/lit/ - Literature

read Adi Shankara

https://estudantedavedanta.net/Eight-Upanisads-Vol-1.pdf

>>14100124
I thought people were hating on this translation or something

>>14100098
Stop caring about any of the measures of success that are commonly held by your fellow members of society. That is pretty much the message of much spiritual enlightenment and is perennial in philosophy, from Diogenes to Heidegger.

>>14100161
So enlightenment means disappointing your parents and the only people who ever truly loved you?

>>14100194
I mean Christ says that unless you hate your family you cannot be a disciple of his. That doesn't mean you should wish them ill will, it's moreso just that the infinitude of God is so much greater than anything else that you have to cast everything aside to get it like the Pearl of great value, another gospel parable.

>>14100134
No, that translation is phenomenal. The only person hating on it is this one mentally ill Buddhist poster. He has an intense hatred for Shankara and used to attack him every time someone posted him and would always shill Nagarjuna and say that Nagarjuna is better and that Shankara stole from him. When people started posting a picture (pic related) from a journal article by a philosophy professor who debunks the argument used in Nagarjuna's magnum opus by showing how Nagarjuna uses dishonest argumentation and flawed logic it caused some sort of mental breakdown in the Buddhist poster.

Instead of reflexively attacking Shankara like he used to, now he pretends to like Shankara and now accuses anyone who posts links to Shankara's work of being a neovedantist shilling neovedanta despite that Shankara's writings strongly disagree with neovedanta. He evidently hopes to discourage any sort of Shankara-posting by derailing any sort of discussion about him into accusations of neovedanta that are completely unrelated to Shankara. I hope that he is able to get help for his mental issues.

>>14100225
What if I don't, but attain it anyway, decide it wasn't what I was looking for at all, and discard God's love in an unceremonious manner.

>>14100225
A Buddhist would say that you should love God, your family, and strangers, equally. That is to say, if you saw a stranger getting hurt, it would appear to enlightened person as if their child, God, or themselves was being hurt. Enlightenment provides the insight that there isn't any difference between the three.

>>14100194
What are you Asian? If you're striving for material success of any sort you'll not only set yourself up for inevitable crushing disappointment, even of it's just your own death, but never achieve any kind of meaningful enlightenment beyond whatever lever-pulling is required for you to be or be seen as some kind of success--which takes a great deal of attention and responsibility but of an entirely different kind. And yes it is often remarked by Buddhists, Christians, certain Hindu sects, certain philosophies etc that you can't reach enlightenment being attached to the whims and wishes or responsibilities of family life.

>>14100317
>What are you Asian?
I keked

>>14100261
noooooooooo you foiled meeeee ooo aa uuoaoaoaoaooa

>>14100124
thinks you can enlightment through the mind (ie reading)

>>14100098
>ideally be on later stages of soul evolution
>find a master
>practice hatha yoga to get the physical dimension in order
>practice brahmacharya (mindful use of energy), stop eating meat, alcohol, drugs, sex and thinking negative thoughts
>meditate to discipline the mind
>open and balance the charkas
>awaken kundalini to prove you with the will to forward
>meditate on awakeness until you realise that you are not body or mind but the eternal Self

>>14100194
>enlightenment means leaving the material world behind
Buddhism isn't the only way.

Tantra teaches that you should still take part in the material world but from a detached state.

>>14100261
The internal politics on this board are quite a spectacle to observe. Not merely their seemingly unneeded existence in the first place, but their unexpected complexity and nuance alongside it.

>>14101008
If you're not on the later stages of soul evolution, can you still "forcefully" accelerate your progress through sheer discipline, or is it better to go at a more ordinary pace and let multiple lifetimes be of service to you? I'm trying to determine whether it's worth putting in much more effort or simply pursuing it in a more relaxed fashion.

>>14100269
You can't because now you're possessed by it.

>>14101402
i always like to imagine what all the mythical posters of this place actually look like in real life, like what kind of humans they actually are. the randomness and precision of some of these topics make me think they're either phd students who need somewhere to spill the things they've studied on, or some absolute fanatics in little run down rooms who have devoted so much of their effort to this shithole

Masturbate. A lot. Each session should extend between 20 minutes to an hour. Outside

>>14100261
But Nagarjuna is indeed much better! Also, you should try to read Shantideva, Bodhidharma and Nagasena. Shankara is interesting, but he's wrong about the ultimate reality of Brahman.

