The dip in the Ganges

Other Hindu schools accused the Advaitins of being Buddhists in disguise. The yogis accused them of talking too much. Both charges had a point.

By Sovandarapor (James) Kong · 2026-08-21 · Nondual

Chapter 12 of 18 in Ninety minutes with a swami

When I wrote about Advaita before, I said my resistance to it was that it can become a sophisticated way of not living your life, and that I had met people fluent in the unreality of the ego who were impossible over a dinner bill. Swami Sarvapriyananda says the same thing, and he says the tradition has always known it.

His version. Somebody grasps the idea intellectually, and it is a genuinely liberating idea. You would expect the feelings to follow. You would expect fearlessness, because the window can be broken and the sky does not die, and love for everyone, because they are literally what you are. Instead you often get a person who appreciates the non-dual consciousness in theory and behaves exactly as before in practice. His diagnosis is that the emotions were never purified. The intellect got there and nothing else came along.

This is why, he says, Advaita has always kept two things it did not strictly need. Devotion, because bhakti sublimates feeling in a way argument cannot. And meditation, because the instrument you are trying to inquire with is the mind, and an untrained mind is chaos, and chaos will wreck a philosophical inquiry long before it reaches a spiritual one. Later Advaita texts simply absorbed both.

The history behind this is funnier than I expected. The Advaitins were outliers inside Hinduism. Other Hindu schools accused them of being hidden Buddhists, which in that thousand year argument was a serious insult. Do you even believe in the deities. Do you take a dip in the holy Ganges. The answer was yes, we do all of that. We just do not think it is the end. The yogis had their own complaint. You people talk a lot, interviews and books and talks, and you do not meditate enough, you do not have the experiences. The reply was that if what you want is knowledge, sitting quietly will not produce it, inquiry will. And then, having said that, they agreed that the sitting helped.

The man I was complaining about over the dinner bill was not refuted by any of this. He was explained. He had the idea and skipped the parts that were supposed to make the idea change him.

What I notice is that I skip them too. I will read an argument for an hour. I will not sit still for ten minutes. If the tradition is right that the second is what makes the first take, then I have been doing the easy half and calling it the whole thing.