The Relationship Between Buddhism and the Vedic Worldview – Part One

The Relationship Between Buddhism and the Vedic Worldview – Part One

[00:45] An Umbrella Body of Knowledge

Jai Guru Deva. Thank you for listening to my podcast, the Vedic Worldview. I’m Thom Knoles. Recently, I was asked about the distinction between the Vedic worldview, meaning the worldview from the ancient body of knowledge, Veda, which was certainly extant at the very earliest 10,000 years ago. There’s evidence of Veda being referred to in 8,000 BC.

And so, one of the oldest organized bodies of knowledge out of which comes, and this is one of the topics of today, Buddhism, as Buddhism has become, Zoroastrianism, Jainism, Taoism, Zen, and ayurvedic medicine, and the Pakistani version of that, a thing called greek, which is herbal self-healthcare medicine. All of this comes from this umbrella body of knowledge called Veda.

And Veda is best known for having been expounded by my tradition, which is the Shankaracharya tradition. Shankara was a man who lived about 2,578 years ago. We often hear modern scholars argue that he lived somewhere in the third century AD, or even as late as the eighth century AD, but probably they’re mistaking him or conflating him, Shankara with one of his very glorious successors, because all of them use the name Shankara, Shankara Acharya. Acharya means a teacher. Shankara. Shankara.

And so, according to the records that are carefully kept in the academies of learning, these academies of learning are called maths, M-A-T-H, a math is an Academy of Learning in India, and there are four of them, in each one of the cardinal corners of India, north, east, south, and west.

The northernmost math is called Jyotir Math, the Academy of Learning that has to do with inner light, jyotish, Jyotir Math, and it’s from that math that my master’s master came. So he was named Swami Brahmananda Saraswati. And Brahmananda Swami is just a member of the knowledge tradition of the highest order in the Veda. I am also a swami, Mahamandaleshwar Swami, meaning a senior-most swami.

Swami Brahmananda was his name. Brahma is with reference to Totality Consciousness. Ananda means bliss. So the bliss of Totality Consciousness. Saraswati is the name of the feminine version of Divine consciousness, Saraswati, who is the deity of our tradition, and she is known to be the goddess of culture, music, learning, and speech.

So, Swami Brahmananda Saraswati was the preeminent master of all the masters of India during his time. He had 240 disciples, one of whom was Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who trained me. Recently, in January of 2025, I was ordained as a Mahamandaleshwar of the Shankaracharya tradition. So, I’m a spokesperson for that tradition, and my main role is being a spokesperson for it, both in India but also here in the West.

This is one of the things that I’m very honored by. I’m humbled by it, but I’m also very honored at the responsibility of it.

[05:00] Spending Time With the Dalai Lama

In the previous January, prior to my Ordainment, I was fortunate enough to spend an hour with His Holiness the Dalai Lama of the Tibetan Buddhist faith in Dharamsala in far North India, in the Himalayan ranges there.

And I was with a few guests, and we were able to ask the Dalai Lama, whom I’d met on previous occasions, what the main distinctions were between modern-day Buddhism, as it has become, and the Vedic worldview. The main point of discussion was around the modern Tibetan Buddhist idea of what they call Anatma.

Anatma means, An-Atma means, there is no Atman. There’s no Unified Field of consciousness. What exists, according to them, is if you go into a quiet state and settle down into the least excited state and enter a thought-free state, it is the vacuum, the nothing. It is a nothingness, a void. In the Vedic worldview, when we settle down into our least excited state and experience that deep inner silence, we even have a saying for it. Ayam, A-Y-A-M, Ayam, Atma Brahma. A-T-M-A, Brahma, B-R-A-H-M-A, but this is a sentence that refers to that Totality Consciousness.

My individual inner peace is not just my little personal patch of Beingness, but, in fact, it is the entry point into a Totality Field, the Unified Field. And so, in Buddhism, as it has become, especially in Tibetan Buddhism, there’s no Unified Field. There’s no unifying field that unites all experiencers. Every individual entity is an individual entity whose beingness, their least excited state, is a non-existent state, a nothing, a void.

