/lit/ - Literature

>>19930271
The sage Ryokan admired bamboo, for it grows straight and is empty inside. His hut was surrounded by bamboo, and one day he noticed a shoot growing through the floor of his closet. He took great interest in the shoot, and as it grew too large for its enclosure he decided to burn a small hole in his thatched roof. He took a candle to the roof, but the thatching caught fire more readily than he expected, burning his hut and the bamboo to the ground.

If all is truly one how are the Skandhas accounted for? I'm not a christfag i'm just genuinely curious. What is it that makes nondualism remain consistent with things? Is not my experience of one of the Skandhas independent/different from yours?

What's your preferred (preferably bullet) journal? I just filled up another Leuchtturm 1917 and was thinking of buying another, but considering that they're only $20 i think I could find a better one for more of an investment.

I'd definitely recommended Leuchtturm, but can I do better?

you tell me

>>16897386
Most Buddhists have just ignored Shankara, for the same reasons most Hindus have: he's a literally who. He's an incredibly minor figure in Hindu thought, and by the time he comes along Buddhism had over a thousand years of intellectual traditition and momentum behind it. Some random heretic of a false religion in India (which, at the time, Buddhism had basically abandoned centuries prior) saying OH, BUT HAVE YOU CONSIDERED ~THIS~ didn't really draw much attention. Buddhism had decided Atman to be silly and non-existent centuries ago, case closed.

This is particularly a problem because Shankara isn't really aware of what the Madhyamakins, or Buddhists in general because he also has a go at Yogacara, think, and has a bad habit of talking past them. He uses a lot of arguments that Nagarjuna rips to shreds (the "lamps illuminating themselves" argument, for example). The image that Guenonfag spams of those six pages really hammer this home.

Having said that, as a Westerner, one really glaring point of critique in the MMK is that he spends most of it critiquing what I would basically summarize as "assuming that the world operates based on the grammatical rules of Sanskrit". To us, this seems kind of silly, but you have to remember that in Hinduism Sanskrit is literally the language that the Gods speak and the grammatical rules of Sanskrit are literally how the world operates. So, when Nagarjuna brings out what amounts to Zeno's Paradoxes and says "how can you say anything really happens?" and "where is a cause stored? where is an effect stored?", he's really critiquing an idea that's just flat out absent in Western thought. Westerners ditched the idea that Hebrew was somehow particularly descriptive of reality in like, 300AD, and while ideas of the "language of God" still persist, this language isn't one spoken now. So, while Nagarjuna attacks certain linguistic structures, you could probably come up with alternative linguistic frameworks that are more accurately descriptive of reality (the big takeaway from the MMK is that language doesn't accurately describe reality).

David Bohm, the physicist, tried to do just this in Wholeness and Implicate Order, but ditched the project.

R8, h8 and masturb8.
https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/7002468-carlos-eduardo

how do I become a buddhist?