/lit/ - Literature

>>14426311
This ‘self’ is of course radically different from what we normally experience as ‘ourselves’: It has no qualities at all, can never become an object of consciousness (but is nonetheless immediately self-revealed), is identical neither to the body nor to the mind (qua mental goings-on we can introspectively observe), and neither does, nor wants, anything. What should this be? It is characterized as the ‘seer’ (draṣṭā) or ‘witness’ (sākṣin)—that is, as that which sees (that which is conscious). Yet this is not supposed to mean that the self is a ‘something’ that performs the seeing or is in a state of seeing: Rather, it is, as Advaita Vedānta (just as, e.g. Sāṃkhya) stresses, in explicit contrast to Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika, nothing but seeing (consciousness) itself. ‘The perceiver’, as, for example, the classical Advaitin Śaṅkara says, ‘is indeed nothing but eternal perception. And it is not [right] that perception and perceiver are different’ (Upadeśasāhasrī II.2.79, Mayeda 1992: 241; addition in brackets by Mayeda). Sākṣin is, as Tara Chatterjee formulates, ‘the never-to-be-objectified principle of awareness present in every individual’ (Chatterjee 1982: 341).

So the claim against the Buddhists is not that there has to be some entity in addition to, and behind or beyond, our experiential life as its substrate, but that there is a stable element within it—yet not as some invariant content or content-constellation we could experience (such a thing is indeed not to be found), but as the very process of experiencing itself, as the permanence of ‘witnessing’, in which everything we experience has its being-experienced, and which is the constant ground of our own being. It is this notion of witness-consciousness that I wish to make some sense of in the following. [2]

2 I must stress that I intend to pursue, as the subtitle says, ‘phenomenological reflections’ on the Advaitic
understanding, and not engage in a staunch exegesis of the details of the various Advaitins' theories. I wish
to discuss philosophically what I take to be a basic intuition about the nature of consciousness that seems to
provide something like a foundation of the Advaitic speculations

>>14426318
2. Self vs No-Self: The Buddhist Challenge

The central question of Advaita Vedānta is that of the nature of one's own self as the subject of experience. I evidently have manifold constantly changing experiences at each moment, and it is no big problem to observe them introspectively; but who am I who has all these successive experiences? It is the nature of this experiencer of the experiences that the whole thinking of Advaita revolves around—not in the sense of some reputed ‘experience producer’ (so that today one could be tempted e.g. to assume the brain is the ‘true self’), but in the sense of a subject-‘I’ as belonging to the nature of experiencing as such, however it may causally come about.

Buddhism famously denies the existence of such an experiencing ‘I’. In Saṃyutta Nikāya XII.12, for example, the Buddha answers the question of who it is who feels by saying: ‘Not a fit question…I am not saying [someone] feels. And I not saying so, if you were to ask thus: “Conditioned now by what, lord, is feeling?” this were a fit question’ (Rhys Davids/Woodward 1972–79, vol. II: 10; bracketed addition by the translators). So, in the Buddhist perspective, the mental life is to be characterized as a flux of permanently changing substrate-less mental events, each caused by some other, previous event, rather than in terms of a persisting experiencing self (an ātman). Experiences take place, but there is no one who experiences them.

>>14426323
It goes without saying that in the various schools of Buddhism the anātman doctrine has seen numerous interpretations (not all implying an outright denial of the existence of a self[3]; indeed, in Mahāyāna and Tibetan Buddhism one can find views that are quite compatible with the Advaitic concept of witness-consciousness [4]). However, for the sake of contrast I here construe the no-self thesis primarily in the sense of a strictly reductionist theory, as espoused by the Abhidharma schools. Even in this reading, the denial of the existence of an experiencing subject is not meant to deny, at least on a conventional level, the existence of something like a unitary ‘person’ (pudgala), just as Buddhists would not deny that there are chairs or states.

3 For example, MacKenzie (this volume) argues that the Madhyamaka school holds—in contrast to the
reductionism of the Abhidharma—that the self is not reducible to more basic phenomena, but ‘is an
emergent phenomenon that, while real, is not a substantial separate thing’ (ibid. : p. 258). (Whether or not
this makes a crucial ontological difference naturally depends on the precise definition of ‘emergence’.)
4 Miri Albahari even interprets the Pali Canon as implicitly, but centrally, assuming the existence of a
witness-consciousness—‘a reading’, as she admits, ‘that aligns Buddhism more closely to Advaita Vedānta
than is usually acknowledged’ (Albahari 2006: 2; cf. also Albahari this volume).

Yet a chair is wholly constituted by its parts and the way they are assembled, and is nothing over and above this, and similarly, the existence of a person does not involve the existence of a self over and above the manifold ephemeral phenomena that form, if sufficiently integrated, what we call ‘one person’. A person is, in the Buddhist view, nothing but a certain ‘psychophysical complex’, that is, an ‘appropriately organized collection of skandhas’[5] (MacKenzie 2008: 252). A person in this sense ‘has’ her experiences only in the sense that a whole ‘has’ parts, and not in the sense of some self-identical ‘I’-core as the ‘bearer’ of its experiences, that is, as an experiencer. [6]

5 The term skandhas refers to the five types of phenomena (dharmas) that constitute the person according
to Buddhism.
6 Expressions like ‘Devadatta's desire’, as the Buddhist argues in Bhaṭṭa Rāmakaṇṭha's Nareśvaraparīkṣā,
do not imply that there is something beyond the desire as its agent, but are ‘just indicating that [the desire]
is connected with a particular stream of cognition, like [such expressions] as “the flow of the Vitastā
[river]”’ (Watson 2006: 190; bracketed additions by Watson).

>>14426328
The account of persons in classical Indian Buddhist Abhidharma texts is, in its rejection of a substantial self, quite in accord with the (at least by implication) dominant modern Western view on this topic (cf. Siderits 2003): it corresponds to what Derek Parfit calls the ‘reductionist view of personal identity’, that is, the thesis that a person's enduring existence consists in (and is therefore reducible to) more fundamental facts, namely certain relations of connectedness and continuity between physical and mental events (Parfit 1987: 210–214)—and that in no way is the trans-temporal identity of a person due to the continued existence of something like a ‘self’ as a ‘separately existing entity’ (ibid.: 210). The many experiences of one person are not unified by each being connected to one enduring subject, but by being connected with one another, and the very ‘oneness’ of the subject is, the other way around, constituted by this (longitudinal) unification of the experiences. This sounds plausible enough: What should there be in addition to the physical and mental events and their interrelations? What else should a person be but a ‘psychophysical complex’ of some sort? Nevertheless the ‘orthodox’ schools of India vehemently challenge the Buddhist anātman (‘no-self’) thesis, and insist on precisely what the Buddhists reject: that there is more to the existence of a person than this complex of skandhas, that there exists a ‘self’ in addition to the body and the experiences, which is the ‘who’ of experiencing.

>>14426336
Is this more than just a dogmatic assumption? Can anything be said in favor of this view? I think, on closer consideration, one has indeed to admit that it is hard to avoid feeling a certain unease about a purely ‘selfless’ account of one's own existence. Is it really true that there is no experiencing ‘I’? Are there really only experiences, but no one who experiences them? Undeniably there seems to be a clear difference between an experience being experienced by me and an experience not being experienced by me. Speaking only of mental events, connected by some interrelations on the basis of which a permanent ‘I’ is constructed, deals with experiences more or less as if they were just objective occurrences, without taking their subjective mode of being—their ‘first-person ontology’ (Searle 1992: 16)—sufficiently into account. After all, experiences do not just lie about like stones or chairs, equally accessible in principle to everyone: Experiences only exist in being subjectively experienced, and that seems to mean: in being experienced by a respective subject. And obviously, all of my experiences, no matter how different they may be, have this one thing in common: that I experience them. In this sense, experiences are not thinkable as being ‘ownerless’: they are essentially experiences of an experiencing ‘I’. And the big question of Advaita Vedānta is precisely what this ‘I’ that experiences its experiences (this ‘first person’ of their ‘first-person ontology’) is.

Yet, the anātmavādin (denier of a self) might reply that even if one concedes this subjective character of experience, this does not at all necessitate positing an additionally existing subject. Rather, the subject searched for (the ‘experiencer’) is simply the experience itself and not something ‘behind’ it (cf. e.g. Strawson 2003). The experiences, as the taking place of subjective appearance (as ‘events of subjectivity’, as Strawson puts it: 2003: 304), constitute the respective ‘inner dimension’ of a subject, and are therefore not ‘had’ by an additionally existing self.

