# Light and Silence: 8 The boundary between knowing and unknowing is not a sharp line, but a kind of twilight—a space where certainty wavers and dissolves into question. We speak of light as if it reveals all things, yet light itself creates shadow. Every illumination is also an obscuring. This is the paradox that philosophy must acknowledge: that to see clearly is sometimes to see more deeply into what cannot be seen. The mind seeks certainty the way a plant seeks sun. It stretches toward definite answers, toward the solid ground of knowledge. But perhaps there are truths that cannot be grasped in the hand, only in the hollow of an open palm. The mystics knew this. They spoke in riddles not because they were obscure, but because some knowledge exists only in the space between question and silence. Language itself betrays us. Words are vessels, and most truths are liquids—they shift shape according to their container. We pour the infinite into finite words and wonder why something essential always spills over. The great teachers have always known that their finest teaching lies in what they do not say, in the breath between sentences, in the pause that invites the listener to complete the thought within themselves. To sit in silence is not to abandon the search for meaning. It is, perhaps, to search in a different way—not by grasping, but by listening. Not by building structures of thought, but by allowing thought itself to settle, the way sediment falls through clear water, revealing the depths below. In this listening, we may find something that words can never capture: the presence of being itself, quiet and complete, needing no explanation.

Kabir, Nanak, and the Sant Tradition: The Folk Voice at the Boundary of Vedanta and Buddhism

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, northern India witnessed a remarkable spiritual movement—the Sant tradition—which transcended the boundaries of Vedantic, Buddhist, and Sufi thought and charted a new path. Two principal voices of this movement stand out: Kabir (c. 1398–1518), a weaver of Varanasi, who criticized Hindu pandits and Muslim mullahs with equal sharpness; and Guru Nanak (1469–1539), founder of Sikhism, who absorbed the essence of both Hindu and Muslim traditions into his own philosophy.


This beginning mapped a particular intellectual and spiritual geography. The word "boundary" here carries profound significance. A boundary is a region where no single identity can achieve absolute dominion. There, language mingles, symbols merge, metaphors blend, modes of practice fuse. The Sant tradition is precisely such a spiritual borderland, where the rigid scaffolding of scripture grows tender, the theoretically erected walls of philosophy become somewhat blurred, and the human soul's living experience finds a voice in a wholly new idiom. In both Kabir and Nanak, there is no dogmatic philosopher's tone; instead, there speaks the voice of a seeker who knows doctrine but refuses to be confined by it. They embrace the vital force within religious identity while shattering its institutional rigidity. Consequently, the Sant tradition is not merely a devotional stream; it is also an inner-worldly protest born from the weariness of scriptural disputation.


Kabir's dohas—couplets of devastating simplicity—resonate with echoes of both Vedanta and Buddhism. On one side: "Moако kahāṁ ḍhūndhe re bande, main to tere pās mein"—"Where do you search for me, O devotee? I am here, beside you." This is the folk echo of the Upanishadic "Tat Tvam Asi"—thou art that—God is not distant, but dwells within you. Yet simultaneously, on another front: "Pothi padhi padhi jag muya, pandit bhaya na koi"—"The world has perished reading books; no one became wise thereby." This resonates profoundly with Bodhidharma's teaching of a "special transmission outside the scriptures"—truth cannot be found in pages alone; truth arrives through direct experience.


When these two dohas are placed side by side, Kabir's singularity becomes apparent. In the first, he brings transcendence down into immanence. God is not some distant celestial being; He is the nearest, the most intimate, present even within your own unrecognized self. This note is undoubtedly Upanishadic, for the Upanishads too teach us not to run outward but to return to the consciousness-self within. Yet in the second doha, Kabir wields an entirely different blade—here he strikes at religious erudition, textual knowledge, memorized scriptures, and the vanity of eloquence. His question cuts: What good are words heaped upon paper? Has anything awakened within? In this question, his voice aligns with the meditative Buddhist tradition, particularly those schools that teach: words are but a finger pointing at the moon, not the moon itself. Truth can be pointed to, but cannot be grasped by concepts alone. Thus within Kabir dwells both the Vedantic call to inner truth and the Buddhist demand for direct realization. He does not theoretically reconcile these two traditions; rather, he translates their operative truth into the vernacular speech of spiritual life.


The Sant tradition shows no interest in philosophical disputation—whether the soul exists or not, whether Brahman is saguna or nirguna, whether nirvana is equivalent to moksha—these are mere "pandits' jargon" to them. Their single, piercing question is simple: Have you reached authentic experience, or are you merely speaking? At the outset of the Japji Sahib—the foundational hymn of the Sikh scripture, the Guru Granth Sahib—Guru Nanak declares: "Ik Onkar, Sat Naam"—"One God, Truth is His Name"—an echo of Vedantic monotheism.

But then in the very next line: “sochai soch na hobi, je sochi lakh bar”—”even thinking a hundred thousand times, truth is not found through thought”—this echoes Buddhist wisdom: ultimate reality cannot be reached through thinking (debate, reflection, reasoning).

This passage clarifies the Sant tradition’s epistemological position. Here, truth itself is not denied; rather, the wrong path to truth is rejected. Scholastic philosophy often privileges ontological questions—what is the soul, what is the world, does ultimate being exist, how is liberation metaphysically comprehensible. The Sants do not dismiss these questions, but they say: humans are far too easily lost within them. Words, arguments, analysis, disagreement, hierarchies—there is no end to them; and human pride finds its shelter precisely there. Nanak’s line “sochai soch na hobi” is therefore not against thinking; it is recognition of thinking’s boundary. It does not say that reflection is unnecessary; it says that reflection has its own limits. If ultimate truth is truly ultimate, it cannot be wholly imprisoned within conceptual frameworks. Here something true from both Vedanta and Buddhism converges in the Sant tradition: on one hand, the experience of unity; on the other, the Buddhist wisdom that analysis itself is not liberation. Thus the Sant tradition creates a folk-mystical position where philosophical doctrine is secondary, and direct experience holds the primary place.

