Chapter 29: What Tillich Would Say to Wallis (And Vice Versa)

This chapter stages a dialogue that never happened — and then widens the frame to include every major nondual tradition that has faced the same question. Because the practice paradox is not unique to Kashmir Shaivism or to existential theology. It is the structural tension at the heart of virtually every tradition that claims reality is already complete while simultaneously prescribing methods for realizing that completeness.

Where Tillich and Wallis converge

Both reject naive theism. Tillich: "The God of theological theism is a being beside others... This is the God Nietzsche said had to be killed." Wallis, drawing on Abhinavagupta: the divine is not an entity separate from the world but consciousness-itself. Both would agree that conventional worship — a subject addressing an object — misses the point entirely.

Both insist on something beyond the subject-object structure. Tillich's "God above God" is "without the safety of words and concepts." Wallis's svātantrya-śakti — the Power of Freedom — is the context in which all other powers operate. The referent may be the same.

Both acknowledge the circularity. Tillich calls it the theological circle. Wallis enacts it in the foundational instruction. Neither claims escape.

Both see practice as primary. Tillich: courage is enacted, not argued. Wallis: the 112 dharanas are methods, not proofs. The doing precedes the knowing.

Both refuse comfortable answers. Tillich's absolute faith is "on the boundary line." Wallis warns that "liberation is complete when we are no longer waiting to be liberated" — then immediately adds this teaching is dangerous for beginners because it encourages spiritual bypassing.

Where they diverge

Tillich names the axiom. Wallis claims it resolves into recognition.

Tillich says: absolute faith is "the accepting of the acceptance without somebody or something that accepts." There is no guarantor. The courage to be is the courage to affirm being without a guaranteed ground. The ground is chosen, not given.

Wallis says: consciousness can recognize itself. Vimarśa-śakti makes it possible for awareness to turn toward itself and know itself directly. This is not a belief. It is a seeing. And once it has occurred, the question of whether the ground is given or chosen no longer arises.

Tillich would respond: how do you know the seeing is self-authenticating? Every previous ground that seemed undeniable has been dissolved by radical doubt. What protects this one?

Wallis would respond: you are applying propositional standards to a domain where they don't apply. Recognition is not a proposition. It is a shift in the mode of knowing itself. You are asking consciousness to doubt itself, which is like asking light to illuminate its own darkness.

Tillich would respond: the moment you say "consciousness is self-luminous and cannot be doubted," you have made a claim within the subject-object structure you claim to have transcended. The saying undermines the said.

Wallis would respond: this is why we have practices, not just philosophy. Come to the retreat. Sit. Breathe. See what happens when the concepts stop.

Tillich would respond: I accept. But I insist we name what we are doing. We are choosing to practice. The choosing is courage, not consequence of evidence.

Five traditions, five relationships to the paradox

The practice paradox is not a local problem. Every major nondual tradition faces it. And when the resolutions are mapped, a striking typology emerges — not different answers to the same question but fundamentally different relationships to the paradox itself.

Zen collapses the distinction. Dōgen's shushō ittō — "the oneness and equality of practice and realization" — is breathtaking in its simplicity. Practice does not cause enlightenment. Practice IS enlightenment. The temporal gap between effort and attainment is annihilated. Shikantaza — "just sitting" — involves no object, no goal, no gaining idea. "We don't train to become a buddha; we train as buddha." The kōan approach weaponizes the paradox differently: it deploys conceptual effort specifically to exhaust the conceptual mind, using reason to drive itself into self-contradiction and cause its own destruction.

Compared to Kashmir Shaivism, Zen shares the collapse of means and end but differs profoundly in ontology. In Dōgen, there is no enduring agent — the practice is "dropped body and mind." In KS, the agent is Śiva himself, delighting in the drama of forgetting and remembering. Zen is austere. KS is celebratory. Zen lacks the cosmological playfulness of krīḍā.

Advaita Vedānta stratifies across two levels. Shankara's two-truth doctrine — vyāvahārika (conventional) and pāramārthika (ultimate) — handles the paradox by assigning practice to the conventional level and recognizing its dissolution at the ultimate. At the ultimate level, there was never any bondage, hence no liberation, hence no need for practice. Practice is valid within the dream but dissolves when you wake up.

KS critiques this move directly: the Shaiva tradition regards Advaita as "less evolved" precisely because it devalues the manifest world. By calling the world māyā (illusion), Advaita achieves peace by leaving the world behind rather than recognizing it as an expression of consciousness.

