Every metaphysical attempt contains a moment of impossibility. For Advaita, the entire phenomenological world possesses an ontologically indeterminate character. To even attempt to explain why it exists in the way in which it does is futile. To attempt to find a locus (āśraya) for māyā is to presuppose māyā; the point is to go beyond. The entire world, in Advaita, is an impossible moment.
Qualified non-dualisms attempt to ground the world as a real thing, but suffer the need to explain the inherence relation itself, without conceding a changing God and losing divine simplicity. The best attempt here is an ‘inconceivable oneness-and-difference’: again we find an impossible moment.
Dualisms presuppose the world, which is some kind of progress. But the impossibility here is twofold: firstly, underdetermining the conditions of disclosure – we do not make contact with the world outside of our experience, thus the fact of our experience is at minimum epistemologically prior to the contents of our experience. Secondly, a problem of interaction. How can two eternally co-existent reals make contact in a way that does not compromise their separation? What stimulates their interaction at all?
Integral monisms, like Trika Śaivism, come very close. They maintain an unblemished absolute but also give us an account of the world; there is a ‘why’. But this why, the līlā of Śiva, necessitates an intentionality in the absolute. Here too there is a twofold impossibility. Firstly, what is the nature of this intentionality? They argue for vimarśa, a dynamic, non-objective self-reflexivity. But if it is a mode of knowing that truly does not objectify its contents (on pain of a regress in subject), lies outside of time, then what truly separates it from the svaprakāśa, the implicit self-luminosity, of the Advaitin? The ‘dynamism’ and ‘reflexivity’ seem to lack any semantic referent.
Secondly, there is the problem of the ‘real appearance’. Abhinavagupta attempts to thread his needle between pariṇāmavāda (a real transformation of the absolute) and adhyāsa (illusory superimposition atop the absolute). For Abhinava, the world is ābhāsa, a manifestation, like a glorious city appearing in a mirror. Interestingly, Advaita itself uses the very same metaphor to demonstrate the unreality of the world. What separates them? Why is what is false to one school taken to be real to the other? For Abhinavagupta, the answer is will. It is a wilful and playful self-manifestation, thus collapsing upwards to the first impossible moment, that of the true semantic content of vimarśa. The answer, to Abhinava, is svātantrya, a kind of inexplicable and unbounded freedom. Why should Śiva be restricted to the laws of logic? Here again we see an acknowledgement of impossibility.
This leads us to the wisdom of the Buddha. All of the above schools, in one way or another, acknowledge acinteyya: the unthinkable, incomprehensible, impenetrable, that which transcends the limits of thinking. But he alone puts forward the idea that they should not be pondered; that they distract from practice, and hinder the attainment of liberation. It is supremely difficult to seek answers to these questions. But it is harder still to content oneself with silence.