>>14426343
This is indeed the position advanced by Yogācāra Buddhism and the school of Dignāga: This line of Buddhist thought expressly acknowledges the subjectivity (the being-subjectively-experienced) of experience, but rejects interpreting this fact as the experience's being experienced by a subject— rather it is supposed to refer to its self-givenness (svasaṃvedana) belonging to the very nature of experience:[7] An experience, in revealing its object, is simultaneously revealing itself, ‘self-illuminating’ (svaprakāśa) (just as a lamp does not need to be illumined by a second lamp in order to be visible). ‘Svasaṃvedana thus provides a continuous, immediate, and internal first-person perspective on one's own stream of experience’ (MacKenzie 2008: 249), without presupposing a ‘first person’ in addition to experience itself.
The stream of experience is given to itself and not to a self. [8]

7 Cf. MacKenzie 2007: 47–49; MacKenzie 2008; Dreyfus 1997: 339–340, 400–402; and the contributions
of Dreyfus, Krueger and Thompson in this volume.
8 This view is comparable to non-egological accounts in phenomenology, for example by Sartre, Gurwitsch
and the Husserl of the Logical Investigations.

Of course I do not experience myself qua experiencer as just being the present experience experiencing itself, but as someone who, as one and the same, lives through permanently changing experiences, and hence is to be distinguished from them. Yet for the Buddhist/reductionist account, this apparent diachronic identity of the subject is wholly constituted by relations between the experiences (most prominently memory-relations): The experiential life of a person is, in this view, a series of causally connected mental events without any underlying enduring self, and an important part of the relevant causal connections that constitute the unity of one person is that the contents of one experience leave memory-traces in the succeeding one. Nothing more (especially not an enduring self) is necessary to account for my remembering ‘my’ past experiences (and hence my experience of my continued existence) (cf. Dreyfus this volume p. 133; Siderits this volume pp. 314–15; Watson 2006: 153–165).

>>14426347
It is true that I do not just remember that, anonymously, experiences have occurred, but my past experiencing them [9]— but this is simply due to the fact that the very meaning of the sameness of the self, of ‘one person’, is co-constituted by these very memory-connections (cf. Siderits2003: 25): I remember my experiences as mine not because I remember my ‘I’ experiencing them, but because they are mine precisely insofar as I can remember them (i.e. insofar as they stand in the right form of causal connection to my present experience).

9 As Śaṅkara stresses against the Buddhist view: Brahmasūtrabhāṣya II.2.25, Deussen 1920: 353–354.

Advaita Vedānta, in contrast, insists that the subjectivity of experience refers to an experiencing subject. Just like Yogācāra Buddhism, it rejects the Nyāya thesis that an experience of an object only becomes itself manifest by becoming the object of another, subsequent experience (comparable to modern ‘higher-order representation theories’): rather, for an experience, to be means to be conscious[10]. But at the same time they reject the Yogācāra idea that it is each experience that is conscious of itself, ‘self-illuminating’ (svaprakāśa)—rather I, the subject, am immediately aware of my experiences as they come and go (cf. Timalsina 2009: 20–21)[11]. For example, if I am in a melancholy mood, this mood is not conscious of itself—for Vedānta this does not make much sense—rather the mood exists in virtue of my experiencing it (cf. Chatterjee 1982: 343).

10 Cf. Chatterjee 1982: 342: ‘The Advaitists say, that when we have an awareness of an object, the object is
indeed manifested, but it is not the only thing revealed; here we have an automatic awareness of the
awareness too. The two awarenesses are simultaneous, but they are not of a similar structure, in fact they
are the two aspects of the same awareness.’
11 Śaṅkara argues against the Yogācārins that even if the experience, like a lamp which need not be
illuminated by a second lamp in order to be visible, is revealed by itself, it still has to be revealed to a
subject (otherwise it would be ‘like lamps, and be they thousands, burning in the midst of a mass of rocks’
(Brahmasūtrabhāṣya II.2.28, Deussen 1920: 361–362), i.e. without anyone seeing them). Cf. Ingalls 1954:
301.

>>14426354
And indeed, one might question whether it is really sufficient to account for the subjectivity of experience—its being-experienced-by-me (respectively)—in terms of its phenomenal self-givenness (svasaṃvedana), as ‘an awareness of what one's experience is like both in the sense of how the experience represents its object and how it feels to undergo the experience’ (MacKenzie 2008: 249). The question is for whom there is something it is like to be in a particular mental state. And it is far from clear that it really makes much sense to say that it is for the mental state itself to be (in) this state.

This ‘who’ of experiencing is an additional fact with regard to the experience and its phenomenal character: No facts whatsoever about an experience or its ‘what-it-feels-like-ness’ can ever imply its being experienced by me (except, precisely, that it is I who experiences it). It appears to be perfectly conceivable that this very experience with all its relations to other experiences of the same stream of consciousness, to this body and to the rest of the world, could have existed without the ‘I’ which experiences it being me. This seems to be a contingent (and even, as Thomas Nagel states, ‘outlandish’ (Nagel 1986: 55)) fact (as I argue in Fasching 2009; cf. also Madell 1981; Klawonn 1987).

This quite enigmatic additionality of the being-experienced-by-me with regard to all other properties of an experience, changes, I believe, the perspective on the question of the diachronic unity of the subject. It seems that what happened once can happen again: that an experience happens as the taking place of me. This refers to something radically different from the question of whether there are experiences that are connected to, or continuous with, my present one. When I ask whether I will still exist tomorrow, I do not ask whether there will be experiences that, for example, have a first-personal access to my present one. I do not refer to any aspects of the contents of some experiences in the future at all, but simply and irreducibly to the question of whether these experiences will be experienced by me [12]. And this seems to be logically compatible with a complete loss of memory or any other kind of psychological change (cf. Williams 1973).

12 Cf. Brahmasūtrabhāṣya II.2.25 where Śaṅkara stresses that my continued existence refers to strict
numerical identity and not to some similarity (Thibaut 1962: 415; this sentence is missing in Deussen's
translation)—and observes that while, with regard to external things, it is admittedly possible to mistake
similarity with identity, this is impossible with regard to oneself as the subject (which today is called the
‘immunity to error through misidentification’).

>>14426357
3. Self as Consciousness

What, then, is this ‘me’? Interestingly, for Advaita Vedānta [13] the true ‘I’ (or rather ‘self’: cf. Ram-Prasad this volume) is in no way some trans-experiential entity (as is the view of Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika), but is in a certain sense nothing but experience itself. For Advaita, ‘the self is the object experiencing…, i.e., ‘experiencing of something’, and is not only becoming manifest in it as something which stands, as it were, behind or beyond it' (Hacker 1978: 275). So in this view experience does not take place for a subject, but simply as the subject.Where, then, is the dissent from Buddhism and its rejection of an experiencing self in addition to experience? The crucial difference is that ‘experience’ is meant here in the sense of consciousness (citor caitanya), which in Advaita Vedānta is strictly distinguished from the mind (in the sense of the changing mental states). When, for example, Advaitins speak of jñāna (‘cognition’ or, in the terminology of this paper, ‘experience’) as being the essence of the self, they expressly distinguish it from what they call the vṛtti-jñānas, that is, the manifold transient mental states (Chatterjee 1982: 342; cf. also Hiriyanna 1956: 344 and Timalsina 2009: 17). [14]

13 Just as for Sāṃkhya and Yoga, and, by the way, for the Śaiva Siddhāntin Bhaṭṭa Rāmakaṇṭha: cf. the
interesting study by Alex Watson (2006) . In his Nareśvaraparīkṣāprakāśa, Bhaṭṭa Rāmakaṇṭha initially
lets the Buddhist win over Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika, which assume the existence of a self as a further entity
beyond cognition. But while Buddhism concludes that there actually is no self, only the cognitions,
Rāmakaṇṭha holds that cognition itself is the self (ibid.: 213–217). He thereby repeats earlier debates
between Buddhism and Sāṃkhya (whose view of the self he largely inherits) (ibid.: 93).
14 Quite similarly, Bhaṭṭa Rāmakaṇṭha differentiates between two meanings of jñāna, namely on the one
hand the many transient cognitions, and on the other, the one abiding cognition which is our very self (and
which he also terms, when it comes to contrasting the two senses of jñāna, prakāśa = ‘illumination’
or saṃvit = ‘consciousness’): the latter being a permanent witnessing or experiencing of the passing
cognitions (Watson 2006: 354–373).

