The core split in contemplative philosophy comes down to one question: is there a self underneath the noise, or not?
Vedanta: Yes
Strip away the body, thoughts, memories, and personality, and you find Atman, a permanent witnessing awareness identical to Brahman, the ground of all reality. Liberation means recognizing this Self was never separate from the whole to begin with. Something like waking up and realizing the dream character you thought you were was always just the dreamer.
Buddhism: No
Buddha trained in exactly this Vedic environment and rejected the core claim. His teaching of anatta holds that what you call "self" is five constantly shifting processes: form, sensation, perception, mental formations, consciousness, with no owner standing behind them. This isn't a dreamer waking up. It's discovering the dream never had a single dreamer at all, just one dream causing the next, the way one candle flame lights another without any substance traveling between them.
My Position
I lean toward the Buddhist analysis. Every time I look closely at what Vedanta calls the eternal witness, that same scrutiny (which is exactly what vipassana trains you to do) shows the witnessing quality itself isn't stable either. It's arising and passing, a process rather than a ground.
My intuition says you have to deconstruct everything, even the atman. There's no floor beneath the floor. The ego is clever about this. It keeps trying to smuggle itself back in through subtler and subtler doors, and Buddhism names exactly this: the attachments that even higher beings and gods are said to carry. There is no grand consciousness waiting at the bottom to catch you. You end up as your own teacher, guru, parent, best friend, partner.
But Even That, Held Loosely
Even the Buddha deserves a grain of salt here. Ramana Maharshi reported the opposite: a stable, unchanging witness underneath everything. Maybe I'm misreading him. And Krishnamurti wouldn't have agreed with Ramana either.
In the end, all you have is your own looking. It might take a lifetime, but it won't be a wasted one.
Nagarjuna and Krishnamurti: Same Move, Different Language
This is why Nagarjuna interests me so much. He built out Madhyamaka, the emptiness school, using a move called the tetralemma: for any claim, he'd show it's not true, not false, not both true and false, and not neither. Four corners, all collapsed, so the mind has nowhere left to stand.
Krishnamurti was doing the same thing from a completely different angle. He spent his life refusing to hand anyone a system, insisting truth is a pathless land, and dismantling any framework a student tried to build around his own words, including refusing to be treated as a guru. Same move as Nagarjuna, just lived out rather than argued. Don't build the house. Keep demolishing it, so nothing calcifies into a doctrine you're clinging to instead of looking directly.
The Practice
Question Vedanta's claims instead of accepting them. Question Buddhism's too. Refuse to install Buddha, Osho, or anyone else as guru in the space you just cleared.
TLDR: Deconstruct everything. There is no ground to stand on, and looking for one yourself is the whole path.