the remaining deluded Buddhist scholars to make them accept his newly formulated teachings. But he never excluded Yogic practices that were meant to achieve one-pointed concentration and Samadhi. In fact, he praised Yoga Vashista, the text which contain both vedantic and yogic teachings and regarded Vashista, the author of Yoga Vashista as the first teacher of Vedanta. But apart from the terminology and certain culturally oriented concepts, his teachings were essentially the same as Buddha’s teachings.

Distortion of the Original teachings

Again, needless to say, Shankara’s original teachings were distorted. Scholars conveniently ignored the concentration oriented practices and maintained the school of Advaita based on the rest of Shankara’s teachings. Overtime, vedantins became mere intellectuals who kept repeating that all is maya. This led to 5 other subschools of vedanta which criticized vedantins as mayavadis.

At the same time, Yoga started evolving as a separate school which ignored a lot of insight present in  Vedanta. They became more focused on physical postures and chasing various experiences.

Edited July 1, 2017 by Shanmugam

[Joseph Maynor]

Thank you for posting this.  Well worth a read through.  Atman = Brahman.  I think this thesis goes back to the Upanishads.  I read in multiple places that Hinduism is a western term.  The Western mind needed a way to grasp Indian thought so it coined the term Hinduism.  The problem is this is like trying to catch water with a net.  Buddhism seems more like a rejection of the priestly class than a new school entirely,  Like Protestantism was in the West.  Although later on Buddhism would explore new territory with the intricate look at Phenomenology, but this was way after the Buddha's time.  But I'm sure there were analogues to this looking-inward activity in Hinduism as well.  We gotta be careful not to superimpose our Western values and habits of mind on Indian thought too rigidly.   This is like trying to logically analyze a Monet painting.  Same goes for Chinese thought.  Another beautiful nexus of ideas and practices differing dramatically from Western tastes and values.

Edited July 1, 2017 by Joseph Maynor

[Ananta]

On 7/1/2017 at 8:17 AM, Shanmugam said:

Overtime, vedantins became mere intellectuals

Where to even start? If this is your opinion you haven't correctly learned Vedanta by a qualified teacher and haven't applied it. You have a mis-understanding, meaning you would need to go back to the beginning.

I suspect your opinion is from a mishmash of piecing together various teaching of Vedanta. Not because you are/were a serious student of Vedanta, applied the teaching and have come to this conclusion.

Edited July 2, 2017 by Anna1

[Prabhaker]

Man is very clever, he has created scriptures even around vedanta - that state which is beyond knowledge. He has created knowledge even out of the state which is beyond knowledge. Pundits go on propagating that vedanta is not the end of the scriptures called the Vedas, the knowledge, but the very essence of these scriptures. They go on insisting that vedanta is a physical part of these scriptures. This is an absolute lie, it is absolutely wrong. 

 The Way Beyond Any Way ~ Osho

First, THE UPANISHADS are not religious scriptures. They are poetic expressions of those who have known.

They are not Hindu, they are not Buddhist, they are not Jaina; they don’t belong to any religion. They are the experiences of individuals sitting at the feet of their master – and when the experience overwhelmed them they danced, they sang, they uttered strange statements. And these were not made by their minds; it was almost as if they were just hollow bamboos. Existence has made them flutes; it was existence itself singing a song.

That’s why no upanishad carries the name of its writer.

The KORAN belongs to Mohammed, the NEW TESTAMENT belongs to Jesus Christ, the GITA belongs to Krishna, the DHAMMAPADA belongs to Gautam Buddha; ISAVASYA UPANISHAD belongs to no one.

Tremendously courageous people... they have not even signed their names. In fact, it would have been ugly to sign because they were not the writers, they were not the composers, they were not the poets. The poetry was coming from above, from beyond. They were simply vehicles.

The_Osho_Upanishad ~ Osho

[Ananta]

Vedanta literally means "end of the Vedas", reflecting revealed Self knowledge contained in the Upanishads.