>>14426366
So, in Advaita Vedānta, consciousness is not equated with the single ephemeral experiences or with some property of them. Rather, it is understood as something that abides as that wherein the coming and going experiences have their manifestation (being-experienced). Consciousness is, so to speak, the witnessing (experiencing) of the experiences, and while the experiences change, experiencing itself abides. After all, the succession of the experiences consists precisely in one experience after another becoming experientially present, which presence as such therefore does not change.

Just like Yogācāra Buddhism, Advaita Vedānta espouses the idea of the ‘self-luminosity’ (svaprakāśatva) of experience—yet not as a feature of the individual mental states—these are things that become manifest in experience (qua consciousness)—but rather of consciousness itself (cf. Chatterjee 1982: 342–344, 349). [15] Consciousness, like light, is the medium of visibility of all things and does not have to be illuminated by another light (i.e. become the object of consciousness) in order to be revealed—it is the shining itself as the principle of revealedness.[16] Light is not visible in the way illuminated objects are, but at the same time, it is not concealed:[17] It is present, and it is precisely its presence that is the medium of the presence of everything—first and foremost of the experiences whose very existence consists in their being present.[18]

>>14426373
15 In Brahmasūtrabhāṣya II.2.28, Śaṅkara lets the Buddhist ask whether, with his stressing of the self-revealedness
of the cognizer, he is not actually adopting, only in other words, the Buddhist's own view of
the self-givenness of cognition, and answers: ‘No! Because cognition is to be distinguished [from the
cognizing subject] insofar as it is originating, passing away, manifold, etc.’ (Deussen 1920: 362, addition in
brackets by Deussen).
16 Cf. e.g. Śaṅkara's Upadeśasāhasrī I.15.40–41: ‘[It] has the light of knowledge as Its nature; [It] does not
depend upon anything else for [Its] knowledge. Therefore [It] is always known to me. The sun does not
need any other light for its illumination’ (Mayeda 1992: 145–146, bracketed additions by Mayeda).
17 Cf. Upadeśasāhasrī I.15.48 and 50: ‘Ātman Itself…is by nature neither knowable nor not knowable’.
‘Just as there is neither day nor night in the sun, since there is no distinction in the nature of light, so is there
neither knowledge nor ignorance in Ātman, since there is no distinction in the nature of knowledge’
(Mayeda 1992: 146). ‘Though light is an illuminator, it does not illumine itself [since it has in itself no
difference as between illuminator and illuminated]…In like manner Ātman [which has homogeneous
knowledge] never sees Itself’ (ibid.: I.16.12 , Mayeda 1992: 150, bracketed additions by Mayeda). Cf.
Ram-Prasad this volume, section 5, and Ram-Prasad 2007: 78–79.
18 For an insightful discussion of the understanding of consciousness as ‘luminosity’ in Indian philosophy,
cf. Ram-Prasad 2007: 51–99.

Hence for the Advaitins—although they hold that mental states are manifest essentially, and not by virtue of being the object of some further, higher-order mental states—it is not adequate to say that they are immediately self-aware. Rather, they exist in manifesting themselves in the medium of the luminosity of consciousness, which is immediately self-revealed. Experiences have their very being in their being-consciously-present (in being manifest in ‘primary presence’, as Erich Klawonn (1987,1998) calls it), and while these experiences are permanently fleeting, conscious presence as such abides (Klawonn 1998: 59; cf. Zahavi 1999: 80; Zahavi this volume: p. 59).

>>14426375
So, in this view, the manifold transient experiences have their manifestation in one consciousness. Yet why should we assume this? Why should we draw a distinction between the individual experiences and consciousness, thereby obviously hypostasizing consciousness into a ‘something’ in addition to experience? Why should we assume an irreducible sameness of consciousness, if, quite evidently, constantly new consciousness events are transpiring? Conscious experiences admittedly share the feature of being conscious, but it seems to be an obvious fallacy to speak here of something like a persisting consciousness-entity. So is there any justifiable sense in which consciousness is to be distinguished from the individual experiences and in which a multitude of experiences can be the taking place of the same consciousness?

I think there is. Already in a purely synchronic perspective, consciousness comprises many experiences, that is, I am actually seeing, hearing, thinking, etc. manifold things at the same time. The question is how one should account for this oneness of the experiencing ‘I’ across its manifold simultaneous experiences (i.e., what binds these experiences together as ‘mine’). Naturally, the reductionist cannot explain the synchronic unity of experiences by their being experienced by one subject (by me). For, in her view, there is simply no subject one could presuppose as explanans; rather, it's the other way around: just like diachronic unity, the unity of being-experienced-by-one-subject at a time is to be explained by the being-unified of the experiences by unity relations that hold between them.

Yet what sort of relations could these be? One must not forget that it is not just any relation,any unity between experiential contents that is at stake here, but the unity of being-present-in-one-consciousness. Certain experiential contents can be more strongly associated than others, and thereby bound together to form experiential ‘fields’ (experiential unities) in contrast to a background; they can be coordinated as constituting one coherent space, and the like—but all such relations that might bind together experiences into ‘total experiences’ actually presuppose their being-present-together (cf. Dainton 2006: 240–244). Only what is co-present in this sense can be associated.

>>14426381
And this presence is nothing other than the being-experienced of the experiences in which, in the sense of their ‘first-person ontology’, the experiences have their being. So they do not exist and additionally become somehow unified. Rather, it is their very being (namely their being-experienced) wherein they have their unity. One could counter that it was inadequate to speak of many simultaneous experiences in the first place. Rather, it is one total experience with an inner complexity.[19] But the crucial question is precisely wherein the unity of this ‘one total experience’ lies. Nothing on the content-side can do this job. So one obviously has to distinguish between the one experience and the many experiential contents that manifest themselves within it. And if one wishes to call the latter ‘experiences’, it is important to understand that the one experience is not a sum or a composition of these many experiences (qua experiential contents), but rather it is ‘experience’ in the sense of the experiencing of the experiences (cf. Zahavi 1999: 80): that wherein they have their being-experienced, their primary presence—quite in the sense of the Advaitic notion of jñāna (or sākṣi-jñāna, as it is occasionally called) in contrast to the vṛtti-jñānas. So when we speak of many simultaneous experiences, their difference lies in what is present, not in presence itself.

19 Cf. the suggestion of Bayne and Chalmers in Bayne, Chalmers 2003: 56–57.

This, I would suggest, is how the talk of ‘witnessing’ in Advaita Vedānta should be interpreted: We stated that the ‘witness’ (sākṣin) is not understood as an observing entity standing opposed to what it observes, but as the very taking place of ‘witnessing’ itself, and ‘witnessing’ is nothing other than the taking place of the experiential presence of the experiences, in which the experiences have their very being-experienced and thereby their existence. In this sense, consciousness can be understood as the existence-dimension of the experiences (cf. Klawonn 1987; Zahavi 2005: 131–132; Zahavi this volume: p. 58; Fasching 2009: 142–144). A dimension comprises a multitude of elements that stand in manifold relations to each other, yet it is not the sum of these elements or a result of their interrelations, but what makes them, together with all their relations, possible in the first place. In this sense, ‘the self’ qua consciousness is to be distinguished from its experiences, but not as 19 Cf. a ‘separately existing entity’—just as space is not a separately existing entity in addition to the spatial objects, yet also not identical to them or reducible to their relations (since any spatial relations presuppose space).[20]

20 Cf., e.g. Upadeśasāhasrī II.2.58 and I.14.50: ‘Ātman, like space, is by nature not composite’; ‘there is no
distinction at any time in the Seeing which is like ether’ (Mayeda 1992: 237 and 140–141).

