The Duality — Nonduality Spectrum
The Nonduality Circus — Is This an Emerging New Fad?
[Updated November 15, 2024] Over 100 nonduality teachers and speakers are on YouTube these days, with more coming online all the time.
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Nonduality is Not New
Emptiness (sunyata) has been a core teaching in Mahayana Buddhism since at least Nagarjuna (~300 CE). The similar Advaita (nondual) Vedanta school of Hinduism has been around since at least Gaudapada’s time (6th c CE). The earliest Zen/Chan Buddhism writings also date back the 6th c CE (such as the Xin Xin Ming, which I re-interpreted here). And Tibetan Dzogchen (10th c CE) introduced its own perspective on how emptiness (or oneness) is an essential characteristic of Buddhahood.
Western transcendentalists explored those traditions in the mid-1800s, and growing numbers of Eastern teachers came to the West starting in the early 1900s. The 1960s and ‘70s saw an explosion of Western seekers going to Asia and Eastern gurus coming to the West.
(For me, in my late teens, I read the recently published Be Here Now (1971) by Baba Ram Das (as he was called then), several…
