/lit/ - Literature

>>17520703
>Has anyone actually disproven subjective idealism? If so, how?

Adi Shankara offered arguments against and in my opinion (as well as in the opinion of S. Dasgupta, who is no Shankara fanboy) conclusively refuted the subjective idealism of Yogachara Buddhists like Dharmakirti, which is summarized in the 2nd half of pic related. But I'm not sure whether these would apply to Berkeley's idealism because unlike Buddhist idealism there is an existing God in Berkley's idealism who ensures that everything exists by it being perceived in the mind of God, who then reveals them to us. And this makes me wonder whether Berkeley's system is misclassified as subjective idealism and whether it is really an ontological idealism in disguise or that it was maybe misunderstood as being subjective, because in subjective idealism things are not supposed to exist outside of us perceiving them, but if God perceives everything and grants it existence through that as Berkeley maintained, then I'm not sure why people classify his system as subjective idealism and not ontological idealism.

>>17516894
>Read the Buddhist philosophers like Dharmakirti
Dharmakirti was completely destroyed and BTFO forever by Shankaracharya (pbuh) as is shown by the second half of pic related which summarizes Shankaracharya’s (pbuh) incisive refutations of Dharmakirti

>>16181328
The early Upanishads predate Buddha, and Shankara destroyed Indian Buddhism, once Shankara’s brilliant refutations of Buddhist doctrine (pic related) began to be widely circulated throughout India, nobody could take Buddhism seriously anymore and it died out due to a lack of followers.

Here are Śaṅkarācārya's criticisms of Yogachara and Sarvastivada/Theravada where he explains in detail what is illogical about their ideas, he considered Madhyamaka to be below criticism as it doesn't offer sufficient proof of the unreality of everything, specifically he wrote "The third type of Buddhist doctrine that states that everything is void is contradicted by all means of right knowledge and thus requires no special refutation. This apparent world, whose existence is guaranteed by all means of knowledge, cannot be denied unless someone should discover some new truth (based on which he could impugn its existence) – for a general principle is proved by the absence of contrary instances. " Madhyamaka is mostly below criticism because it does not provide any clear proof of any truth whatsoever that would show everything is void, but if you'd like I can go into more detail on what I consider to be illogical about Madhyamaka beyond just what he said about it as I'm quite familiar with its many holes.

>>14990595
Here are Śaṅkarācārya's criticisms of Yogachara and Sarvastivada/Theravada where he explains in detail what is illogical about their ideas, he considered Madhyamaka to be below criticism as it doesn't offer sufficient proof of the unreality of everything, specifically he wrote "The third type of Buddhist doctrine that states that everything is void is contradicted by all means of right knowledge and thus requires no special refutation. This apparent world, whose existence is guaranteed by all means of knowledge, cannot be denied unless someone should discover some new truth (based on which he could impugn its existence) – for a general principle is proved by the absence of contrary instances. " Madhyamaka is mostly below criticism because it does provide any clear proof of any truth that would show everything is void, but if you'd like I can go into more detail on what I consider to be illogical about Madhyamaka beyond just what he said about it as I'm quite familiar with its many holes.

>>14662704
>>14662698
>>14662578
And here is a summary of some of these arguments from a book by a scholar

>>14627573
>buddhism has a relatively coherent explanation of how and why we exist, and the metaphysical explanations of it.
No it doesn't lol are you kidding me? Buddhism has no idea why there is the universe, ignorance, rebirth, karma etc to begin with . The one explanation of dependent origination that Theravada gives as responsible for the universe and samsara was btfo as illogical by both Mahayana and Vedanta, but the Buddhist schools which don't teach depedent origination as causing the universe don't have any explanation to replace it with and instead have no idea why we are here experiencing things. And not only this but all of the major schools of Indian Buddhism have been completely btfo by various thinkers for being logically inconsistent and incoherent. Shankaracharya BTFO Yogachara and the proto-Theravada Sarvastivada (pic related) and Richard Robinson BTFO Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka. There isn't a major school of Indian Buddhism which hasn't been exposed as having completely illogical ideas.

>>14429978
Shankara retroactively refuted Hinayana

>>14421541
this anon knows

How did Shankara manage to destroy Buddhism?