>>14426385
So the unity of being-experienced-together is irreducible to the many experiences and their relations, being rather that wherein they have their being, and this is nothing other than what Advaita Vedānta calls the ātman as ‘the immediately co-experienced unity of experiencing’ (as Paul Hacker characterizes Advaita's ātman, using a formulation of Scheler's about the ‘person’: Hacker 1978: 274; cf. ibid.: 275). When Advaita Vedānta equates the self with consciousness, this is not supposed to mean that the subject is composed of the many contents of consciousness. I qua consciousness am not an agglomeration of phenomenal contents, properly organized, but rather their thereness, their presence (and that is the one presence of the manifold contents).[21]

>>14426391
21 In her very lucid paper on the concept of witness-consciousness, Miri Albahari (2009) rigorously
distinguishes it from the ‘for-me-ness’ or ‘mineness’ (i.e. ‘first-personal givenness’), which Dan Zahavi
posits as the core sense of self. While mineness is a property of experience, witness-consciousness is
‘the modus operandi of the subject that has them’ (Albahari 2009: 68), i.e. of a ‘separate me’ (ibid.: 73 )
(whereas for Zahavi ‘the self…does not exist in separation from the experiences, and is identified by the
very first-personal givenness of the experiences’: Zahavi 2005: 132). I agree that experiences and
consciousness have to be distinguished in a certain sense (this being the very idea of ‘witness-consciousness’),
yet I disagree with breaking them apart as if they were separate existences, as Albahari
seems to do. Witness-consciousness is, according to Albahari, the ‘mode-neutral awareness’ that is
supposed to account for the experiences' accessibility to reflection, and for the unity of consciousness
across manifold experiences (Albahari2009: 71–72), thus obviously our pre-reflective awareness of our
own experiences. Yet this is precisely what Zahavi calls ‘mineness’ qua first-personal givenness. To
‘witness’, according to my understanding of the term, does not literally mean that the subject ‘observes’ the
experiences (as Albahari formulates: ibid.: 68 ), as if the witness were a separately existing entity that
watches experience-objects existing outside of it. Rather, it should be understood as the experiencing of the
experiences in which they have their very being. It is simply not the case that the being-present (first-personal
givenness, for-me-ness) of the experiences and the witnessing as the modus operandi of the subject
are two different things. And according to the Advaitic (and my) understanding, the ‘me’ of the for-me-ness
(i.e. the self) is—quite in agreement with Zahavi—not something to be posited in addition to this presence
(for-me-ness), but something that consists in nothing other than the witnessing/experiencing itself.
Furthermore, Albahari holds that this for-me-ness is, as an aspect of experience, something introspectively
detectable, and also in this respect stands in contrast to witness-consciousness which, as ‘built into the very
act of being aware’, can never become an object of awareness (Albahari 2009: 68–69). I have my doubts
about the former claim. ‘Mineness’ is about as much a ‘real predicate’ as is ‘being’ according to Kant. It is
in no way a content towards which one could direct one's attention, no introspectively examinable quality
(no ‘feeling’: Albahari 2009: 70) my experiences have in addition to other qualities (such as the specific
character of my pain) (cf. also Zahavi this volume: p. 59)—it is rather precisely the first-personal thereness-for-
me of my experiences, together with all their qualities.

>>14426398
Now the question is: What is the nature of the temporal abiding of experiential presence through the permanent succession of experiences? Does a new presence with new contents not take place each moment? Is there a succession of presences together with the succession of contents (after all, the presence-of-this now and the presence-of-that then are obviously different presence-events)? Or is it, rather, not one and the same consciousness, in which the experiences have their coming and going? In other words: Can two presence-events at different times be the taking place of the same presence, that is, is there an irreducible sense in which two such presence-events can be the taking place of (one and the same) me? Vedānta insists that what changes when one experience follows the other (presence-of-this being succeeded by presence-of-that), are actually the contents of consciousness, not consciousness itself (cf. Sinha 1954: 329). And indeed, as soon as one distinguishes consciousness from the experiences, the assumption that the diachronic identity of consciousness has to consist in unity relations between the experiences appears less compelling. And if one takes a closer look at the nature of the presence of the momentary experience, it becomes outright implausible: The ‘primary presence’ (the current being-experienced) of an experience always and essentially is the presence of the temporal streaming of experience transpiring right now. And that means: presence is irreducibly presence of the current taking place of temporal transition. (Otherwise no time-experience, no experience of change and persistence, would ever arise.)

>>14426404
So the indubitable evidence of my experiences in their very beingexperienced is always their evidence as passing the thereby ‘abiding dimension of first-personal experiencing’ (Zahavi 2005: 131). And, therefore, the absolute evidence of my present existence is the evidence of my present living through these streaming experiences. The being-experienced of the streaming experiences as streaming implies the permanence of the actuality of experiencing itself, which is the being of my ‘I’.[22] Therefore I, qua consciousness, am not the passing experiences, but rather their manifestation as passing, which does not pass with them: the abiding experiencing of the changing experiences (Fasching 2009: 144–145).[23]

22 Cf. Śaṅkara in Upadeśasāhasrī II.2.75 (in answering the question of how the perceiver, perceiving now
this, then that, can be said to be changeless): ‘If indeed you were subject to transformation, you would not
perceive the entire movement of the mind…Therefore, you are transcendentally changeless’ (Mayeda 1992:
240). ‘There must be some constant continuous principle to see their [the cognitions’] origin and
destruction…And this continuous consciousness is sākṣin' (Chatterjee 1982: 349).
23 Along comparable lines, Rāmakaṇṭha argues against the Buddhists that there is no need to assume that
the change of the objects of consciousness implies a change of consciousness itself: For even the Buddhists
cannot deny that many objects are conscious in one single consciousness at one point in time (and it is of no
help for the Buddhist to hold that this is due to a unifying cognition: it is still necessary to appeal to the
possibility of a single cognition having many objects). So, Rāmakaṇṭha argues, if the multiplicity of objects
at one time does not affect the singleness of consciousness, why should the multiplicity of
objects over time? It is the contents of consciousness that change, not consciousness itself (Watson 2006:
335–348).

So the question of whether the subject is something that can exist, in an irreducible sense, as one and the same at different times, must, I believe, be answered in the affirmative: It only exists as now-transcending from the start; in contrast to the fleeting experiences it abides as the presence of the streaming experiences as streaming. Experiences only exist in being experienced, that is, experientially present, and they are essentially present as streaming, which implies the abidance of this presence itself. This abidance cannot be constituted by relations between momentary ‘experience-stages’, because there simply are no experience-stages that would not have their primary presence as temporally passing. That is: There is no experiential evidence prior to the evidence of the ‘standing’ of the experiencing ‘I’.

>>14426412
This abidance of the ‘I’ cannot properly be conceived of as the enduring of an object in time that derives its persistence from unity relations between its temporal stages. For presence is not so much something that takes place in the respective present, but rather it is this very present itself—not in the sense of the objective time-point that is now present and then sinks into the past, but in the sense of the presentness of the respective present moment:[24] What marks a particular moment as being now is no objective feature of this special point on the timeline (cf. Nagel 1986: 57), rather it is the ‘now’ only in relation to the experiential presence of the subject (cf. Husserl 2006: 58, 390, 406). Consequently, the abiding of the ‘I’ is not so much the enduring of an inter-temporal object (with its coming and going temporal ‘object-stages’), but should rather be conceived of in terms of the ‘standing’ of the present itself, in which the very passing of time (the permanent becoming-present of ever-new time-points and object-stages) consists:[25] that is, of the phenomenon that it is always now. While the temporal stages of an object one is conscious of continually sink into the past, consciousness itself does not elapse: ‘…even though the object of knowledge changes’, says Śaṅkara, ‘the knower, being in past, future, and present, does not change; for his nature is eternal presence’ (i.e. the presentness of the present) (Brahmasūtrabhāṣya II.3.7, Deussen 1920: 389). So the evidence of the abiding of the subject is not the experience of some object-persistence, but the condition of the possibility of any experience of persistence.[26]

>>14426415
24 Cf. Husserl 1966: 333: ‘…the now-consciousness is not itself now’.
25 Cf. UpadeśasāhasrĪ I.5.3: ‘Just as to a man in the boat the trees [appear to] move in a direction opposite
[to his movement], so does Ātman [appear to] transmigrate…’ (Mayeda 1992: 114; bracketed additions by
Mayeda).
26 In my interpretation of the notion of witness-consciousness, I owe much to Dan Zahavi's views on
consciousness and the self. However, I am not sure whether we fully agree regarding the nature of the
diachronic identity of the self. Zahavi states ‘that it is the shared mode of givenness that makes two
experiences belong to the same subject, i.e.…it is their exposure in the same field of primary presence
which makes different experiences of one and the same self’ (Zahavi 1999: 144). I find this formulation
ambiguous. It could mean that a past experience is mine insofar as it is in my present experiencing given in a
first-person mode, ‘as mine’, or it could mean that the experience, when originally experienced, had its
manifestation in the same field or dimension of first-personal givenness. Hence, the question is: Is a past
experience mine insofar as, and because, it is first-personally accessible to me (in the present), or is it first-personally
accessible to me because it was experienced by me? The first reading ultimately amounts to a
reductionist view in Parfit's sense, and Zahavi appears to tend towards this approach (cf., for example, the
final section of his contribution to this volume). On the other hand, he speaks of an ‘abiding dimension of
experiencing’ (Zahavi 1999: 80), which would allow a view of the ‘sameness’ of the ‘same field of
givenness’ in the second sense (the view I favor). Formulations such as, ‘Not only is the first experience
retained by the last experience, but the different experiences are all characterized by the same fundamental
first-personal givenness’ (this volume: p. 58) may also be interpreted along these lines.