The Sant tradition is therefore a “third path” in the debate between Vedanta and Buddhism—one of experience, not doctrine. In light of Glasenapp’s analysis, the Sant tradition seems to say: “You are both right and both wrong—because you are fighting over words, while truth lies beyond them.”

This notion of a “third path” demands particular clarification. It is not simple syncretism, where one would say, Vedanta is right, Buddhism is right, because all paths lead to the same place. The Sant tradition actually stands elsewhere. It says: at the level of argument, your disagreement is real; but at the level of life, your distance sometimes obscures spiritual truth. “Both are right”—because both urge humans to break through externality and go deeper. “Both are wrong”—because both sometimes confuse their own language with ultimate truth. This is why the Sant tradition may be called the voice of the folk at the borderland. Folk wisdom is not the enemy of philosophy; but it reminds us that philosophical truth, if it does not resonate within life, remains merely words. In the Sant tradition’s voice, the demand for that life-resonance speaks with force.

**Whitehead’s Process Philosophy: The Buddhist Parallel in Western Form**

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947)—mathematician and philosopher of Cambridge and Harvard, co-author with Bertrand Russell of *Principia Mathematica*—in his *Process and Reality* (1929) proposes a philosophy that comes closest, among Western systems, to Buddhist metaphysics. Whitehead argues: the fundamental unit of reality is not some enduring “thing” (substance), but rather “actual occasions”—tiny momentary points of experience that arise in a moment and perish in a moment, conditioning what comes after. This bears remarkable resemblance to the Buddhist doctrine of momentariness (*kṣaṇavāda*, the “moment-doctrine”)—especially as taught in the Sarvastivada and Sautrantika schools. Buddhist metaphysics similarly holds that the fundamental unit of reality is “dharma”—transient processes that arise and perish in a moment. In both philosophies, enduring “substance” is rejected; both accept process as the ultimate form of reality.

The crux of this comparison lies in substance versus process. In the long Western philosophical tradition, especially since the Greeks, substance or enduring being has functioned as the fundamental explanatory principle of reality. Even to explain change, it has been assumed that something persists through transformation. Buddhism raises a fundamental objection to this notion. There, reality is fundamentally impermanent, dependent origination, and rests on no unchanging soul or material substance.

Whitehead’s philosophy similarly does not regard reality as constituted by discrete objects, but rather as composed of an ongoing stream of events. The concept of “actual occasions” is crucial precisely because it transforms ontology into experiential philosophy. The world is no longer a heap of static entities; it is a web of events, a web of response and counter-response, a web of becoming. The resemblance to the Buddhist notion of “dharma” lies exactly here: for both, reality is fundamentally dynamic, fleeting, and relational. Thus this section seeks to demonstrate that Buddhist insight is not confined merely to India’s spiritual history; certain Western thinkers too have arrived at a vision in which process-oriented reality, rather than enduring substance, becomes paramount.

Yet Whitehead’s philosophy contains a concept of “God”—his God is not the conventional omnipotent deity, but rather an entity that co-evolves with the world—which is entirely absent from Buddhist philosophy. The American philosopher David Loy, in his *A Buddhist History of the West* (2002), has analyzed in detail the Whitehead-Buddhist parallel—showing that “process philosophy” represents the closest Western intellectual reflection of Buddhist insight, even though no direct historical connection between the two can be established.

This restraint is crucial. To assume identity merely upon seeing resemblance is a grave intellectual error. Whitehead’s God is admittedly no biblical omnipotent Creator; but he is a cosmological principle that participates in some manner within the world’s ongoing unfoldment. Buddhist philosophy, especially in its foundational theological construction, presupposes no such divine entity. There is a chain of causation, there is moral consequence, there is transformation of consciousness, but there is no all-pervasive divine pole. For this reason, the ‘Whitehead-Buddhist comparison,’ though illuminating, is limited. It is a philosophical resonance, not a doctrinal equivalence. David Loy’s analysis too seeks chiefly to capture this resonance—namely, that the West too has produced thought that departs from entity-centered ontology and speaks instead in the language of flux, relation, event, and process. This resemblance matters because it shows that Buddhist insight is not some wholly exotic “Eastern” phenomenon; human intellect, in different places and different times, can generate similar thinking in response to similar predicaments. Yet the absence of historical connection reminds us again: parallel lines do not imply inheritance.

The Perennial Philosophy: Huxley, Schuon, and the Allure of Unity

Aldous Huxley’s *The Perennial Philosophy* (1945) and Frithjof Schuon’s *The Transcendent Unity of Religions* (1953) advance an arresting claim: at the root of all spiritual traditions lies a single truth—the *philosophia perennis* (“perennial philosophy”). Huxley argues: the sages of the Upanishads, the Buddha, Plotinus, Meister Eckhart, Sufi masters, Zen teachers—all speak of the same experience, merely in different tongues. Schuon maintains: each religion’s “exoteric form” differs, but the “esoteric truth” is one. This perspective expresses a beautiful spiritualized liberality—and appeals deeply to many, for it promises to transcend religious division and offer a universal truth in its stead.

The attraction of this position is easily grasped. Religious history is stained with bloodshed, discord, theological disputation, clashes of worship, and claims that “my path alone is true.” Against this, perennial philosophy brings a kind of solace. It insists that beneath the conflict lies unity; that though languages differ, the depths of experience are one.