13 hours ago, Shanmugam said:

Overtime, vedantins became mere intellectuals who kept repeating that all is maya.

The above ^ is ignorance, plain and simple. First, vedantins would say "all" is the Self/Brahman, since reality is "non-dual". Maya appears, because it it a power within Brahman that makes Brahman appear to be something it's not.

[Shanmugam]

@Anna1  I am talking about what happened many centuries before... You are picking up statements without the context.. It is true that there were people in Ancient India who were just repeating all is maya.. This happened a few centuries after Shankara's time.If you read the next sentence, it should be clear that I am talking about the past:

Overtime, vedantins became mere intellectuals who kept repeating that all is maya. This led to 5 other subschools of vedanta which criticized vedantins as mayavadis.

 

Edited July 2, 2017 by Shanmugam

[Ananta]

12 minutes ago, Shanmugam said:

You are picking up statements without the context..

What Are You Talking about? I'm quoting "your" statements. They weren't clarified and no reference was given to there origin. So, I'm left to presume they are your thoughts/opinions "now" and didn't portray Vedantin's in a good light.

Edited July 2, 2017 by Anna1

[Shanmugam]

@Anna1  "Overtime, vedantins became mere intellectuals who kept repeating that all is maya. This led to 5 other subschools of vedanta which criticized vedantins as mayavadis."

Read the above two lines... I have explained what happened before the 5 other subschools of Vedanta were formed. Many of the people who read Vedanta those days was simply repeating everything is maya..

If you are reading my posts solely to find faults, you will find faults in some way.

 

[Joseph Maynor]

Have you guys studied the history of Buddhism in China?  That's like the sequel of your dreams to this saga.  And then Zen grew out of Chinese Buddhism.

Edited July 2, 2017 by Joseph Maynor

[Shanmugam]

@Joseph Maynor A little bit... I read a lot about Buddhist way last month and it was amazing. Now, it has various schools, theraveda, mahayana, zen (subschool of mahayana), Tibetan buddhism etc. But the core remains the same. If you read commentaries on Apidhamma of Pali canon, you will get many insights into the nature of mind.

[Shanmugam]

@Shanmugam  But still, the modern vedanta taught now lacks some of the teachings of Shankara, even thought it claims to be from Shankara's thoughts. I am not denying that. Here I am talking about what is happening now. I have already covered that in my post

[Ananta]

14 minutes ago, Shanmugam said:

If you are reading my posts solely to find faults, you will find faults in some way.

Actually, I'm not. It doesn't make sense, but we don't have to beat a dead horse. You made your point and I made mine. 

[Joseph Maynor]

7 minutes ago, Shanmugam said:

@Joseph Maynor A little bit... I read a lot about Buddhist way last month and it was amazing. Now, it has various schools, theraveda, mahayana, zen (subschool of mahayana), Tibetan buddhism etc. But the core remains the same. If you read commentaries on Apidhamma of Pali canon, you will get many insights into the nature of mind.

Does the concept of self-transcendence predate Buddhism in the sense that the Hindus were practicing this before the Buddha lived?  Or is Enlightenment a concept and practice that properly starts with the Buddha?

[Ananta]

19 minutes ago, Shanmugam said:

@Shanmugam  But still, the modern vedanta taught now lacks some of the teachings of Shankara, even thought it claims to be from Shankara's thoughts. I am not denying that. Here I am talking about what is happening now. I have already covered that in my post

My teacher is very clear that he is teaching "traditional" Vedanta, not a sub-school, knock off, or modern version, but he is teaching mostly westerners and teaches accordingly.

Edited July 2, 2017 by Anna1

[Shanmugam]

@Anna1  why should we group ourselves as vedantins, yogis and buddhists in the first place? My whole point is go to back to the original teaching, which included all aspects of these schools. We can again take advantage of all traditions by seeing the central practices and ideas as one core teaching. Why to even identify one's teaching to an 'ism'?  Because, any such sect or a path usually fails to take advantage of certain ways of teaching in another sect, path or tradition.

