/lit/ - Literature

>>17555254
Most of the up to date general overview sources are cited here (Richard King, Isayeva, Mayeda, Arvind Sharma, Whaling, Potter, Hacker).

>>17555289
For once Guenonfag and I agree on something. Hirst's book is quite good. I will post a compilation in a sec, showing that she also recommends King as the best major overview of the relationship between Advaita and Buddhism, along with Isayeva and Mayeda, and somewhat endorses Hacker's widely accepted view that Shankara developed from being mainly a buddhist and yogin to reformulating his ideas in light of the Upanishads.

>>17385206
>Because Shankara wasn’t a Buddhist,
But scholars are unanimous that he was and even other hindu schools call him cryptobuddhist. It was Indians who invented the term, prachana buddha. Also many advaitins including the most famous ones of all time and the president of India openly proclaim that Advaita is pretty much Mahayana with some words changed.

This picture has helpful sources on advaita and its rejection by most Hindus as heretical and buddhist in nature.

>>16894973
every academic and most hindus disagree with you hahaha get dabbed on buddhist

>>16855786
any of the sources listed here are a good place to start, these are all the leading experts on advaita vedanta

>>16754777
The majority of modern Hindu theology, asceticism and monasticism is derived from Mahayana buddhism

>>16661825
It is literally true, that's what makes it so funny

Is this the weekly shankara=cryptobuddhist thread?

Anyone still remember when only a few people on /lit/ knew that cryptobuddhism is the standard response to advaitaboos? Those were dark times, thankfully now everybody knows

>>16552724
>guenonfag cherrypicking citations from wikipedia again
>still hasn't read a real book

lmao, you'd think you would at least graduate from wikipedia at some point

>>16487743
Its a big conspiracy by b*ddhists who have managed to control all opinion on advaita for 150 years. They even manage to get prominent advaitans to agree that advaita is an adaptation of Madhyamaka!

>>16475226
Do you mean younger? Advaita came more than a thousand years after Buddhism had been around.

>it is immediately clear that Buddhism was derived from and owes its thought and beliefs to Hinduism.
To neovedantists with a loose understanding of Hinduism and India maybe, or if you're reading a history of Indian thought from about a hundred years ago. But this is not the position of any people who study it. Modern scholarship identifies the sramana movements with a different cultural, geographical, linguistic, and probably ethnic (this one is controversial) complex in the east, more in Bengal.

The vedic complex, identified with brahmanical ideas, seems to have had two major renaissances or at least redaction periods. The first was when it collated the oral-ritual vedas into written versions (the traditional four divisions of the vedas), and the second was after centuries of sramana influence crept into the brahmanic ritual culture dominated by priests.

In other words, whatever the general trend was that produced movements like jainism and buddhism, it started in the east and spread everywhere over a few centuries, and acquired so much prestige that it got into everything. Even people within the brahmanic complex became accustomed to it, and they reopened the brahmanical canon through commentaries to the old texts, reinterpreting them along sramanic lines.

Shankara is in some ways just the last and most radical representative of this tendency, a thousand years later. Later buddhism, Mahayana, is so renunciatory and anti-sruti, anti-ritual in its epistemology that vedantists were horrified by it. Shankara's whole philosophy is just Mahayana with some names changed, and he has long been criticized for all but rejecting the necessity of ritual and the authority of sruti over reason. That's why he is called "crypto-buddhist." The accusation is that he "saved" the Vedas from Buddhism by turning Hinduism into Buddhism.

Shankara's monasticism is modeled on Mahayana monasticism, his epistemology is buddhist to the point that it receives the same criticisms of being nihilistic from other Hindus, his stance on sruti is either anti-revelation and anti-ritual to the point that it is offensive to many Hindus.

>>16327597
avoid cryptobuddhism/advaita

its hinduism lite for western larpers

Advaita = cryptobuddhism

Shankara is a crypto buddhist

>>15950515
This is the other one.