[07:27] Buddha – The Shakya Muni

And this has come about, in my opinion, and with all respect to the Dalai Lama, it’s come about from a misunderstanding of the teachings of the Shakya Muni. Shakya Muni is the name properly given to the man whom historically we refer to as “The Buddha.”

Buddha is a word in Sanskrit, which means master of the intellect. Buddhi, B-U-D-D-H-I, is the word for intellect. A Buddha is someone who is the master of that. And the man to whom we refer as Buddha was not referred to as Buddha any time within a hundred years of his death.

In his lifetime, he was referred to as Shakya Muni. Shakya is the surname of an aristocratic family of North India and Nepal, as it is today.

In those days, Nepal was not an independent state yet. This is 2,600 years ago or so, the time of the birth of Shakya Muni. His family home name was Siddhartha Gautama Shakya. If you were a member of the Shakyas, you were, as if today, akin to being a member of the Windsor family of the United Kingdom. The Windsor are currently the house or the family in which the monarchy of the United Kingdom resides.

And those of you who know a little history, you know that there have been many of these houses in England and what later became the United Kingdom, the Plantagenets, and so on and so forth.

So we have a historic period in far North India, modern-day Nepal, where a particular king and his wife had very much desired a child, and the mythos of it goes that they were eventually granted a child, but it was told to them by a Rishi, a great seer, that the child, Siddhartha, as it was to be named, would either be a monk who brought great wisdom to everyone in the world or if he never understood the suffering of the world, would be able to become the crown prince and eventually the king of North India.

[10:07] Searching for the Truth

So he was the crown prince when he was born. His parents were really, not his mother as much, but his father was bent on the idea of him only being the crown prince who became king, didn’t want him to become a saint or a sage who would bring the solution to suffering to the whole world. So, they made very extensive arrangements that Siddhartha should never see suffering. He should never see aging. He should never see disease.

So, anybody who looked like they were aging would get their hair dyed. Or if they looked like they were getting a bit bent over or something, then they’d be whisked out of the palace grounds, outside the great walls that surrounded the palace.

If anyone was sick, they’d be exported from any place. There was no coughing allowed, no sneezing allowed, no sicknesses allowed anywhere within the perceptible field of this young man. And one day, he manages to go for a stroll in the middle of the night outside the palace gates, and there he sees it all.

The sickness, the suffering, the disease. He sees corpses that are being prepared for cremation the next day. And it dawns on him that suffering exists, and he has to do something to discover the source of suffering and also the solution to it.

So, he writes a note to his, already, wife, and they’d already had a son, his wife, and his young son who were asleep, basically a goodbye note saying, “I have to go off and find the truth.”

And so, that sounds like a very sad part of the story. The story gets happier later. I mean, I hate to be a spoiler, but, end of the story, of that particular phase of the story, the wife and son many, many years later end up hearing about this sage, this saint, the Shakya Muni, Shakya, family name like Windsor, Muni means a saint or a sage, that was out walking around all over North India, inside of a circumference of about 300 miles, the rest of his life was spent. 

He had a teaching career of 50 years, and they met him and became very senior disciples of Siddhartha Gautama, who was now known as the Shakya Muni. So, that part has a nice Hollywood ending to it.

[12:43] The Middle Way

In the meantime, the young man Siddhartha attempted severe tapasya. Tapasya is a technique used by yogis to engage in austerities in order to attain a signal event.

He had a friend with him who also did tapasya, and the two of them, for example, kept their hands closed like this [clenches fists] for so long that their fingernails grew and protruded through the backs of the hands. That was a goal, by the way. That didn’t bring them to enlightenment. 

They starved themselves. The Shakya Muni, in his own recollection, says that he had become so thin that he could feel his spine by touching his belly. That’s how thin he’d become. He was nearly starving himself to death and still had no enlightenment.

And so, even though he was engaging in severe austerities and doing what he thought yogis should do, finally one day, by virtue of coming into contact with a small girl who was sailing a boat in a river and watching this, a realization dawned on him, which he referred to as “The Middle Way.”

