/lit/ - Literature

>>18958215
>why study superior Vedantic metaphysics over soul-denying NPCddhism?
Because, as a wise man once said:

From whatever new points of view the Buddha's system is tested with reference to its probability, it gives way on all sides, like the walls of a well, dug in sandy soil. It has, in fact, no foundation whatever to rest upon and hence the attempts to use it as a guide in the practical concerns of life are mere folly. Moreover Buddha, by propounding the three mutually contradicting systems, teaching respectively the reality of the external world, the reality of ideas only and general nothingness, has himself made it clear that he was a man given to make incoherent assertions or else that hatred of all beings induced him to propound absurd doctrines by accepting which they would become thoroughly confused…Buddha’s doctrine has to be entirely disregarded by all those who have a regard for their own happiness."

- Sri Śaṅkarācārya (pbuh), Brahmasūtrabhasya 2.2.32.

>From whatever new points of view the Buddha's system is tested with reference to its probability, it gives way on all sides, like the walls of a well, dug in sandy soil. It has, in fact, no foundation whatever to rest upon and hence the attempts to use it as a guide in the practical concerns of life are mere folly. Moreover Buddha, by propounding the three mutually contradicting systems, teaching respectively the reality of the external world, the reality of ideas only and general nothingness, has himself made it clear that he was a man given to make incoherent assertions or else that hatred of all beings induced him to propound absurd doctrines by accepting which they would become thoroughly confused…Buddha’s doctrine has to be entirely disregarded by all those who have a regard for their own happiness."

- Sri Śaṅkarācārya (pbuh), Brahmasūtrabhasya 2.2.32.

>"No one, they (Buddhists) claim, can possibly deny this chain of causation (Pratītyasamutpāda) beginning with nescience. And once the whole causal chain beginning with nescience is admitted to exist, and to be revolving continually like a wheel with buckets at a well, it is found to imply that the formation of aggregates must be possible. But this is not right, as the causes so far mentioned lead to production (of the next effect in the series) only (and not to aggregation of any kind). An aggregate could be admitted if an intelligible cause were assigned for it. But it is not. Nescience and the rest may cause one another mutually in your cycle, but they only cause the rise of the next link in the chain. There is nothing to show that anything could be the cause of an aggregate. True, you claimed that if nescience and the rest were admitted, an aggregate was necessarily implied.

>To this, however, we reply as follows. If you mean that nescience and the rest cannot arise except in the presence of some aggregate and so are dependent on it, then you still have to explain what could be the cause of the aggregate. Now, we have already shown in the course of our criticism of the Vaisesikas that aggregation is unintelligible even when supported by such assumptions as that of the existence of eternal atoms along with eternal individual experiencers who serve as permanent loci for the conservation of the effects of past action. So it will be all the less intelligible in a theory in which only atoms of momentary existence are admitted, without any permanent experiencer or any permanent locus for anything. If the Buddhist now claims that it is this causal chain beginning with nescience that is the cause of aggregation, we ask how this causal chain (pratītyasamutpāda) could ever be the cause of aggregation (of its constituents into a united whole that can produce nescience etc) when it depends on (that) aggregation for its own existence?

Sri Śaṅkarācārya (pbuh) - Brahmasūtrabhāṣya 2.2.19.

Guénon and other "gnostics", as your type usually calls them, led more people to christianity than internet zealots like you. Imagine thinking being interested in advaita is "idolatry" lmao.

>>18665400
>What, we should take seriously your opinion that mind magically processes everything at the same time and therefore Buddhism is wrong?
Do you mean the fact that the mind and its functions including thoughts and senses are illuminated all at once by a witnessing presence consisting of self-intuiting foundational awareness? Well, this position was held to by someone who is widely considered one of the wisest and most intelligent eastern philosophers, some even say of all time; a man who performed the lions share of the task of intellectually vanquishing Buddhism from India with his irrevocable refutations which the Buddhists never could muster a reply to, I am speaking of course of Sri Śaṅkarācārya. Aside from that, this point about the united of experience is also demonstrated by numerous common examples of how the contents of the mind is experienced within our conscious lived experience as a unity, as for example in the unity in knowledge of thought and sense-perception, as demonstrated when for example thinking about another person doesn't prevent you from seeing what's in front of your face, instead that thought and sense-perception coincide within knowing awareness as different types of objects presented to it at once.