>intentional misinterpretation by Sankara to give the text an Advaitic character
>absorption of Buddhism into Vedanta
>incorporating foreign elements
>made the Vedantic tradition Buddhistic
>buddhification of the Vedanta

The brahmans don't care if you are an original vedic pantheist or a buddhistic advaita, as long as you don't disrupt the brahman caste lol.

>>15822795
How u holding up Injr?

>>15814965
cope harder shitskin

do you mean the upanishads or the vedic corpus as a whole, or specifically the vedas? most people don't read the vedas as a whole, they read the upanishads (1/4th of the traditional division of the vedic literature). the other 3/4s, the rgveda and the brahmanas and even the aranyakas, are mostly tedious formulary for rituals or extremely repetitive/esoteric. even specialists openly call them mind-numbing to read and philosophically uninteresting, in most cases. the brahmanas in particular.

the vedas proper are composed of an original body of ritual formulary, mythological hymns, and extremely occasional metaphysical speculations. these are then broken up into several "collections" (rgveda, yajurveda, samaveda, atharvaveda), with the rgveda being the oldest and atharveda the youngest, and the samaveda and yajurveda being selections/repetitions of the rgveda for the most part. i believe the main theory about the origins of these divisions is that the samaveda and yajurveda are selections specifically for certain grades of priests who only needed them for a specific purpose, and the atharvaveda is a separate compilation of local folk traditions and magical recipes not derived from the original rgveda. they were all collated from orally transmitted hymns and formulary, plus the folk traditions, by a "reform" vedism with a brahman priesthood around 800-500BC.

luckily there are compilations of the most famous, most philosophically interesting bits of the rgvedas. radhakrishnan's sourcebook for indian philosophy is a classic although it's somewhat biased in favor of a monistic interpretation, assuming that vedic philosophy was always internally developing towards monism (which is arguable). but it still has most of the classic rgvedic sections you would be most interested in. wendy doniger's collection is also ok and has a lot of overlap with a newer translation although she is just as biased in the opposite direction, of portraying indian thought as a plurality.

if you want to read anything "in full," be prepared for endless repetition and boredom.

>>15799160
>I would be careful about reading Advaita Vedanta interpretations such as Shankara's as a commentary to the Upanishads, they are extremely reliant on Buddhist philosophy (Shankara is called a "cryptobuddhist" by most Hindus, and most scholars agree). If you want to read the Upanishads, work through them with editions and commentaries that aren't sectarian, or at least read an interpretation that is closer to the original meaning of the Upanishads, rather than Shankara's 8th century AD quasi-buddhism.

pic related

>>15799253
no, the best approach is to read a source anthology like radhakrishnan/doniger so you get the highlights. this can also include interesting bits from the brahmanas and aranyakas, which are few and far between especially for the brahmanas. this is what most people do, along with reading a good history of sanskrit literature so you know what the structure is.

I would be careful about reading Advaita Vedanta interpretations such as Shankara's as a commentary to the Upanishads, they are extremely reliant on Buddhist philosophy (Shankara is called a "cryptobuddhist" by most Hindus, and most scholars agree). If you want to read the Upanishads, work through them with editions and commentaries that aren't sectarian, or at least read an interpretation that is closer to the original meaning of the Upanishads, rather than Shankara's 8th century AD quasi-buddhism.

>>15654058
More in depth if you're interested.

>>15555315
for anyone wondering, shankara's commentary (bhasya) of the brahma sutras (written more than a thousand years before he lived) is widely considered by both hindus in india and western scholars to be imposing buddhist philosophy on a non-buddhist monist text

here's the full details if anyone really cares enough. guenonfag is a buddhist in denial, not even real advaita believers deny the shit he does, it's wild

Is this text true? are some sorts of buddhisms an off-shot of hinduism?
within hinduism;are post-Vedic scriptures basically a hack which criticize animal sacrifice and birth casteism?

>>15464539
it makes you seethe doesn't it?

>>15456228
>Advaita is older than Buddha

the only people who think this are advaita cultists on quora.com. hindus don't think this, not even most advaitafags think it, academics don't think it.