People often ask me whether Dzogchen and Advaita Vedānta are “basically the same thing.” I have been practicing both for forty years, and the short answer is no. But the longer answer is more interesting than the disagreement.
The two traditions come from different philosophical worlds. They use different languages, different methods, and sometimes frame experience in ways that flatly contradict each other. What has surprised me, over decades of sitting with both, is where they end up. Not in agreement exactly, but in a kind of mutual transparency that neither tradition’s vocabulary quite accounts for.
## The View: Where They Start
Advaita Vedānta begins with a proposition: Brahman alone is real; the world is appearance; the individual self is none other than Brahman. You’re not asked to believe this. You’re asked to check. The method is analytical. You discriminate (viveka) between what is real and what is layered on top, examining experience carefully until you notice that the witness of all experience is itself unchanging, unborn, and without a second. Śaṅkara, the eighth-century teacher whose commentaries gave Advaita its systematic form, was explicit: this is not a matter of belief. It is a matter of direct verification through sustained inquiry.
Dzogchen starts somewhere else entirely. There’s no proposition. There’s an introduction. The Nyingma tradition calls it rigpa’i ngo sprod, the direct pointing-out of the nature of mind. The teacher doesn’t explain anything. They show you what’s already the case: awareness in its natural state, never obscured, needing no improvement. You don’t arrive at the Dzogchen view through reasoning. Someone points, and either you see it or you don’t. Then you learn to see it again, and again, until it holds. Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, one of the great Nyingma masters of the twentieth century, described it as simply resting in the nature of mind without fabrication, without adding anything or taking anything away.
This difference matters more than people think. Vedānta works through understanding. Dzogchen works through recognition. One sharpens the intellect to a fine point and then lets it dissolve. The other skips the intellect and goes straight for what’s looking.
## The Method: What You Actually Do
In Advaita, the main practice is ātma-vicāra, self-inquiry. You ask, in one form or another, “Who am I?” or “What is this ‘I’ that seems to be having experience?” It’s not a philosophical question. You turn attention back on itself and watch the sense of a separate self dissolve. You also study texts: the Upaniṣads, the Brahma Sūtras, Śaṅkara’s commentaries. But the study isn’t for accumulating knowledge. It has three stages: śravaṇa (hearing), manana (reflecting), and nididhyāsana (deep contemplation). The texts are tools for looking, not reading.
Dzogchen practice has a different shape. After the initial recognition of rigpa, you practice trekchö, which translates roughly as “cutting through.” In practical terms it means resting in the natural state without distraction and without meditating. You don’t do anything. The practice is to stop fabricating. Dilgo Khyentse taught that in trekchö, one does not follow the past, does not anticipate the future, and does not alter the present moment. There’s also tögal in more advanced stages, which involves subtle luminous experience, but the foundation never changes: remain in what you already are, without adding anything.
Something I’ve noticed over the years: the Vedāntic method, because it works through understanding, builds a kind of philosophical sturdiness. When you’re confused or agitated, you can fall back on discrimination. It gives you something to do. Dzogchen depends on a more immediate recognition that can feel flimsy in the early years. You sit there wondering whether you’re resting in rigpa or just spacing out. But when the recognition does stabilize, it has an effortlessness that inquiry, with all its turning and questioning, doesn’t always arrive at.
## Where They Actually Disagree
There are real divergences here, and I don’t think it helps to smooth them over.
Classical Advaita holds that the world is mithyā: not completely unreal, but not ultimately real either. It has a dependent, appearance-like status, the way a dream has a kind of reality while you’re in it. Śaṅkara’s method is adhyāropa-apavāda: deliberate superimposition followed by its removal. You use the teaching framework itself as a ladder, and then you set the ladder down. The goal is to see through the superimposition of names and forms to the substratum (Brahman). There’s a subtle but persistent orientation toward the formless in this.
Dzogchen doesn’t work this way at all. Appearances aren’t something to see through. They’re the display (rolpa) of awareness itself. Thoughts, emotions, perceptions aren’t obstacles or illusions. They’re the self-expression of the natural state. You don’t transcend anything. You recognize that everything, exactly as it shows up, is already what you are. Dilgo Khyentse put it simply: all that arises is the display of rigpa. Nothing needs to be rejected.
This has real consequences in practice. I spent years in the Vedāntic mode and developed a subtle dissociation that I didn’t recognize at the time. I was “witnessing” everything from a slight remove, and I thought that was the point. I remember a period in my early forties when my wife said I seemed absent even when I was in the room. She was right, though I couldn’t hear it then. Dzogchen corrected this. Its insistence on including everything as display brought me back into embodied life in a way that pure inquiry hadn’t. On the other hand, I’ve met Dzogchen practitioners who rest in a kind of pleasant, spacious vagueness that lacks any rigor. They could use some Vedānta.
## Where They Converge
After enough years, something happens that I wasn’t expecting and that neither set of texts quite describes. The inquiry and the recognition start to feel like two ways of talking about the same moment. Self-inquiry, carried far enough, stops being inquiry and becomes a simple resting. The recognition of rigpa, sustained long enough, reveals something that looks a lot like understanding, though it didn’t come through the intellect.
The way I’d put it now: Vedānta gave me the grammar. Dzogchen gave me the silence between the words. I seem to have needed both. The grammar without the silence became arid. The silence without the grammar was formless, and I kept getting lost in it.
I trace this whole arc in Nothing in the Way: how the witnessing became withdrawal, how a five-year-old’s question showed me what twenty years of practice hadn’t, and what brought me back. The book follows this convergence across four decades and ten verses of Śaṅkara, through specific arguments and specific kitchens and the particular silence that holds both traditions when you stop keeping score.
## For Those Practicing in Both
If you’re drawn to both paths, as I was and still am, here is what I’d say after forty years: don’t merge them prematurely. Let each one speak in its own voice. Practice Vedāntic inquiry with full rigor. Practice Dzogchen with full trust. The connections will show up on their own, not because you built them but because they were already there.
And be patient. The convergence can’t be reached by reading about it. It comes out of years of practice, and it moves at its own pace, which is always slower than you’d like.
Rahul Bhaskar’s memoir, Nothing in the Way, traces four decades across Advaita Vedānta and Nyingma Dzogchen.