>>14390665

>>14381933
everything you wrote is incorrect my mentally ill friend

>What is at issue is whether Shankara (living around 800AD) essentially coopted the discourses of Buddhist idealism ca. 200-600AD,
The Upanishads are idealistic and directly say that consciousness is Brahman and that Brahman is the inner awareness etc, Buddhist idealists like Yogachara probably ripped off them but Shankara logically destroyed them (pic related)
>This is similar to what happened to the Upanishads themselves actually, since they came
more out of the dissident brahmanic traditions like Aranyakas and the non-brahmanic sramanas, and only later were reabsorbed into a brahmanic hegemony.
All the parts of the Vedas including the Upanishads are part of the same Sruti revelation, the later parts are just going deeper in depth into the same ideas. Even the mantra portion, the earliest layer of the Vedas talks about the Supreme Self of the Upanishads in lines like "the Solar Self of all that is in motion or at rest" - (Rig-Veda 1.115.1). The Aranyakas and Upanishads are the later stages of this divine revelation.
>It was in response to this crisis that Shankara "saved" Hinduism by stealing the much more advanced philosophy of the Buddhist schools and appending ".... but it's ATMAN!" at the end.
There isn't a single piece of Shankara's thought which he doesn't obtain directly from Upanishadic lines saying as much
>None of this is controversial, either. Not only scholars in the West and in India agree that Shankara basically "saved Hinduism from Buddhism by making Hinduism into Buddhism,"
I've cited mainstream scholars before who disagree but you just lie relentlessly and pretend otherwise. For example this masters thesis examines this exact question and concludes that Shankara's thought is derived from the Upanishads

"Thus, Shankara is best characterized not as a Hindu thinker or a “crypto-Buddhist” but as an Upanishadic Indian philosopher"
https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=rs_theses

the scholars Sharma and Comans both also take position that Shankara's thought and Advaita writ large is derived from the Upanishads
>I just like that every time he posts, everyone knows who he is and how stupid he is.
everyone knows you as the mentally ill buddhist who constantly lies and spams his schizo images
>He tried to post his bullshit about the early Upanishads again yesterday and some guy effortlessly humiliated him.
in that thread I cited lines from the pre-Buddhist Upanishads that clearly state the ideas that people allege Shankara took from Buddhism and you didn't have any argument in response

>>14360238
>They couldn't contend with the popularity of Buddhism
Buddhism was never especially popular, the idea of India being mostly Buddhist at one point is just a myth. It only became semi-widespread for a brief period because Ashoka promoted it in a top-down manner *after* unifying the subcontinent via military force, not because of the persuasiveness of Buddhist arguments. And even Ashoka's promotion of it still couldn't penetrate into the rural villages and countryside which always remained staunchly Hindu, it was really only accepted among some city-dwellers and certain monastics. And Buddhism soon declined in India after the doctrines of it's various schools were pointed out as illogical by various brilliant Hindu thinkers such as Shankara (pic related), and Kumarila Bhatta, whom even the Buddhist historian Taranatha wrote defeated in debate the disciples of Buddhapalkita, Bhavya, Dharmadasa, Dignaga and other Buddhist thinkers. After being badly discredited in debates and after assimilating various concepts from Hindu teachings and recycling them in Mahayana sutras Buddhism fled India with its tale between its legs and subsequently spread a Hinduized form of itself across east-Asia.

>>14263464
>Shankara did not sufficiently respond to Theravada doc-

>>14229899
>Adi Shankara
>Buddhist
he was one of the main Hindu theologians/philosophers and debunked Buddhism

>>14113552
I can't even imagine the levels of cope needed to believe this. Dharmakirti lived in the 6th or 7th century. Shankara was 8th century. Dharmakirti had no idea what Vedanta was, Shankara was the one who came several hundred years after Dharmakirti and completely destroyed his garbage philosophy. Pic related is a summary of Shankara's criticisms of Buddhism. The section about Yogachara/Vijnanavada in the picture completely BTFOs the ideas of Dharmakirti and exposes them as incoherent and illogical. I don't understand how someone could still take Dharmakirti seriously when he was destroyed by Shankara that bad.

>>14054407

>>14033384
Yes I'm sure, what they don't teach you in these self-serving Buddhist mythological narratives is that in reality Dharmakirti had extremely shitty epistemology, and that it's quite easy to expose it as illogical and contradictory if you know what you're doing

>>13814462
OP, this picture is a summary from a book of some of Adi Shankaracharya's critiques of Buddhism, he mostly pointed out where certain schools have logically inconsistent teachings that are either illogical or contradict other Buddhist teachings.