[Joseph Maynor]

10 minutes ago, Shanmugam said:

@Anna1  why should we group ourselves as vedantins, yogis and buddhists in the first place? My whole point is go to back to the original teaching, which included all aspects of these schools. We can again take advantage of all traditions by seeing the central practices and ideas as one core teaching. Why to even identify one's teaching to an 'ism'?  Because, any such sect or a path usually fails to take advantage of certain ways of teaching in another sect, path or tradition.

I agree with this.  Sectarianism is a stupid thing really.  We should think of philosophies and scriptures more like a buffet, take what you need.  Nobody is asking you to opine and categorize the buffet items into some kind of system.  Just shut up and eat.  And then go back for seconds of course!

Edited July 2, 2017 by Joseph Maynor

[Ananta]

7 minutes ago, Shanmugam said:

@Anna1  why should we group ourselves as vedantins, yogis and buddhists in the first place? My whole point is go to back to the original teaching, which included all aspects of these schools. We can again take advantage of all traditions by seeing the central practices and ideas as one core teaching. Why to even identify one's teaching to an 'ism'?  Because, any such sect or a path usually fails to take advantage of certain ways of teaching in another sect, path or tradition.

That's fine with neo-advaita, but I found what I needed. Thanks.

[Shanmugam]

No schools, no sub schools are really needed anymore.. It is time to integrate all these teachings and also approach it in scientific way. My blog and most of my posts are intended to create awareness in bridging science and spirituality. All these schools are started by people who wanted to classify the teachings of a certain person like Shankara and Buddha and make it to Advaita and Buddhism. Why not see it as a wisdom of Shankara and Buddha alone? Classifying truths into schools, traditions creates a lot of debate and confusions overtime. Why keep repeating the history?

In the last 15 years, I have been exposed to various traditions as a part of my search... I got interest in exploring all schools of India and all the western ways including sufism and christian mysticism. I was also intensely into my own spiritual search until 2014 after which life and the perception of reality has shifted.  In the last two years I also spent time in psychology, the scientific study of mind and behavior. This is how I realized that science and spirituality can be integrated by combining psychology and core psychological basis of all major traditions in the world...Scientists can be enlightened and enlightened ones can be scientists. So, I think there should be no division between spirituality and science either.

That's why I was impressed by Sam Harris book and opened a thread recently about it. His books and videos are already on the way to bridge spirituality and science.

[Joseph Maynor]

4 minutes ago, Shanmugam said:

No schools, no sub schools are really needed anymore.. It is time to integrate all these teachings and also approach it in scientific way. My blog and most of my posts are intended to create awareness in bridging science and spirituality. All these schools are started by people who wanted to classify the teachings of a certain person like Shankara and Buddha and make it to Advaita and Buddhism. Why not see it as a wisdom of Shankara and Buddha alone? Classifying truths into schools, traditions creates a lot of debate and confusions overtime. Why keep repeating the history?

In the last 15 years, I have been exposed to various traditions as a part of my search... I got interest in exploring all schools of India and all the western ways including sufism and christian mysticism. I was also intensely into my own spiritual search until 2014 after which life and the perception of reality has shifted.  In the last two years I also spent time in psychology, the scientific study of mind and behavior. This is how I realized that science and spirituality can be integrated by combining psychology and core psychological basis of all major traditions in the world...Scientists can be enlightened and enlightened ones can be scientists. So, I think there should be no division between spirituality and science either.

That's why I was impressed by Sam Harris book and opened a thread recently about it. His books and videos are already on the way to bridge spirituality and science.

Don't forget about Western Philosophy and Chinese Philosophy too.

Edited July 2, 2017 by Joseph Maynor

[Shanmugam]

@Joseph Maynor  Oh yes... There is a lot of wisdom in the West also, right from the time of Socrates. There have been many schools in the west for spiritual liberation.