Practicing that methodology, which had occurred to him, he gained his nirvana. Nirvana is the Sanskrit word for liberation, and it has many applications, just like the word liberation does in English. The liberating of full potential, and the liberation from the shackles and fetters of being defined and bound by past experience. So, freedom from stress, if you like, in modern terminology.

[14:26] Searching for a Guru

Shakya Muni, at one early stage of his careening through North India looking for knowledge, had heard of a master of our tradition, of the Shankaracharya tradition.

This was long in advance of Shankara himself. It’s so interesting that Shankara, the young man after whom our tradition, Shankaracharya, is named, was such a pivotal character that his name was applied retroactively to all the masters in the tradition coming before him. So, even people who were extant prior to Shankara being born are referred to as members of the Shankaracharya Tradition.

So, one of the members of the Shankaracharya Tradition, who predated Shankara, was a man by the name of Gaudapada. Gaudapadacharyam was a famous Rishi living in Varanasi, and Shakya Muni went down there to Varanasi, down meaning south from where his normal home was, to Varanasi in India.

Varanasi has different names. In the West, Benares is sometimes a name used for it. The ancient Sanskrit name, which was its name at the time, was the city of Kashi, K-A-S-H-I. Today, a very delicious brand of organic breakfast cereal, Kashi. The Kashi is named after the city of Varanasi, which rests on the banks of the Ganga, the Ganges River.

Shakya Muni went down there to Varanasi and went into the place, the ashram of Gaudapadacharya, and bowed before him, offered him a flower, and asked for an initiation, and Gaudapadacharya said to him, “It is not your destiny to have a guru like me. It is your destiny to have discovered the deep truth by yourself, self-sufficiently. So I’m not going to give you an initiation, but I’ll be watching your progress, and here’s that rose you gave me. I’m now blessing it and giving it back to you. Now go and gain your enlightenment, your nirvana.”

And so, although it is stated that the Shakya Muni, later known as Buddha, never really had a guru, there are some who argue that was his guru, and that was him following the instruction.

In India, in the Vedic tradition, Shakya Muni, known as Buddha, is considered to be one of the avatars of Lord Vishnu. Vishnu, who is the maintenance operator, has many declensions in the form of avatars, or personifications of the Divine living in human-like form, one of those being the famous Krishna. That was the eighth. But the ninth of ten elected avatars was Buddha.

And the tenth is considered widely either to be yet to be born, or to have been Mahāvīra. Mahāvīra was the great Rishi or seer who brought Jainism to India and to the world, the patron Rishi of the Jains.

[18:01] Buddhism is Not One Thing

Anyway, Buddha began to report on his experiences, and there are Shastras, meaning ancient records, of lectures that he gave more than 2,500 years ago. These are something of official documents of the kinds of statements he made.

In modern-day Buddhism, we see a lot of emulative behavior. It was well known that Buddha shaved his head, and he was one of the first to do that, to shave his head and face completely, so as to remove any flourishes of individuality.

He was a monk. He didn’t have a lover or a girlfriend or a boyfriend, or wasn’t married to anybody. He chose to be monastic. Though he did have a son, that was in a previous phase of his life, but he had no more children after he gained his nirvana. So, he was considered to be a celibate monk with a shaven head.

He wore some version of saffron, although saffron itself, as we know, can be anything that… the herb can be anything from red, all the way through to this color [gestures to orange shawl], or even a very light yellow. So, though it was called, his clothing was kesariya. Kesariya means the color of saffron, and if you go to certain parts of Thailand, you’ll see very, very light colored yellow being worn by the Thai Buddhist monks.

If you go to Tibet, you’ll see something closer to this color [gestures to orange shawl]. If you go to Sri Lanka, you’ll see quite a reddish version of saffron being sported by the Buddhist monks. The real point is that Buddhism is not one thing.

Buddhism, as it has become, when “ism” was added to the name of Buddha, and Buddha was added to the name of Shakya Muni, then a lot of change happened, as does happen.

Once, I was in Thailand, conversing with the Abbott of the Thai Buddhist Church. The Thai Buddhist Church in Thailand, as it’s referred to, has a head. They don’t subscribe to the Dalai Lama of Tibetan Buddhism as being the head of Buddhism. They have their own Abbott. 

