/lit/ - Literature

For the Upanishads and the Gita, I strongly recommend the commentaries of the 8th century Hindu thinker Shankara. You can read them online here. It's good to begin with the Vol 1 of the 8 Upanishads or the Gita. The Brihadaranyaka, Chandogya and Brahma Sutra commentaries are long and dense and should only be read after the other works IMO. I have checked out various modern translations/commentaries by scholars and none of them compares to Shankara's. If you have trouble understanding what's being talked about or feel like you don't know a lot of the words, than you can download on lib-gen and read "advaita vedanta a philosophical reconstruction" by Deutsch and then it should make sense

>gita
Bhagavad-Gita.with.the.Commentary.of.Sri.ShankaracharyaN.pdf
>upanishads
http://estudantedavedanta.net/Eight-Upanisads-Vol-1.pdf
http://estudantedavedanta.net/Eight-Upanisads-vol2.pdf
https://archive.org/details/Brihadaranyaka.Upanishad.Shankara.Bhashya.by.Swami.Madhavananda
https://archive.org/details/Shankara.Bhashya-Chandogya.Upanishad-Ganganath.Jha.1942.English
>brahma sutra (summary and exegesis of upanishads)
https://archive.org/details/BrahmaSutraSankaraBhashyaEnglishTranslationVasudeoMahadeoApte1960

The 13th century poet-saint Jnanadeva also has a wonderful 700 page commentary on the Gita

https://estudantedavedanta.net/Sri-Jnandevas-Bhvartha-Dipika-Jnaneswari_smaller.pdf

>>13741266
https://realization.org/p/ashtavakra-gita/richards.ashtavakra-gita/richards.ashtavakra-gita.html
https://estudantedavedanta.net/Eight-Upanisads-Vol-1.pdf
https://estudantedavedanta.net/Eight-Upanisads-vol2.pdf

>>13413582
This copypasta is missing Shankara's commentaries on the Brihadaranyaka and the Chandogya Upanishads.

https://archive.org/details/Shankara.Bhashya-Chandogya.Upanishad-Ganganath.Jha.1942.English
https://archive.org/details/BrahmaSutraSankaraBhashyaEnglishTranslationVasudeoMahadeoApte1960

>>13418874
It's free on archive.org here. It looks interesting, I would like to read it eventually but I'm reading some of his other stuff at the moment. Apparently some of the scholars that have looked at it and compared it to his main works say that it has signs of being genuine and no obvious things indicating that it isn't.

https://archive.org/details/SankaraOnTheYogaSutrasTrevorLeggettMLBD2006

>>13279238
>Is there no dependent arising in Advaita?
No, there is no need for it. Dependent arising itself can be considered as an alternative explanation for samsara/creation which "passes the buck" onto beginningless cause-and-effect *without* explaining how or why that is the case. Advaita Vedanta has no need for it because the Upanishads provide a sufficient explanation for the cause of relative existence, namely that the Lord through his Maya (effectively a power of His that He exercises) appears as multiform and as creation while remaining in reality immutable and unchanged. One of the only points of similarity are that the karma of Jivas is considered to be withdrawn back into the unmanifest at the end of a cycle of universal manifestation (i.e. the night of Brahma), this karma is then made manifest again with the resumption of the cycle of manifestation and contributes to furthering the continued illusion of relative existence, so in this sense there is a rough equivalent to dependent arising insofar as it is a mechanistic explanation for transmigration and the continued illusion of relative existence; however the Advaitins are able to answer the questions that the Buddha never answered about the cause of dependent arising itself because the earliest Upanishads describe Maya as a power of the Lord.

The second part of the dependent origination formulation "if this ceases to exist, that also ceases to exist" can also be considered to have equivalents in the Vedantic understanding of Liberation; in the understanding of Advaita the Jiva itself shorn of it's limitations or limiting adjuncts is Atma, the Self and Lord Itself; once knowledge of the Self has been attained and ignorance burned away by the fire of understanding, the Atma already existing in It's own nature is merged in It's own nature that was the reality all along. In both Buddhism and Vedanta the dismantlement of the mechanism for continued illusion and relative existence is considered to be sufficient to put an end to the cycle. This Vedantic understanding of liberation is exemplified by such Upanishad verses such as the one below.

>"Regarding this there is the following verse: "Because of attachment, the transmigrating self, together with its work, attains that result to which its subtle body or mind clings. Having exhausted in the other world the results of whatever work it did in this life, it returns from that world to this world for fresh work.’ "Thus does the man who desires transmigrate. But as to the man who does not desire—who is without desire, who is freed from desire, whose desire is satisfied, whose only object of desire is the Self—his organs do not depart. Being Brahman, he merges in Brahman.

- Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 4.4.6.

>>13124718
Yes, Ramanuja is based. I've read a bit of him in addition to a lot of Shankara and he is basically a more relaxed Advaita that says it's fine to be a householder and that you can still achieve moksha while doing so through devotion and contemplation etc. Some people find Shankara's Advaita to be a little too 'harsh' in its emphasis and to these people Vishishtadvaita is a better fit. He disagrees with Shankara's ideas and criticizes them at times, although to some extent these points seem to stem from him not exactly understanding Maya as Shankara explained it. Despite the ostensible conflict between them though they are highly similar and can quite easily be considered two different ways of approaching the same thing IMO. Ramanuja despite criticizing Shankara's Maya still uses the concept of beginningless Avidya/Karma to explain multiplicity and the 'descent of the soul' and like Shankara he admits that the immediate intuitive realization of the Absolute/Real is the only cause of liberation, but he differs in that he calls it highest (para) bhakti and says that it dawns by the grace of God. But again, Shankara in his Gita commentary talks about for those who are not ready for/capable of Jnana-Yoga that Bhakti-Yoga can still lead indirectly to moksha, so there is really not much conflict between them. Ramanuja didn't write commentaries on the Upanishads but only on the Brahma Sutras and the Gita, although he did write a fairly short ~60 page summary on his views of what the Upanishads teach called the 'Vedartha Sangraha' which is a pretty good introduction to his metaphysics if you are interested in him, some of Ramanuja's prose is really good too.

http://www.srimatham.com/uploads/5/5/4/9/5549439/vedartha_sangraha_.pdf


>>13125328
From what I've read Ramanuja is more popularly known among the wider populace but Shankara tends to predominate among sannyasins, the largest monastic organization/order in India is the Dashanami Sampradaya who are advaitic and who trace their lineage to Shankara.