Any one portion of the mind like an individual thought, intuition, memory etc upon analysis is clearly unable to know both itself and the rest of the conscious functions of the mind and senses simultaneously, that nothing within the mind can know the whole of the conscious mind shows that there must be something else that is different from the mind and which knows the mind and its mental functions, and which allows for them to occur in a united fashion when they are known alike by it, such as when thought and sense-perception coincide. This thing that is different from the mind is the self-revealing formless pure unchanging consciousness, which allows for the distinct mental functions to be known at the same moment that sight, sound and touch are also known when they are illuminated by its light.

What are some essential Hindu texts besides the bhagavad gita?
Pic unrelated

>>18626018
No

>>18576569
>Shankara and his teacher Gaudapada loved Buddhism
Shankara thoroughly refuted Buddhism and Advaita rejects the ontology and epistemology of Buddhism alike.

>>18553384
Sri Shankaracharya (pbuh) completely obliterated the doctrinal foundations of Buddhism as contradictory garbage and thereby helped vanquished it from India.

>From whatever new points of view the Buddha's system is tested with reference to its probability, it gives way on all sides, like the walls of a well, dug in sandy soil. It has, in fact, no foundation whatever to rest upon and hence the attempts to use it as a guide in the practical concerns of life are mere folly. Moreover Buddha, by propounding the three mutually contradicting systems, teaching respectively the reality of the external world, the reality of ideas only and general nothingness, has himself made it clear that he was a man given to make incoherent assertions or else that hatred of all beings induced him to propound absurd doctrines by accepting which they would become thoroughly confused…Buddha’s doctrine has to be entirely disregarded by all those who have a regard for their own happiness."

Sri Shankaracharya (pbuh) - Brahma Sutra Bhasya 2.2.32.

>>18501702
>Are there any books or philosophers that analyze or refute ideas in bhuddist thought like anatta (so-self)?
Yes, the Hindu philosopher Adi Shankara (pbuh) refuted Buddhist teachings extensively

>>18486758

>Why does /lit/ like Hinduism when it has been BTFO'd by Buddhism?
It never was though, Hindus like Kumarila Bhatta (pbuh) and Shankaracharya (pbuh) refuted all the arguments of Buddhists and vanquished it from India, Buddhists lost the debate in India which is why it's a Hindu country. Also, Buddhism is counter-traditional, sophistic, nihilistic, soul-denying and so on.

Ernst Johann Eitel accurately summed up Buddhism when he wrote in 1873:

>Modern philosophical schools of Buddhism are all more or less influenced by a spirit of sophistic nihilism. They deal with Nirvāṇa as they deal with every other dogma, with heaven and hell: they deny its objective reality, placing it altogether in the abstract. They dissolve every proposition into a thesis and its anti-thesis and deny both. Thus they say Nirvāṇa is no annihilation, but they also deny its positive objective reality.
>According to them the soul enjoys in Nirvāṇa neither existence nor non-existence, it is neither eternal nor non-eternal, neither annihilated nor non-annihilated. Nirvāṇa is to them a state of which nothing can be said, to which no attributes can be given; it is altogether an abstract, devoid alike of all positive and negative qualities.
>What shall we say of such empty useless speculations, such sickly, dead words, whose fruitless sophistry offers to that natural yearning of the human heart after an eternal rest nothing better than a philosophical myth? It is but natural that a religion which started with moral and intellectual bankruptcy should end in moral and intellectual suicide.


>pic
>The Buddhist Suttas are dialogues. So is the Bhagvat Gita
The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad and Chandogya Upanishads are centuries older than Buddha and they both contain dialogues, so maybe Buddha copied his dialogues from them along with so much else.