>>14426419
4. The Presence of the World and the Subject in the
World

What Advaita Vedānta soteriologically aims at as the realization of the ‘self’ is nothing other than becoming aware of experiential presence (consciousness) as such. So far, we have characterized this consciousness as the presence of the experiences. Yet this should not be misunderstood as meaning the presence of merely mental contents, of some subjective interiority in contrast to the outer world. Rather, consciousness exists as the presence of anything we could ever refer to, be it ‘inner’ or ‘outer’. The presence of the experiences is the presence of the world.[27] The presence of sensuous contents, for example, is ipso facto the sensuous presence of the respective perceived object; my thinking is nothing but the successive presenting-itself of some meaning-constellation (some ‘thought’ in the noematic sense); the moods I live through are aspects of the way the world is there for me, etc. So experiences are manifestation-events—they exist as appearing-of-something, and appearance as such has its existence in its being-present (beingexperienced)—namely its existence as appearance-of. The presence of experience means that appearance-of-something takes place, and so the presence of experience is ipso facto the presence of this something.

27 Cf. Śaṅkara's Brahmasūtrabhāṣya II.2.28: ‘We are obliged to assume objects apart from cognition,
namely on the ground of cognition itself. For no one cognizes a post or a wall as mere cognition, but as
objects of cognition everyone cognizes the post or the wall’ (Deussen 1920: 359).

Therefore my being qua presence means that all sorts of things are present to me. I can investigate these things given to me in manifold ways, and I can also reflect on their modes of givenness. Yet what can be said about the presence itself as such of what is present to me? This presence (consciousness) is notoriously elusive. It has no observable properties of its own, is no particular and distinguishable content we encounter, and can never stand before us as an object. Therefore the self in the Advaitic sense is not one of the ‘seen’ things but the ‘seeing’ itself: ‘I am neither this object, nor that, I am That which makes all objects manifest’ (Śaṅkara, Vivekacūḍāmaṇi verse 493, Prabhavananda/Isherwood1978: 115). Presence is not a phenomenon of its own that I could find in addition to other phenomena, but simply the taking place of thereness of any phenomena. This is the sense of the so-called ‘transparency’ of consciousness, that is, the fact that when one tries to attend to the consciousness of an object, one can hardly help ending up attending to what it is conscious of.[28]

>>14426429
28 Consciousness is no object we could find anywhere and is in this sense ‘invisible’. But this does not
mean that it is concealed. The transparency of consciousness does not mean that the cognitive processes
through which we represent objects are not themselves again represented and thereby normally unknown to
us (as Metzinger understands it: Metzinger 2003: 163–177), but rather that there simply is nothing to
represent, because consciousness is nothing but the thereness of whatever it happens to be
consciousness of and nothing beyond that: It is not an object we fail to be conscious of, but no object at all.

So the presence itself of what is present can never be an observable object, yet at the same time it is the most familiar thing in the world: It is that wherein everything we experience has its being-experienced, the medium of all phenomena (the taking place of their phenomenality). And the soteriological aim of Advaita Vedānta—the realization of ātman—is nothing but simply becoming explicitly aware of this taking place of presence as such. Of course, in a certain sense we are constantly conscious of our being conscious. After all, we are not living in a permanent state of complete self-forgetfulness, fully absorbed in the objects: we are not only conscious of the objects we see but also—at least implicitly—of our seeing them. But evidently, this is not the form of self-awareness Advaita Vedānta strives for— rather, it is, in their view, precisely a form of self-forgetfulness, that is, of obscuration of the fundamental dimension of our own being qua subjectivity: It is ahaṃkāra (‘ego-sense’), the awareness of a distinct ‘I’ (aham) as an inner-worldly subject with particular empirical (psychophysical) properties (a jīva, ‘person’).

To say that I am not only conscious, for example, of this desk I see, but also of my seeing it actually means that I am aware of myself sitting here and looking at the desk and of the fact that the desk appears in this particular way precisely because it is given to me as someone viewing it from this particular angle, with these particular sense-organs, and so on. So that which I am aware of here, is my localization in the world, and of my own body to which I relate the rest of the appearances. When I experience an unchanging object in changing modes of givenness, I experience this change as being due to the changing relations between the experiencing subject and the experienced object: that is, together with the object, experienced in changing modes of givenness, a ‘subject’ is experienced for whom the manifestations are manifestations, a ‘subject’ which is itself something that is objectively located within the objective world, standing in manifold—physical and psychical— relations to other things.

>>14426436
And this is essential to object-givenness in general. Objectivity means appearance-transcendence: We apprehend the subjective appearance as not being the object itself, but as only being an aspect of this object, that is, this object as seen from a certain viewpoint, in certain respects. Hence the from-where of seeing is necessarily co-constituted with the seen object—co-constituted as a ‘subject’ that is itself part of the objective world (cf. Husserl 1952: 56, 109–110, 144; Albahari 2006: 8–9, 88). So in a way the experience of objects is ipso facto also self-experience, in the sense of the self-localization of the subject within the realm of the objects.

This not only holds for our being conscious of ourselves as a body, but also with regard to the mental aspects of what we experience as our ‘I’: For example, the field of givenness is never a mere homogeneous plane, but features an attentional relief which indicates a mental ‘I’ to which certain things are attentionally ‘nearer’ than others: I can direct my attention to this or to that within the field of what is consciously there for me, so that my ‘I’ is obviously to be distinguished from this field (cf. Husserl 1952: 105–106), an ‘I’ with particular personal interests and the like. This ‘self-experience’ as a particular psychophysical being means that we identify a certain special sphere of what is experientially given to us as ‘ourselves’: that is, we constantly distinguish within the realm of phenomenal contents between what belongs to ‘ourselves’—one's body, one's thoughts, and so on—and what is located ‘outside of ourselves’ (cf. Albahari 2006: 51, 56–60, 73[29]). This is what is called adhyāsa (‘superimposition’) in Advaita (see below).

29 Albahari 2006: 57: The identification of the subject with certain aspects of the body or mind involves
‘the subject—the witnessing as it presents from a psycho-physical perspective—identifying with those
very khandhās [= skandhas] (objects of awareness) that contribute…to the impression of a hemmed-in
perspective from which the world is witnessed’.

>>14426443
So object-givenness implies the givenness of the subject (an indicated and experienced from-where of experiencing) as a necessary moment of the structure of the field of the objectively given. Now the point is that the experiencing itself—consciousness—is not a structural moment of what is given, but is the very taking place of givenness itself. The whole inner/outer (self/not-self) distinction constitutes itself within the realm of experiential contents—and consequently experiencing itself is not located within some ‘inner sphere’. My consciousness is not to be found on one side of this inner-outer distinction in which what we experience is necessarily structured, but is, again, the taking place of experience itself. The viewpoint is part of the structure of the field of presence and therefore not presupposed, but constituted by it.

Hence consciousness of myself as an ‘inside’ as opposed to an ‘outside’ is not a way of being aware of consciousness as such, which is not a special inner realm opposed to the outer objects, but the thereness of these objects, the appearing of what appears (be it ‘inside’ or ‘outside’). This ‘preinterior’ consciousness is what Advaita Vedānta means by ‘self’: ‘[T]he self which is of the nature of consciousness … [is] the witness of both the seer and the seen’ (Śaṅkara, Ātmajñopadeśavidhi III.7, quoted in Gupta 1998: 38), therefore it is ‘the pure “subject” that underlies all subject/object distinctions’ (Deutsch 1969: 49), ‘the “field” of consciousness/being within which the knower/knowing/known distinctions arise’ (Fort 1984: 278).

>>14426451
5. The Process of De-Superimposition

In order to become aware of the self in this sense it is necessary to stop identifying oneself with what presents itself as ‘I’ and ‘mine’: the ‘annihilation of the ego-sense’ (Ramana in Osborne 1997: 19). Normally we are not explicitly aware of consciousness as such, since we are totally lost in the objects of consciousness and can also understand ourselves only as one of the objects. This erroneous self-understanding as one of the objects is what is called adhyāsa in Advaita Vedānta, the ‘superimposition’ of self and not-self: Certain experienced contents are appropriated as belonging to one's own self, as an ‘inner’ opposed to what is located ‘outside’ the self (cf. Fort 1984: 278) as it articulates itself in our ‘saying, for example, “that am I”, “that is mine”’ (Śaṅkara, Brahmasūtrabhāṣya, Introd., Deussen 1920: 3).

