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I shall first quote from the seventh section of the Buddhist work ‘Nirvana Has No Name’. This passage is quoted in case 91 of the ‘Book of Serenity’, and I use Thomas Cleary's translation thereof.

The mysterious Way is in ineffable enlightenment, enlightenment is in merging with reality, merging with reality involves seeing existence and nonexistence as equal, and when you see them equally, then others and self are not two. Therefore, heaven, earth, and I have the same root; the myriad things and I are one body. Being the same as me, they're no longer existent or nonexistent; if they were different from me, that would oppose communication. Therefore, neither going out nor being within, the Way subsists in between. (Here, “going out” means something like sending the focus outward to respond to external events, whereas “being within” means remaining in quiet contemplation, focus turned inward, in trance or similar state. Both of these can be forms of clinging, or attachment, so it is frequently emphasized that though you have to do both of them, neither of them constitute the Way or any kind of holy state.)

Wansong, the original author of the ‘Book of Serenity’ comments that “this indeed is talking about a dream”. He goes on to say:

I have talked of a dream: first there is someone who doesn't sleep; then there is sleep. Because of not awakening from sleep there are dreams: by dreams scenes are seen; based on these scenes you see the existence of another body applying discernment within the scenes. If you know the one who never sleeps, so many complications would be erased at a stroke.

I have heard this before, but never expressed in quite this way, and it made me realise that I have also heard this before in Western thought: specifically in the Cartesian principle.

Descartes realised that the only starting point for philosophy is that the thinker can perceive one thing: his own thoughts. Regardless of how much of a solipsist you are, whether you believe that the reports of your senses are illusory or faked or dreams or real or whatever, you have to believe in yourself as an entity, because if you don't, then who or what is it that disbelieves? Even if you're in a dream, if you're in someone else's dream, or if you're in a computer simulation, you must have some measure of existence to be able to consider the question at all. Once you've settled that question, you can go on to worry about sense data and where they come from and whether they reflect an objective reality and whether other people in that reality (if it exists) have the same kind of existence as you or some merely apparent existence, or whether you can even tell.

Buddhist teaching often starts by denying the existence of an essence, by saying that Buddha-nature neither exists nor doesn't exist, to dissuade students from thinking of whatever is there as a thing, a thing that can necessarily be described and said to exist or not exist in a meaningful way. This, I realise, is exactly in parallel to Descartes, and how students of his work are cautioned against the fallacy that “I think, therefore I am” means that the thinker is real in any of the ways that we think of reality in the everyday world — physical existence, or existence in the way computer programs or ideas exist — whereas what it in fact does is define a new type of existence.

And so, starting from this idea of unique existence, the existence beyond existence or nonexistence, beyond perception, it is a tiny step to proceed to universal existence in the same sense: regardless of whether people in my dream are real, they exist in the same way that I know I exist: “Being the same as me, they're no longer existent or nonexistent,” as it says above.

But Buddhism sets aside these outward presentations and goes inward, concentrating on what it is that is the key to this existence grounded on Descartes' self-insight (or prajñā, as it is called in the Sanskrit). First it is crucial to realise that every thinking (sentient is the usual term) being has the in-built capacity for prajñā, by definition. Then can one work on non-attachment, on using the prajñā-eye to see the emptiness of this thing that is neither existent nor nonexistent.

This notion of all things, “the myriad things and I”, sharing the same existence is not the same as the notion of all beings being one that is often described in science-fiction and fantasy works. Such works often feature a benevolent, pseudo-Buddhist character or culture, whose compassion grows out of a sense that as all living beings are ‘connected’, injuring or killing another person is like cutting off your own arm or leg. But as we saw above, the oneness, or suchness of all things is not quite in the same way that an arm and leg are one body: it is more like the way in which a strapping lad currently sitting GCSEs and thinking about his future; a young, sharp-witted, slightly pudgy chap doing SATs later this year; and a cynical computer scientist trying to decide who to work for next are, despite our surface differences, one fraternity.

In the same way, Wansong's comments on dreams are a metaphor, a teaching aid. They shouldn't be taken as meaning something like the old literary motif of “maybe I'm in a dream, how would I tell?” or as Geoffrey James put it in ‘The Tao of Programming’, “‘I don't know whether I am Turing dreaming that I am a machine, or a machine dreaming that I am Turing!’” The point is not to discriminate dreams and reality but that “wakefulness and dreaming are fundamentally nonexistent.” (Wansong again.)