>>18485647
BAAAAAASSSSEEEDDD

>From whatever new points of view the Buddha's system is tested with reference to its probability, it gives way on all sides, like the walls of a well, dug in sandy soil. It has, in fact, no foundation whatever to rest upon and hence the attempts to use it as a guide in the practical concerns of life are mere folly. Moreover Buddha, by propounding the three mutually contradicting systems, teaching respectively the reality of the external world, the reality of ideas only and general nothingness, has himself made it clear that he was a man given to make incoherent assertions or else that hatred of all beings induced him to propound absurd doctrines by accepting which they would become thoroughly confused…Buddha’s doctrine has to be entirely disregarded by all those who have a regard for their own happiness."

Sri Shankaracharya (pbuh) - Brahma Sutra Bhasya 2.2.32.

>>18473308
Yes.

>>18442309
>you are responding to several who have already said something that denies this,
Yes, I'm familiar with the particular details of those allegations and can point out why they are wrong and have before, you don't even want to get into the details of the metaphysics but would rather just post screenshots of books, posture and make personal attacks. I challenge you to debate the details of why they are the same or different right now, but you're not even smart enough to do that.
>you're also responding to a book that you personally recommended
I like some sections of that book and disagree with others which I'm free to do so, what are you gunna do about it? sue me?
>you also are in disagreement with almost all hindus and people who study the subject for more than a thousand years.
Rene Guenon, AK Coomaraswamy, Chandradhar Sharma all disagree with that take. The Hindu thinkers who accuse Shankara of that all have a personal stake in the game whereby they personally benefit from doing so, they are not impartial, and in their works and arguments they show that they haven't read Shankara and they misunderstand him anyway.
>you don't even argue anymore,
That's what I'm doing right now
>the crypto-buddhism thing really broke you.
Not really, I still refute Buddhism and point out its contradictions in various threads and have been doing so for years, I'm part of the reason so many people here correctly view large swathes of Buddhism as nihilistic, because they see me debating Buddhists and they see I'm correct when the sophistic arguments of Buddhists crumble and fall apart.

>>18439315
>>18439307
The other Vedantins are unironically just coping because Shankara’s Advaita is a straight forward reading of the Upanishads, they feel like they have to call him a Buddhist to delegitimize him to give their own system further legitimacy, but most of them didnt even understand Shankara’s position and it shows.

The primary Upanishads dont talk about grace and devotion at all, and they repeatedly say that rituals are a part of the lower knowledge and that they dont produce liberation (e.g. Mundaka Upanishad 1.2.20) Its not until the secondary texts like the Puranas, Gita, Pancharatra etc that a focus on bhakti emerges, the primary Upanishads are devoid of it. The text known as the Brahma Sutras which are the immediate consolidation of Upanishadic doctrine don’t contain the Sanskrit words for devotion or grace once in their entire text, but they do contain the word maya in verse 3.2.3. If bhakti and grace was essential to Vedanta they would be mentioned by name in the Brahma Sutra. Bhaskara’s comment that the Brahma Sutras dont say that the bondage of the Atman is a false appearance is contestable, according to Advaita the Brahma Sutras say that the individual soul is an appearance (of Brahman) only, which implies that it's existence as such as a delimited individual soul (as other than Brahman) is an deception or illusion, a mere appearance, this occurs in Brahma Sutra 2.3.50-51. which after a prior section talking about the soul says: “And (the individual soul is) an appearance (reflection) only. On account of the unseen principle being non-limitative.”

The nonsense allegation that Shankara agrees with Buddhism is part of the other Vedantins attempt to foster their non-Vedic doctrines derived from Pancharatra etc onto the Upanishads. Bhaskara’s comment that Advaita is subjective idealism just shows he has no idea what he is talking about. Shankara distinguishes his own ontological idealism which accepts the empirical reality of the world from the subjective idealism of the Buddhists which rejects it, Shankara refutes subjective idealism in his works. In Advaita the world appearance exists outside our individual perception and is sustained by Brahman so by definition it can’t be subjective idealism which refers to doctrines where the world doesn’t exist aside from it being crafted by the mind/ignorance of individual beings.