As do the Burmese, the people of Myanmar. As do the Japanese and the Chinese, all have, all these variant, different cultural, geographic and political cultures have different versions of who is the head of Buddhism. Who’s the Supreme authority? Dalai Lama is but one of them.

[20:50] The No-thingness

But they all have this one peculiar idea of anatma. You know the… I call it peculiar because I mean specific by peculiar, that there is no one indivisible whole consciousness field. That all there are is individual entities, at the end of which, at the least excited state of which there is a void.

When we describe this void by looking into the Shastras, which I did with the Abbott of the Thai Buddhist Church, we see an interesting description of the no-thingness, the no-thingness. The unmanifest is what we call it, in the Vedic way of looking at this. Certainly, that no-thingness is beyond thought, and so it doesn’t think.

When individuality goes beyond thought and experiences it during Vedic Meditation, experiences transcendence, it’s not individuality truly experiencing it. Individuality becomes It. The It here will, just for distinction and not to be corny, we’ll spell with a capital I, the It. That is the unmanifest.

Mind doesn’t experience Being, mind becomes Being, and Being experiences Itself, capital I, Itself. Being is always experiencing Itself. Individuality is not capable of experiencing it. So, we can read these things in the Shastras of Buddha, but we can see then that an interpretation arises that it is a no-thingness. It is unmanifest.

That means there are no qualities in it. It has no qualities whatsoever. It is devoid of thought. Individuality comes to an end when it experiences Being, and we see that it is completely silent and it is empty of any features. So, we can see how you could arrive at a conclusion that this void is just vacuum.

This vacuum has no capacity then, at least intellectually, as I would consider an incorrect conclusion about this state, that it has no capacity to connect anything. In the Vedic worldview, it’s also considered a no-thingness, but it is no-thing, meaning unmanifest.

[23:29] Sap in Expressed Form

Just like the colorless sap in a flower, which, although colorless, gives rise to and expresses itself as every aspect of the flower. And so, a flower could have a green stem and a thorn, and yellow petals and sepals that enclose those petals, and all kinds of leaves and features of the flower.

Although those things are individualistic, they nonetheless all derive from one unmanifest colorless sap, and that one unmanifest, colorless sap is akin to what we call Being, or Brahman, Totality. Though colorless, it’s not a vacuum, and all aspects of the flower actually are sap in expressed form.

Sap in expressed form. In its unexpressed form, colorless. In expressed form, it could be a thorn with a point on it. In its expressed form, sap can be a yellow soft petal. In its expressed form, sap can be a fragrance. In its expressed form, sap can be a leaf, stem, or root, but it’s all sap. The whole thing is sap.

This is the Vedic worldview about the least excited state of consciousness, Being. That Being is not a void, nor is it the end of existence. It’s not a non-existence. It is a fullness. It’s fullness and wholeness. It has in it all the potential for everything that exists. Everything that exists emerges from it.

[25:15] The Unmanifest Field of Pure Potentiality

And so, we have a similar concept in modern physics in the Unified Field. The Unified Field, sometimes referred to as the quantum field, although, in fact, there’s a difference between the two. The Unified Field, or quantum field, is the unmanifest field of pure potentiality. It has all possible wave functions in it, which then can collapse into individual particulate forms such as quarks, leptons, nuclei, protons, neutrons, atoms, all the combinations of those making molecules.

All the combinations of those making the physical world as we are able to perceive it with our macroscopic viewpoint through the human eye. So, the world is made up of particles that aren’t actually particles in their final analysis. They’re wave functions, which are waves of something. A wave is always a wave of a thing, a medium.

If there are waves on the ocean, fine, they’re waves of the salt water of the ocean. So, when we see a wave function, it cannot be a wave of nothingness. It’s a wave that is an undulation of a transcendent medium.

That transcendent medium, although transcendental, beyond, nonetheless, is a something. So, we call it the fullness, not the emptiness. We don’t refer to it as a void, although it is devoid of individual features. It is the colorless sap, as it were, of the entire Universe.