Accordingly, the way of becoming aware of one's true nature consists in a ‘process of desuperimposition’ (Indich 1980: 16, 10), that is, a process of deidentification from anything one objectively encounters as one's purported self (cf. Fasching 2008). One stops identifying oneself with the inner-objective ‘subject’, the psychophysical entity (jīva) one normally takes oneself to be. Instead of identifying certain configurations of experienced contents as being ‘oneself’, one begins to experience oneself as the abiding experiencing itself (the taking place of presence) of any contents. De-superimposition means radically distinguishing oneself from all objects by no longer delimiting oneself (as an ‘inside’) as opposed to the objects ‘out there’. One stops considering anything as being ‘oneself’ or ‘one's own’: ‘He to whom both “I”…and “my”…have become meaningless, becomes a knower of Ātman’, as Śaṅkara puts it (Upadeśasāhasrī I.14.29, Mayeda 1992: 138).

>>14426457
In the ‘de-identified’ mode of experiencing that is strived for, one completely lets go of ‘oneself’ and becomes nothing but ‘seeing’, without any distinct ‘seer’ standing apart from the ‘seen’. This amounts to a profound transformation of one's self-experience and of the way of being in the world. To experience oneself as the ‘witnessing’ leads to a sense of detachment, a loosening of one's involvement in the concerns, desires, and fears of the ego [30]. One experiences oneself as an inner stillness in the midst of all motion, and as non-acting even when engaged in action.[31]

30 Cf. e.g. Śaṅkara's descriptions in Vivekacūḍāmaṇi verses 428–442, Prabhavananda/Isherwood1978:
104–106; Osborne 1997: 31.
31 ‘…he who, though acting, is actionless—he is the knower of Ātman’ (Upadeśasāhasrī I.10.13,
Mayeda 1992: 124); cf. also Osborne 1997: 32.

Instead of simply identifying oneself with a particular configuration of experiential contents, standing in permanently changing relations of activity and passivity to other experienced contents, one simultaneously experiences oneself as the abiding experiencing itself, as the motionless and non-acting dimension of manifestation of all movements and activities, of any ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ and all relations between them. One no longer apprehends oneself as a subject-pole in opposition to an object-pole, being affected by it, reacting to it, dealing with it, but as the event of presence of any subject and object. ‘I (= Ātman) am of the nature of Seeing, non-object…, unconnected [with anything], changeless, motionless…[Touch] does not produce for me any change of gain and loss…, since I am devoid of touch, just as a blow with the fist and the like [does not produce any change] in the sky’ (Upadeśasāhasrī III.3.115, Mayeda 1992: 252; bracketed additions by Mayeda). With the dropping of the notions of ‘I’ and ‘mine’, in a way nothing remains for oneself, and in this sense it could be seen as a dissolution of the self. Yet for Advaita Vedānta this ‘nothing’ actually just means no-thing, that is, non-objectivity. The modern Advaitic author Arvind Sharma answers the question of whether ‘the sense “I am” [is] real or unreal’ with the words: ‘Both. It is unreal when we say: “I am this, I am that”. It is real when we mean “I am not this, nor that”’ (Sharma 1993: 96–97).[32] One becomes aware of oneself precisely when one ceases to find oneself anywhere.

32 Cf. Upadeśasāhasrī I.6.6: ‘The learned should abandon the “this”-portion in what is called “I”,
understanding that it is not Ātman’ (Mayeda 1992: 116). (Formulations like this seem to contradict the
claim, such as Ram-Prasad (this volume) makes, that in Advaita Vedānta the term ‘I’ does not at all refer to
the ātman.

>>14426465
6. Conclusion

In opposition to Buddhism, Advaita Vedānta insists on the existence of an abiding self, a self which consists in nothing but consciousness (‘seeing’ or ‘witnessing’) and as such is the non-object kat' exochen, since seeing is not itself something visible. I have argued that this view does indeed capture something essential about the nature of experience. Buddhism and Advaita Vedānta agree that it is necessary to inhibit the identification with the ‘I’ and the clinging to what is ‘mine’ to achieve liberation. The theoretical interpretation of this process is where they disagree. Now it is my opinion that the notion of witness-consciousness allows for a more faithful description of what actually happens in this process than the idea of no-self (at least in its reductionist interpretation).

Buddhism invites us to reflect on our own being and holds that what we will find are all kinds of transient phenomena (the five skandhas), but nothing like a stable ‘self’. With regard to each of theskandhas one should understand: ‘this is not mine; this am not I; this is not the Self of me’ (Saṃyutta Nikāya XXII.59). This insight leads us to the liberation from the illusion of self. Yet the question is: If there is nothing but these transient phenomena that constitute our being (in other words: if this simplyis what we are)—who is it then that is not identical to all this? Who is it who can say of her body, her thoughts, etc. ‘this am not I’? This ‘who’ is, I wish to suggest, nothing but the experiencing consciousness in which all the passing phenomena have their manifestation and which Advaita Vedānta regards as our ‘self’.

>>14426311
youexpectmetoreadallthatnigga.jpg

bump

>>14426602
Yes.

>>14426311
Now that the dust has settled, in the end did Shankara achieve the Buddhist Nirvana?

>>14427513
He achieved the Upanishadic moksha.

"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." - Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 4.4.6.

when the Upanishad said that "this sacred knowledege cannot be obtained through thinking, but it can be obtained by a sacred teacher"
does that mean self introspection is futile? and that one must be indoctrinated by a guru?

>>14428282
the 'orthodox' position espoused in shankara's works in that one cannot reach moksha without both renunciation and direct personal instruction by a realized teacher, although it's more or less accepted as a given that anyone can still have spontanous spiritual experiences from studying scriptures and practicing spiritual teachings even without personal instruction, and that the results of these and the results of having regular spiritual practice can range from transmigration into another life with very auspicious circumstances where one is exceptionally bright and inclined to spirituality, all the way up to the attainment of brahmaloka lasting until the end of the cycle of universal manifestation (i.e. the northern path), although moksha itself requires both initiation and monasticism

REMINDER: Over a thousand years of Hindus, and modern mainstream scholars (both Hindu and Western) largely agree that Shankara's philosophy is "crypto-Buddhism," reliant on Buddhist epistemological idealism ca. Nagarjuna, and is in fact not faithful to the Upanishads at all.

The OP is a theosophist and wikiperennialist who would be considered dangerously heretical by most Hindus today. He knows nothing about real Hinduism. Don't listen to his lies!

>>14428411
Hmm...no, this is why I don't adhere to Advaita Vedanta, the cult aspect is what makes it less of a philosophy and more of a circlejerk.

>>14428427

>>14428427
REMINDER. Literally no one cares about the opinion of a shizo 4chan Buddhist larper and anyone who unironically becomes a Buddhist or Hindu based off /lit/ memes was naive beyond saving anyways.

>>14428427
>Shankara championed monism because he was so stupid that he could only count to one

>>14428562
why has nobody ever been able to logically refute Shankara like that guy does with Nagarjuna here?

>>14428634
a refutation of nagarjuna is a refutation of shankara, since everyone knows shankara is just using nagarjuna's ideas 90% of the time. only advaita cultists deny this

>>14428698
10/10 Mental gymnastics

>>14428634
they have. Ramanuja and Madhva have refuted him multiple times. The majority of Hindus today subscribe to Madhvacharyan Bhaktism. Shankara remains just a footnote of history even in India.

>guenonfag getting annihilated in his own threads again

hahahaha it's every time now

Reminder that guenonfag accidentally outed himself as a Hindu not too long ago (pic related)

>>14428717
>Ramanuja and Madhva have refuted him multiple time
do you have any proof of this?

>>14428741
He also outs himself as a "Sufi" routinely. If you say he's a heterodox Muslim, he gets mad and says that only salafists would be anti-guenon. He clearly sees himself as a Hindu/Muslim, but he is neither Hindu or Muslim. He's a brown Frenchman who reads theosophy.

>>14428440
How do you know if you have truly reached spiritual enlightenment if you don't have someone who has reached it already guiding you there?

>>14428730
>>14428741
>>14428801
>shizo literally unable to see a thread about Hinduism without spazzing out about muh guenonfag

>>14428717
>Hindus today subscribe to Madhvacharyan Bhaktism

Is this true?

>>14428810
Quiet guenonfag.