>>14102156
Quite the opposite, Semen retention is required for enlightenment.

>>14102187
I disagree. If Nagarjuna is better than Shankara why was the scholar in that pic able to completely refute Nagarjuna's main argument in the MMK by showing how its logic is heavily flawed? That calls everything else that Nagarjuna ever wrote into question. Nobody has ever been able to do the same with Shankara despite him leaving behind some 5000+ page of material that people can examine. Just that alone makes me have higher regard for Shankara. Nagarjuna's system is also rendered incoherent by his denial of any self (and his arguments don't even apply to the transcendent Self of the Upanishads, which he never mentions and was seemingly unaware of). Emptiness and self-contradiction are neither self-illuminating nor self-comprehending, the inherent self-contradiction in thought-catagories and the emptiness of phenomena which Nagarjuna proposes can only be realized by the witnessing Self. Nagarjuna also doesn't solve the problem of if there is no abiding essence or existence on which the unreal is based than on what could the illusion of samsara be possibly predicated? Illusions cannot have emptiness or voidness as their basis. Illusions never appear in nothingness but only when there is an existing substratum on which they can be superimposed, such as the false idea of a man superimposed on a stump, snake on a rope, silver in mother-of-pearl etc. Lastly, unlike Vedanta Nagarjuna has no explanation whatsoever for what causes samsara/maya.

>>14102921
>>14102187
also
>Shankara is interesting, but he's wrong about the ultimate reality of Brahman.
why do you believe this?

>>14100098
i checked on google maps and it seems to be somewhere in somerset, so i'd say head for shepton mallet then take the a361

>>14102009
>implying most phd students aren't fanatics living in run-down little rooms

>>14102388
Benjamin Franklin was a legitimate genius and son of the enlightenment and he was banging prostitutes every day

suffer terribly

>>14103210
The 18th century 'enlightenment' is something completely different from enlightenment in eastern philosophy you doofus

>>14100098
By locking yourself in your room and reading old books.

bump

>>14100098
The ultimate truth is that there is nothing to be reached. Just be yourself.

>>14102921
>>14102928

Nagarjuna, as buddhist, didn't consider the Upanisads as truthful or correct. His influence comes from Canon Pali and mahayana sutras, sucha as Saddharma Pundarika Sutra and Vimalakirti.You must understand that many terms shared in common between buddhism, vedantisn (hinduism) and even jainism have different meanings and are used in different context. In buddhism, all things in our reality, even dhamma itself, are considered impermanent. It doesn't mean that it couldn't exist an ultimate reality such as Bhraman. That said, in buddhism, the access to this ultimate reality is not the ultimate ascetic transcendence. As all things are impermament, it's not you that have a life, it's life that has you. You're merely a paratisic set of sensation, feeling, volition and perception. This set is empty of an essence, so there is no soul, and thus, no "I" (Anatta). Bhraman is another matter, dealt by Buddha himself in Majjhima Nikaya, when, in Brahmanimantanika Sutra he meets Bhraman in his eternal court. There, Buddha is able to identify that even Brahman is a victim of the illusions of Mara, once Brahman believes he's ultimate. Buddha refutes Brahman when tells that while he is and he is not, and, as Buddha, he reached the non-conditioned, he is able to not be free from samsaric-wheel, while Brahman is condened to be, Brahman cannot not be. As Buddha said "I saw fear in being and non-being, not desiring any being did not hold with interest anything". For us, mere mortals, unable to be nor to not-be, there is no other higher path than the buddhic, which could be resumed as said by the Buddha's last words: all component things in the world are changeable. They are not lasting. Work hard to gain your own salvation. Nagarjuna was the one who gave greater colaboration into the explanation of pratītyasamutpāda (dependent origination), but term doesn't make sense for hinduism since anatta is not part of Advaita's understanding of reality, since it's opposed to atman. I'm not sure however, if there's an intrinsic opposition between anicca and brahman. I'm inclined to think that Buddha considered brahman as that of an ultimate decoy of samsara, thus being a not perfect trascendence.

>>14100098
Isn't that the question of the day

>>14100309
>That is to say, if you saw a stranger getting hurt, it would appear to enlightened person as if their child, God, or themselves was being hurt
Christ says this as well.