[27:02] The Origin of Tibetan Buddhism

And that one indivisible whole consciousness state then, consequently, must also be you, my dear listeners and viewers, it must be you. This is the Vedic worldview: if there is one thing that is omnipresent, then all things are that thing, right? Omnipresent means omni. It means absolutely everywhere.

So in the Buddhist worldview, particularly in the Tibetan Buddhist worldview, as it has been espoused by my friend, the Dalai Lama, I consider him to be a friend, there’s no connectivity. Though there are undulations or wave functions, there are individual people, there’s nothing connecting them.

So, when we talk about going deep into meditation and awakening the Unified Field, from the Tibetan Buddhist point of view, all you’re doing is making yourself quiet and calm, and that’s good.

They don’t disapprove of the fact that we practice Vedic Meditation, but they don’t agree that we’re experiencing anything like a Unified Field. From their perspective, we’re just quieting down. The most important thing, as I asked the Dalai Lama to describe to me what he does in his meditation, he says he prays to Tara.

Tara is the feminine deity that grants all good. She is the bonum bonum, the ultimate good of Tibetan Buddhism, a deity who existed in the Tibetan culture prior to Tibetans becoming Buddhist. 

Tibetans only became Buddhists a relatively few hundred years ago, when the first Tibetan Animist went down to Varanasi, the same city the Shakya Muni went to, and began studying the Shastras, and then came back from Varanasi and brought his version of Buddhism to Tibet. He became the first Tibetan Buddhist.

[29:10] The Many Faces of Buddhism

And since that time, a few hundred years ago, Buddhism as it has become, and as it does in every country in which it exists. Chinese Buddhism, where the Buddha is fat with large ear lobes, shaven head, always laughing and jolly, and if you rub his tummy, you get money. There’s a few other things besides that. The Japanese Buddha looks exactly like a Japanese man. The Burmese Buddha looks exactly like a Burmese person, as you would expect. 

Cambodian Buddha is absolutely Cambodian. In India, Buddha is portrayed probably the closest to the way he actually looked, which was a North Indian. He looks like an Indian in the statuary of India. In Nepal, he looks Nepalese. 

What happened with the teachings of Buddha is that they were fit around a body of knowledge that was already extant, mostly animism, various kinds of ideas of individual statuses and structures all having consciousness, and then Buddhism added to this, giving the local flavor of Buddhism. So, Tibetan Buddhism, Burmese Buddhism, Japanese Buddhism, and so on, and so on, and so on.

[30:31] Buddha Didn’t Teach That

So, we have a very interesting relationship in Veda with Buddhism, although we consider Buddha, the historic Buddha, Shakya Muni, to have been, in fact, a teacher of Vedic knowledge who taught transcendence. He taught his students how to meditate and how to go beyond thought.

From our perspective, he was teaching what we’re teaching. But that was a long time ago, so 2,600 some years ago, and we have to acknowledge what happens in the long corridor of time and how time can change things.

One of those changes is very interesting for me to report. In my discussions with the Abbott of the Thai Buddhist Church, we went through the Shastras, and one of the areas of disagreement that he and I had was that in the Vedic worldview, we say that desires are the Universe causing the individual to move in the direction of evolution.

That desires are seeded, where we’re spelling it, S-E-E-D-E-D, seeded. Desires are seeded into human consciousness by Universal Intelligence, in order to sprout as desires that cause an individual to move forward in ways that will be progressive and evolutionary. That desires are to be fulfilled because they are the means whereby an individual becomes an agent of progressive change.

When I raised that with the Abbott, his reaction was, “No, no, no, no. Buddha didn’t teach that.”

I said, “I think he did.”

He said, “No, no, he didn’t. He taught that desires are the cause of suffering. That if you have a desire, you need to defeat the tendency to have desires.”

And I said, “Where does it say so?”

[32:36] The Source of All Suffering

He goes, “The Shastras.” So he called to his juniors, and they brought some dusty old books, and we dusted them off and read these particular lines, and it was written in Pali. Pali is the first child of Sanskrit, and his interpreter interpreted for us, and what the sentence actually said was, “Authorship of desire is the source of all suffering.”

