There and Back Again: The Unity of Samsara and Nirvana in Tantric and Zen Buddhism

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The Four Noble Truths are the spiritual, metaphysical, and ethical grounding for Buddhism. They succinctly outline the nature of our existence as suffering, and offer a pragmatic way of transcending this condition, via the Noble Eightfold Path. This path is a journey that takes a being out of the realm of Samsara and into Nirvana. Samsara is conditioned, illusory and cyclic existence. It is characterized by deep-rooted ignorance, which manifests as seeing the world as a plurality of sensory objects that are separate from oneself.[1] Nirvana is attained when dualistic thinking is transcended, and the mind is freed from all karmic conditioning. While these states seem diametrically opposed, their inseparability is postulated in many occult texts, particularly those belonging to the Vajrayana and Zen Buddhist schools. I will be investigating the journey towards enlightenment that Tantric and Zen practitioners undertake. While both traditions hold that Samsara and Nirvana are fundamentally inseparable, the journeys from ignorance to realization are vastly different. I will argue that the journey of a Tantrika is a transformative process of experiencing the realm of duality in its fullest, and then transcending it. Whereas the Zen journey…