>>13725289
>OMG Shankara is such a dumb retard even though he completely obliterated the ideas of two prominent schools of Buddhism at the time and despite that not a single Buddhist thinker since then has ever been able to return the blow by refuting anything or by pointing out anything as being logically inconsistent in Advaita
>lol he is so dumb because he didn't extensively study Madhyamika writings and probably just debated with a few monks representing it before criticizing it, don't you understand that he was under some obligation despite being a Hindu to spend years studying and practicing Madhyamika teachings before passing judgement on it!
>forget that nihilism is a common attack on Madhyamaka that everyone from 1st millennium Theravadins to modern scholars have accused it of! Nagarjuna defends himself against the charge of nihilism in his Vigrha-Vyavarttani by explaining that he affirms empirical reality while only negating the ultimate reality of it, and that he is not negating everything as non-existent and that it would be nihilistic to negate everything as unreal but Nagarjuna only negates the relative and phenomenal but this is not nihilism because Nirvana is not negated!
>Nevermind that this is basically the same thing as the 'Not this, not this' negation already found in the Brihadaranayaka Upanishad nearly a thousand years earlier! It's like totally different because like *hits blunt* it's like empty or something (coughs). Yeah! it's empty, nevermind that Upanishadic moksha is empty of phenomenal content and is just pure bliss, and that if I insist that the Madhyakama Parinirvana isn't spiritual absolutism and is empty of everything then I have no way to distinguish it from a nihilistic void or complete non-existence, I'm totally not trying to have my cake and eat it too by claiming Madhyamaka isn't nihilistic but then not accepting the interpretation of it as Absolutism which is what rescues it from nihilism!

If Shankara has actually taken the time to study Madhyamaka well instead of debating some of its representatives he would have rightfully pointed out that there is nothing to refute, as Nagarjuna didn't advance any arguments purporting to establish it on logic but only attempted to refute other views (none of which included a refutation of the Upanishadic/Advaitic view), and that it's basically crypto-Upanishadic Absolutism with a fig-leaf of emptiness (but faithful to Buddha's crypto-Upanishadic Absolutism at least!)

>>13487462
>unable to refute anything in that post because you know that it's true
>>13487486
>what's the difference retard?
I never said that Buddhism was the wrong view, I was just pointing out that Buddhists don't have any ways of arguing against Advaita that don't involve circular logic. On the other hand, Shankara refuted various Theravada and Mahayana teachings on the basis of them being logically inconsistent without relying on circular logic (pic related). Less of his criticisms apply to "original Buddhism" although if it were even possible to know what this was he would still probably have criticized certain aspects of it like dependent origination.

>>13477562
Thats wrong, Shankara criticized almost every school of Buddhism including Madhyamaka, which he dismissed as nihilistic. He criticized some of Buddha's original ideas as well such as for example dependent-origination which he called nonsensical absent something like Brahman causing it, and he tore apart the various no-self arguments by pointing out how they contradict basic epistemology. The only way that Shankara would not have had a problem with Buddha's *actual* ideas would have been if they were just crypto-Upanishadic/Vedanta teachings in which case he might have still attacked them for being so badly formulated that they gave rise to a bunch of retarded interpretations in the later Buddhist schools that Shankara btfo like pic related.

>>13390744
>Not the op but any idea on why Buddhism had such a huge decline in India historically?
There were a number of different factors that caused it. The Islamic invasions played a role especially in northern India, but there was also a Hindu intellectual 'renaissance' of sorts throughout the first millennium AD that played a major role, different schools of Hindu philosophy like Vedanta, Tantra etc flourishing and many of them heavily criticizing Buddhisms ideas or claiming to improve/supercede on it. The narrative as Indians themselves understand it is that Hindus defeated Buddhism through refutations and debates which caused it to decline in popularity. The mainstream historians and academics generally occupy a middle point and agree that both the Islamic invasions and the Hindu revival played a role.

Sadly, many Buddhists seem to have some sort of resentment towards Hinduism (I see it as sort of akin to a son's resentment towards his father) and strenuously deny that Hinduism ever refuted or defeated Buddhism despite many academics agreeing this happened to a certain degree. You often see people like this poster >>13390798 claiming that it was solely Islam that was responsible despite that this completely fails as an explanation for why Buddhism almost vanished from southern India even though the Muslims never reached or partially-controlled it until fairly late when Buddhism was already basically gone from it; and it fails to explain why only Hinduism survived en masse despite Muslims persecuting both (they didn't uniquely target Buddhists). It's as though they come up with all sorts of explanations to console themselves because they can't bring themselves to accept that someone who understands Buddhism could come to prefer Hindu teachings, it's a sore spot of their history that they don't like to dwell on.
>What are the main Hindu criticism of Buddhism , are they any valid?
Different schools had different criticisms, you'd have to read up on what each Hindu school said. Adi Shankara and his Advaita school criticized it the heaviest, people will just give you a partisan answer corresponding to what they favor when you ask if the criticism is valid, you'd just have to read about it and decide for yourself. Some of the Hindu criticism is more of later Buddhists schools than Buddha's original teachings but there are still some attacks that apply to his core ideas directly.