I pointed out to His Holiness, “The noun, the operative noun in this sentence is authorship, not desire. It is taking authorship of desire that causes people to suffer. That is to say, it’s my desire, and I’m going to get fulfilled by fulfilling the desire.”

The Vedic worldview teaches you that if you authorize or take authorship of a desire, then you suffer from the delusion that that desire appeared for you to gain fulfillment, which it did not.

That desire appeared to you as an instruction of where to move yourself in order to be an agent of progressive change. When you authorize or take authorship of a desire, then it causes you to expect that the fulfilling of a desire is going to bring you fulfillment. This is wrong. This is the source of all suffering. That you’re going to gain fulfillment by simply fulfilling desires, which is palpably untrue.

So, Buddha was warning against authorship of desires, taking authorship, rather than saying Nature is the author. To say individuality is the author is a guarantee of suffering. So, we have suffering caused by authorship rather than suffering caused by desire.

And the Abbott looked at me, and with his, he had a beautiful clipped Oxford accent because he was educated at Eton, and went on to be educated at Oxford. This was the Abbott in the 1980s. He said to me, with a smile and that beautiful accent, “I never thought of this.” So we became friends right on the spot.

[35:03] Everything is One

We have… our Vedic worldview is able to take the Shastras of Buddha and demonstrate that, in fact, what he was teaching is what we’re teaching. 

Modern interpretations of what he was teaching very often are relatively recent contemplations. Relatively recent could even be 500 years. From our perspective in Veda, we consider 500 years or a thousand years to be relatively recent. The Johnny-come-lately thinkers are the ones who sprouted about a thousand years ago during the time of William the Conqueror. 

We have the advantage, for which we’re extremely grateful and humbled, of having had more thousands of years to think about all these things and to experience directly, have the direct experience of the fullness of the internal transcendence state, and to see evidence of, we wouldn’t even say connectivity because we’re very specific philosophers.

We don’t say that everything’s connected. We say that everything is One, in the following ways. You know, if you see waves on an ocean, you can say they’re all connected by the ocean, but it’s not actually quite true. There’s no screws, there’s no nails, there’s no tape connecting waves to the ocean. Waves are the ocean. Waves are undulations of the one indivisible wholeness. It is One, but it does undulate.

Brahman, Totality, is One, but it undulates. It is undulating Oneness. So, the fact that it undulates doesn’t mean that the undulating bits are connected to the wholeness that underlies them. They are all one thing, actually. It’s all One. This is the Vedic worldview. There are no two things.

[37:12] What Buddha Was Actually Teaching

This also happens to be the worldview of the most successful theory ever in modern science, quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics tells us there are no particles. Particles come into existence by us attempting to measure them.

Particles don’t exist unless there’s an observer, that there is one indivisible wholeness, and the particles are the undulations of the Oneness. So, we don’t really like the word connected. We like the word Oneness. There’s Oneness. Everything is Oneness.

There are those elements of Oneness, which you might experience as extended Oneness, extended Self, and there are those elements of Oneness, which are less extended than that.

But like my toe down here is extended Self. If you step on my toe, I might say, “Ouch! You stepped on me. Me. That thing down there is me.”

“Oh, really? Oh, okay. I thought it was way down there.”

“No, it’s me.” So just like that, the Me-ness extends through all things, and there is a state of consciousness, Unity Consciousness by name, in which one experiences Self extending into all things, meaning that there’s actually only one indivisible whole thing, and you are It.

This is ultimately what the Vedic worldview is telling you. There’s really actually only one indivisible whole thing, and you and everything else, you are It, and everything else is It.

Sarvam Khalvidam Brahma. That means absolutely everything you can conceive of is nothing but that Oneness, that Oneness.

So, this provides us with some distinctions between what Buddhism has become, the ism of Buddha. The Buddha, who was the Shakya Muni, what Buddhism has become compared with what Buddha himself actually was teaching.

The next episode of the Vedic Worldview will be a questions arising episode where listeners pose follow-up questions in relation to this episode.