>>14102009
>they're either phd students who need somewhere to spill the things they've studied on, or some absolute fanatics in little run down rooms who have devoted so much of their effort to this shithole
as a philosophy phd student these are the same thing

>>14103231
yeah its much better

>>14100098
Get rid of your pride
Accomplished by learning a lot about why people act the way they act

You gotta stand on your tippy toes

Stop lusting. Stop masturbating. Stop having sex. Nothing else matters. This take over the mind and makes you a slave to your pants. Ethics do not matter. Being moral does not matter. Self control does.

Enlightenment is not a yes/no kind of deal. It's a scale. The more understanding you have, the more enlightened you are.
So the question is really: how do I gain more understanding? And the answer is:
>be inquisitive
>be open-minded
>ask questions
>be introspective
>be empathetic

>>14105662
You're going to get him tied up in knots, great job

This is going to be a bit of a bitter pill, but you can't reach enlightenment. The enlightened one is never you. As long as you are you, you are not enlightened.

>>14101417
You can use psychs. Read all the literature first, and start meditating pretty consistently before you use the drugs.

>>14104623
in Buddhism, in the pali canon it says that only conditioned dhammas are impermanent but not Nibbana. The only mark of existence that applies to Nibbana is anatta, not-self. If you read a bit further into Mahayana, you’ll learn that even impermanence is a relative teaching and not ultimate, that the perception of impermanence and of any objects whatsoever is actually empty, sunya. At the same time, inherent to all experience is Suchhness, or Tathata - the ultimate truth that is beyond any and all distinctions and thus cannot even be pointed to or regarded as an object of experience. It’s also worth noting that there is a positive description in the nikayas for the mind of the arahant after full awakening: non-manifestative/signless/empty consciousness, indicating that their mind no longer reifies objectivity in perceptions, no longer perceived self-nature or stable essence in anything that can be designated whatsoever. This signless consciousness of the arahant is of course a relative designation as well solely for others to refer to his mind, but it gives a good clue as to what awakening is like. The profound absence of objectification, as Nagarjuna calls it.
“When the heart is released from clinging,” said the Buddha, “then consciousness does not land anywhere. That state, I tell you, is without sorrow, afflication or despair.”
It’s important to not just consider the aggregates as anatta but then go on to view the aggregates as solidly real in some impersonal way. There is no self-nature in the aggregates either. If there’s no subject, there’s no object.

>>14106412
funny enough sometimes it sounds like you can replace “sunya” with “maya.” For example “perception of the reality of individual real objects is just sunya, the objects are sunya, empty of self-nature” vs “perception of the reality of multiplicity is maya.”
Buddhism just seems to really want to avoid reifying consciousness or awareness, and seems to avoid making positive distinctions about ultimate reality, other than that it is the ever-present truth that we don’t see only because of obscurations of ignorance. Buddhists seem to strictly reject any determinations and distinctions whatsoever to represent ultimate reality other than that it is the absence/transcendence of distinctions.
‘The Buddha is not saying to reject the material and to go find the immaterial out there somewhere in the spiritual aether realm or something, no, the immaterial is right in front of you in what you call matter, but your deluded mind perceives things in terms of matter, the world, self, consciousness, objects. You don’t realize that these supposed external material objects are actually more like objects of mind, since the only thing determining them to be material in the first place is deluded mind.’

>>14100098
jerk off to increasingly depraved pornography. Your third eye will open right after reaching your vomit play and vore phase

>>14105098
t. positivist anglo brainlet

>>14100098
Meditation without any conceptual beliefs. Emptying your mind of any and all concepts. If you meditate with prior concepts, or on concepts, then you'll inevitably just continue to see them in your mind, which will deceive you as to what is true. Then, observe what you observe. And subsequently reflecting on what you have observed. Don't even worry about any other facts of the world, spiritual or otherwise. Just try and first become an adept meditator, who has reached highly lucid states of mind through meditative trances.

>>14100098
>Read The Mind Illuminated
>Cheat on your wife with prostitutes, causing your entire non-profit corporation board of directors to resign
>Be enlightened

>>14100098
asking 4chan, because anyone who's achieved enlightenment still browses /lit/ on a regular basis

>>14107818
Yes...I always wanted to run a website devoted to giving advice on how to give up the internet....complete with its very own app.