There isn’t any doctrine of Shankara accepted by Buddhists or vice-versa, even the way in which they both consider there to be multiple levels of existence is way different, for one thing Advaita unlike Buddhism admits that the absolute truth actually exists as a changeless, permanent, inexhaustible reality with its own svabhava. In the Isayeva quote she deceptively omits that in his magnum opus the Advaitin Sriharsa explicitly distinguishes Advaita from Buddhism by noting that Advaitins accept the absolute existence of consciousness while Buddhists dont which changes everything.

>>18406985
>Buddhism

refuted by Adi Shankara (pbuh)

>>18395927
>bc he was the most perfect person in the world
pro-tip, he wasn't, the most perfect person in the world was Adi Shankara (pbuh), who was born into a Brahmin family

>>18385109
>doing a petitio principii asking us to think consciousness as eternal without giving us any real proof of it
No I'm not, I already stated that the eternality or non-eternality of consciousness cannot be empirically proven, and I simply demonstrated that the arguments for consciousness being conditioned and changing don't add up because they all address changes in things which are other than consciousness. Our inability to prove or disprove the eternality of consciousness combined with the flaws in the arguments for consciousness being changing leaves open the possibility that consciousness is eternal and unchanging, but it doesn't prove it; and simply pointing this out is not asking you to think consciousness is eternal.
>you're just asking us to believe that consciousness is eternal just because you feel like it is
No I'm not, I don't care about what you believe. I'm just pointing out the flaws in your Buddhist arguments without caring about proving my own non-Buddhist position from the ground up.
>what you fail to realize is that just as there's a sensations of permanence in consciousness there's also a sensation if impermanence,
So? That doesn't prove anything at all, consciousness is not a sensation but its the luminous sentience to which all sensations are presented. Just because of the point the mental ideas of permanence and non-permanence are both presented to consciousness like sensations, it doesn't show that consciousness is conditioned or impermanent. Just because the mind can entertain the notion of permanence while having this mental notion be presented to consciousness doesn't demonstrate that its false or that consciousness isn't permanent.
>which don't correspond to phenomena but to the same a priori synthetic rationalization you articulate about an eternal soul, just as you can think about an eternal soul contemplating consciousness you can also feel it's impermanence
As I have said, impermanence is only something that can be detected in things exterior to and different form consciousness, consciousness cannot "feel" its own impermanence because it only feels as objects non-conscious phenomena that are presented to consciousness. You are in fact forced to concede this as correct, because if you reject this and say consciousness can observe itself and thereby feel its own conditionedness you are taking the position that Nagarjuna and Chandrakirit are incorrect because they attacked and attempted to refute this.

>>18341721

>>18320207
Advaita is completely logically coherent and without a single hole or contradiction, without having any such flaws in his own tradition Shankara was able to decisively refute Buddhism and vanquish it from India by pointing out glaring defects within it like how dependent-origination is unable to account for the existence of samsara, and how the no-self theory doesn't accord with our experience of having a unified field of awareness. The Buddhists to this day have never even attempted to address Shankara's arguments in writing because they instinctively know any attempt to refute him or address his argument would be hopeless, the Buddhists flee before his scorching brilliance because of its reputation for ensnaring sophists and shattering their arguments into pieces, Buddhist and non-Buddhist alike.

>>18279545
Buddha and his false doctrine was soundly refuted by Sri Shankaracharya, the doctrine of anatta fails to account for and acknowledge the reality of one’s own self of consciousness, and the doctrine of dependent origination is illogical for the reason that it cannot reasonably be the origin of samsara and the world as Shankaracharya pointed out.

>>18274840
This

>>18214652
>Heart Sutra
basically just Hinduism at that point