>>14428427
>agree that Shankara's philosophy is "crypto-Buddhism,

Let us see how many of these ideas allegedly taken from Buddhism appear first in the pre-Buddhist Upanishads

The doctrine of Maya? It's first mentioned by name in Brihadaranyaka (2.5.19) and alluded too many times elsewhere in the same text and in Chandogya. Monasticism? The Brihadaranyaka praises it and describes it as the course that Janaka follows after becoming enlightened in (4.4.22 & 4.5.2). The self-luminosity of the Self being taken from Yogachara? The Brihadaranayka describes the Self as self-luminous in (4.3.6). Advaita idealism being taken from Buddhist idealism? The Aitareya Upanishad (which according to a review by Olivelle et al is pre-Buddhist) directly says "consiousness is Brahman" in (3.1.4.).

The unborn doctrine? The Brihadaranyaka states that Brahman is unborn many times in (4.4.22., 4.4.24. & 4.4.25.), and says that Brahman is only seen as manifold because of Maya (2.5.19) and says that really there is no diversity in Brahman and that people who see diversity go from death to death (4.4.19). The Chandogya says in line (6.1.4.) "By knowing a single lump of earth you know all objects made of earth. All changes are mere words, (existing) in name only. But earth is the reality" and then repeats the message with the example of clay, gold etc in other lines. Hence, the pre-Buddhist Upanishads deny that change, multiplicity etc are real and attribute it to maya and ignorance, and they say that he underlying reality which is the basis of those illusions is unborn and unchanging.

The distinction between absolute knowledge and non-absolute knowledge? The Mundaka Upanishad while not pre-Buddhist mentions supreme and non-supreme Brahma-knowledge in line (1.1.4.) hundreds of years before Nagarjuna who is the first Buddhist to mention higher and lower knowledge (Buddha never did). The pre-Buddhist Brihadaranyaka also makes an identical distinction in line (2.3.1.) when it says that Brahman should be known in two forms, the one gross, mortal, limited and definite and the other subtle, immortal, unlimited and indefinite.

That's a quick summary of everything people claim Shankara took from Buddhism, but as you can see it all appears first in the pre-Buddhist Upanishads, if anything it would indicate the Buddha himself and Buddhists like Nagarjuna obtained concepts from the early Upanishads.

>>14428843
This has been refuted every time you post it, you're embarrassing yourself at this point but I guess that's your strong suit.

>>14428741
Hasn't he always admitted to being Hindu?

>>14428584
Because of course the only reason people would be interested in those things is your stupid memes.

>>14428843
Guenon's a fucking nobody to philosophy and you have successfully ruined any chance of discussing Buddhism on /lit/.

>>14428813
>Is this true?
No it's not. Dvaita is a relatively unpopular school that only formalized in the 13th century. Vishishtadvaita (basically Advaita for normies) is perhaps the most popular while Advaita is about second in influence and tends to dominate among actual ascetics and pandits whereas Vishishtadvaita is more prominent among the masses who seek some form of devotional worship without reading a bunch of metaphysics. One of the major sects of Hinduism is Smarta though which follows Advaita while most Vaishnavism tends to be Vishishtadvaita. Third in popularity/influence are the various Bhedabheda schools.

>>14428860
Nobody has mentioned Guenon at all whatsoever in this thread except for the spergs who have come into the thread to attack Shankara and/or OP

>>14428844
How has that been refuted? That refutes lies from buddhist spammers. It is so clear why Advaita Vedanta is orthodox, it has never been supported by anything but shruti.

>>14428867
Damn you really never have been to India have you.

>tfw you realize guenonfag has heard more french rap in his life than he has heard indian languages spoken out loud

>>14428843
What you call truth is one. There cannot be two truths, three truths, four truths, five truths, etc. There is only one truth – satyameva jayate. II.12, 5th Brahmana - Br Up
>What you call truth is one. There cannot be two truths, three truths, four truths, five truths, etc. There is only one truth – satyameva jayate. II.12, 5th Brahmana - Br Up

>>14428860
>and you have successfully ruined any chance of discussing Buddhism on /lit/.
good, Buddhism is gay

>>14428880
Just like the real Guenon.

>>14428867
Vaishnavis are Dvaita you stupid mleccha

>One of the major sects of Hinduism is Smarta
ok guenonfag

>>14428884
>good, Buddhism is gay

>>14428881
It's a misnomer to refer to the Vedantic/Upanishadic distinction of absolute and non-absolute truth as the two truths doctrine, Shankara never refers to it as such and only talks about higher/absolute knowledge and lower knowledge, Shankara doesn't say there are two truths which is why he says the world is unreal. That line does not in any way disprove the point that the Mundaka and the pre-Buddhist Brihadaranyaka both make the distinction of absolute and non-absolute knowledge hundreds of years before any Buddhist thinker did (Nagarjuna may have stole it from the Mundaka). That line you are quoting is not relevant because such a distinction was never considered by Advaita to be a doctrine of 'two truths', the label is the invention of modern scholars.

I've explained this to you before but you are coping and have no real arguments and so you just pretend that it never happened. There is no two truths because only absolute knowledge/reality is absolutely true, the empirical and non-absolute is ultimately false. That line could not have possibly meant that there is not a distinction of absolute and non-absolute knowledge (that there is such a distinction is stated in the very same text that line comes from) because the "two truths" doctrine of Nagarjuna didn't exist then and would not be created until some 900-1000 years later so the phrasing could not possibly refer to it. Do you know realize how brainlet-tier your argument is here?

>>14428919
>copy pasting from the same thread you sperged out

>>14428931
fucking kek

>>14428931
Don't forget this classic Guenonfag post:

>It's been 24 hours and none of you ming-mongs have replied to this. All the more embarrassing considering YoU CaN't HaVe Up WiThOuT dOwN mY dUdEz loooooollzzlz lmafaooo :DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD!1!111! was intended to be the epic GOTCHA retort. Writhing animals.
>>/lit/thread/S14177852#p14185535

>>14428931
You are just copy and pasting the same debunked argument and so I'm just copy and pasting the same response that explains why it's bullshit. If you have any new arguments that have not been debunked I'll gladly entertain them and provide a thoughtful response.

>>14428948
>YOU'RE THE ONE FUCKING COPING YOU LITTLE SHIT!!!1

>>14428950
lmao

>>14428804
Verificationist fallacy, something that many religious have to justify their nonsensical tenets on equal footing with everything else they say.

he's astroturfing in other threads again, making threads tenuously related to "esotericism" and recommending shankara/guenon

guenonfag is seriously the most pathetic person i've ever seen online

>>14429012
>guenonfag is seriously the most pathetic person i've ever seen online
how pathetic does that make you then for obsessing over him like you were a teenage girl obsessing over the Jonas brothers lmao, you've come into a thread where someone posted an academic article about advaita without even mentioning guenon and you barged in and made 7 or 8 posts about guenonfag so far, talk about rent-free!

Didn't the Buddha proactively refute Advaita though?

>>14429081
i've made 3 posts and all of them were laughing at you, just like i am laughing at you now

>>14429087
So it seems. So it seems.

>>14428997
how is that in any way a fallacy?

>>14429087
>In early Buddhist literature there is no reference to Brahman (neuter) as absolute, but only to Brahmā (masculine) the creator God. The principle of absolute consciousness is however mentioned in a debate between the Buddha and Brahmā. The Buddha does not defeat this view by polemics but by supernatural powers. 86

86 Majjhima Nikaya I.329 - Sutta, No. 49. Cited in H. Nakamura, " Upaniṣadis Tradition and the Early School of Vedānta as Noticed in Buddhist Scripture, "Hardvard Journal of Asian Studies, 18 June 1955, pp.78-79

In the one Sutta in the whole Pali Canon where anything remotely resembling Upanishadic teachings is presented, the Buddha did not have any arguments against the concept but instead had to rely on his magic powers to win the argument, which is what one might expect of a pseudo-spiritual con artist

>>14429131
Truth is beyond truth by consensus, there is no truth by consensus of any sort, not even by consensus of one is not truth itself.

>>14429146
It isn't mentioned because Advaita is a perversion of Buddhism that arose in the 8th century and no Upanishads can truly be dated before the Buddha. There are like 2 that MIGHT be dated before it, 2 out of over 200. Face it, Indian civilization started with Buddhism.

You're like a Christian constantly talking about how Christianity is the superior religion because no classical period Greek philosopher refuted it.