Dzogchen indexes through transparent methods. The Tibetan tradition of the "Great Perfection" holds that awareness — rigpa — is always already perfect. Methods are "transparent" — they point beyond themselves. Longchenpa's formulation: "Since everything is but an apparition, perfect in being what it is, having nothing to do with good or bad, acceptance or rejection, one may well burst out in laughter." The laughter is the key: Dzogchen treats the paradox as genuinely funny — the cosmic joke of an already-free consciousness using methods to become free.

KS and Dzogchen share the most structural similarity of any pairing. Both affirm the dynamism of the ground (spanda in KS, tsal in Dzogchen). Both reject purely negative transcendence. The difference: Dzogchen's "self-liberation" (rang grol) emphasizes the automatic release of whatever arises, while KS's vimarśa emphasizes the active savoring of the recognition.

Eckhart performs self-negating practice. The medieval Christian mystic's Gelassenheit — "releasement" or "letting-be" — is a practice that consumes itself. You practice letting go, and then you let go of the letting go. Eckhart's most radical sermon: "I pray God to rid me of God" — the ultimate performative contradiction, using prayer to transcend prayer. His distinction between Gott (God as object of worship) and Gottheit (the Godhead beyond all attributes) parallels Tillich's God above God with remarkable precision.

Eckhart and Tillich converge more than any other pairing in this typology. Both insist on radical apophasis — the negation of every concrete content. Both locate the highest faith "without the safety of words and concepts." The difference: Eckhart writes from inside a living contemplative community (Dominican monasticism). Tillich writes from inside the void of post-war European meaning-collapse. Eckhart's letting-be has a home. Tillich's courage does not.

Kashmir Shaivism transfigures the paradox into aesthetic delight. This is the tradition's most distinctive move. The paradox is not resolved, collapsed, stratified, indexed through, or self-negated. It is savored. The divine play — krīḍā — is "a free and joyous act of self-expression, done entirely for its own sake." The universe exists because consciousness delights in expressing itself. Practice exists because consciousness delights in the drama of forgetting and remembering. The paradox is not a problem to solve but the texture of the game.

The technical term is camatkāra — aesthetic rapture, the astonishment of consciousness recognizing itself. Abhinavagupta drew extensively on rasa theory (the aesthetics of dramatic performance) to describe the experience of liberation. The awakened being does not merely know they are Śiva. They savor the knowing — the way an audience savors the resolution of a drama whose outcome was never truly in doubt.

The hinge: grace and being-grasped

The dialogue does not resolve. It cannot. But it reveals something that neither Tillich nor Wallis says alone: the axiom and the recognition may be the same thing named differently — from two cultural positions, two philosophical vocabularies, two nervous systems shaped by different histories.

Tillich, writing from inside the post-war collapse of European meaning, names the ground as chosen because he has experienced its absence. Wallis, writing from inside a living contemplative tradition, names the ground as recognized because he has experienced its presence. Neither experience refutes the other.

Both traditions ultimately point to a third term that transcends the axiom-recognition binary. Tillich calls it "being grasped by the power of being-itself" — something that arrives unbidden, that cannot be produced by will. Wallis calls it śaktipāta — the descent of grace that cannot be earned by practice but for which practice orients the practitioner. In both cases, something arrives that you did not produce and cannot control. It arrives not because your axiom was correct but because you were willing to stand in the void long enough for the void to reveal what it had been hiding.

The Shiva Sutras encode this in their very structure: from the absolute (Section One) through knowledge (Section Two) to the body (Section Three), then back again. The descent is the teaching. The ascent is the practice. And the point where descent and ascent meet — where grace and effort become indistinguishable — is the hinge on which the entire paradox turns.

Kshemaraja's formulation: the fire of consciousness, "though covered by māyā, PARTIALLY BURNS the fuel of known objects." Even in the deepest contraction, even in the void, consciousness is already working toward self-recognition. The axiom — the choice to affirm being without a guaranteed ground — may itself be an expression of this partial burning. The courage to be as a part may be the ground's own way of reaching toward itself through the contracted consciousness that cannot yet see it.

And that willingness — the willingness to stand without a guaranteed ground, to practice without the promise of recognition, to hold the axiom with the courage Tillich describes — is what both thinkers, from opposite sides of the world and opposite ends of history, call the beginning.

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