>>14429172
>there is no truth by consensus of any sort
I never stated that there was, that's unrelated to the content of my post

>>14429176
Not to mention that of the two Upanishads you refer to, Chandogya and Brhadaranyaka, both include completely contradictory and experimental cosmological speculations that are not at all in accord with Advaita interpretations. Advaitins just cherry-pick two or three of the hundreds of statements about how the world originated, while ignoring the rest when they indicate a personal Brahman/Atman, or even refer to Brahman as a heavenly place where people go after death.

All we know about the earliest Upanishad period was that it was roughly contemporary with the sramanas, who did not give a shit about the Vedic corpus, and probably had as much or more influence on the Upanishadic authors as the Upanishadic authors had on them.

What we do know is that Advaita's purified nondualism comes from Buddhist developments in logic and metaphysical idealism circa 200-600AD, which are then read back into the Upanishads by cherry-picking the aforementioned "nondual" verses. The whole style of argumentation of Shankara is Buddhist, the whole re-envisioning of Hindu life along monastic and ascetic lines is Buddhist. The only people who deny this are fringe Hindu nationalists, since even the mainstream Hindu nationalists don't like Theosophists like Guenonfag.

>>14429176
Both Advaitins and Sectarian Buddhists end up appealing to primacy, pathetic. Just because something existed before something else doesn't make your interpretation of either true.

>>14429203
A self proclaimed master who claims to know because someone else claims to know told them that they know and so on back to the head honcho, said chain of succession is not valid in and of itself, see the Catholic Church as an example (there is no actual unbroken chain of succession).

>>14429225
This is actually a really strong tendency in the way brown immigrants do religion. I read about how much they worship gurus and "teachers" for a long time, but I always assumed it was like a mild quirk. But then you meet them in real life and they say openly to you "you have to believe whatever I say, because my teacher was so-and-so, and his teacher was so-and-so, so I must be right." They mean this literally. They will try to use it to settle arguments, appealing to their OWN authority via the authority of their teacher (and his teachers and so on).

>>14429176
>no Upanishads can truly be dated before the Buddha.
Why do nearly all mainstream scholars date the earliest Upanishads as pre-Buddhist then? Do you know something that they don't? maybe you could publish your valuable insights?!?
>There are like 2 that MIGHT be dated before it, 2 out of over 200
And in those two appear all the concepts that people accuse Advaita of taking from Buddhism as this post demonstrates >>14428843
>Face it, Indian civilization started with Buddhism.
Kek, the mantras of the Vedas predate Buddhism by over a thousand years, what a nonsense claim. Your spiteful and childish sectarianism reveals itself.

>>14429225
>said chain of succession is not valid in and of itself
That's an unproven assertion, but anyways I never made the claim that "this traditions claim of an unbroken chain proves that it's correct", I merely posed the question "How do you know if you have truly reached spiritual enlightenment if you don't have someone who has reached it already guiding you there?", which you never answered

>>14429245
If you are claiming that YOUR particular teacher is the one who has real access to spiritual enlightenment, the burden of proof is on you. Obviously if you say "follow him and find out," a thousand other teachers will say "no, follow me, not him."

That's why guru worship is fucking retarded.

>>14429207
>What we do know is that Advaita's purified nondualism comes from Buddhist developments in logic and metaphysical idealism circa 200-600AD, which are then read back into the Upanishads by cherry-picking the aforementioned "nondual" verses.
There is no proof whatsoever of this though, any attempt to show it inevitably leads to the discovery that such ideas appear first in the pre-Buddhist Upanishads, which paints Buddha as either a plaigerist or as a transmitter of Upanishadic ideas

>>14429256
It is the standard opinion of scholars and of other Hindus. The first thing Hindus like Ramanuja said when they say Shankara's philosophy was "but this is just Buddhism tho." Nothing will be "proof" for you, because you are a dogmatic Advaitin, but everybody who looks at it without bias, scholars and other Hindus, sees it this way.

And as already covered, the pre-Buddhist Upanishads (if they are even pre-Buddhist, and in fact only layers of them might be) also contain personal descriptions of Brahman, heavenly descriptions of Brahman, and even nihilism and other things that do not correspond to Advaita at all. Things are even worse when you realize that Shankaran Advaita claims the Gita as prasthanatraya, when the current form of the Gita is basically a bowdlerized brahmanical text from as late as 200-400AD.

>>14429209
I didn't appeal to primacy. I just explained why a much later system would be absent in earlier texts. And like >>14429207 said, you need Buddhist philosophy to read Advaita into these texts. Which is why the sects in India that do not presuppose Buddhist philosophy such as the two truths doctrine and non-dualism gets something completely different out of the Upanishads.

In a similar way you have christcucks going around saying Taoism taught the religion of rabbi Yeshua Bar Yehosef.

>all these people more focused on having the more impressive-sounding beliefs or being able to make better arguments than they are on their own direct experiencing
It doesn’t matter if you say you’re one with Brahman or that, conversely, you have no atman when you’re on your deathbed.

Hinduism vs Buddhism “debate” can best be answered: both and neither. Both have valid insights, but differ based on cultural biases and different emphases/focuses. Plunder what you need from it for your own direct experiencing instead of trying to choose something to “believe” or “have faith” in, as if some belief your brain holds will bring you to enlightenment (even when such a belief is criticized by sages of both traditions). Also don’t bother responding to me.

>>14429321

>>14429321
Can I respond to you if I want to say that I liked your post friend?

>>14429286
>It is the standard opinion of scholars
For just about every scholar who claims he was influenced by Buddhism you can find one who says Shankara's ideas are Upanishadic in origin. Here is a masters thesis for example by a scholar who says Shankara's ideas are Upanishadic

"Thus, Shankara is best characterized not as a Hindu thinker or a “crypto-Buddhist” but as an Upanishadic Indian philosopher"
https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=rs_theses

the scholars Sharma and Comans both also take position that Shankara's thought and Advaita doctrine writ large is derived from the Upanishads
>The first thing Hindus like Ramanuja said when they say Shankara's philosophy was "but this is just Buddhism tho."
because they are trying to delegitimize him to make themselves look better, it doesn't change the fact though that the very things they accuse of being Buddhist appear first in the early Upanishads, which those people have unconvincing answers and responses to. Please, go ahead and post which exact idea they claim is Buddhist and I'll cite the exact pre-Buddhist Upanishad passage that idea is found in.
>also contain personal descriptions of Brahman, heavenly descriptions of Brahman, and even nihilism and other things that do not correspond to Advaita at all.
Those things are a part of Advaita you moron, Nirguna Brahman appears as Saguna Brahman via maya and Brahmaloka is accepted by Advaita and fits naturally into Advaita doctrine, if you think those are incompatible with Advaita you havn't the slightest notion of what you are talking about, there is no nihilism in the Upanishads
>Things are even worse when you realize that Shankaran Advaita claims the Gita as prasthanatray
what are you even talking about? Shankara cites the Gita as a smriti text and not as a sruti, he always defers to the sruti texts when it comes to doctrine and only cites smriti texts to back up what he already shows the sruti contains

>>14429321
>stop debating philosophy on /lit/!

>>14429347
Yeah, I found that Master's thesis too by looking at the first three results when googling "upanishads buddhism influence." You know a Master's thesis is completely meaningless? You can write one anywhere, on anything.

Also, if you knew anything about Sanskrit and Hindu religious scholarship, you would know that mid to late 19th century Indian nationals cannot be trusted because they are universally nationalist Advaitins and neo-vedantists (like you), and that you especially can't trust the proteges of the Guenonian Eliade from the '50s to about the late '80s, becaues they reduce the entire history of Hindu philosophy to a neo-platonized Advaita just like you and Guenon do.

As always, all you do is cherry pick, by googling. You've never done anything but google, to the point that I can tell exactly what google searches you are doing. Why don't you go read a book for once? Come back with something interesting to say for once, instead of copypasting the same easily refuted spiel, or desperately searching Google Books for "buddhism influence shankara." Here's a tip, use a library instead of Google Books.

The rest of your post is retarded. Honestly Guenonfag, you haven't even read the Upanishads except for skimming the verses you absolutely have to. You're not even a good cultist. At least cultists read their foundational texts.

>>14429367
I looked at your whole posts for arguments but didn't find any, only ad-hominem attacks and strawmen. Sad! many such cases

anyways, interesting article

Replies: 100
Posters: 14
Guenonfag has literally schizophrenia

>>14429839
you were the one posting over and over again about him you retard

>see a thread about hinduism
>spaz out and spam the copypasta images that you do every single thread without fail
>throw a hissy fit and hysterically insult everyone
>reply to your own posts with kek etc
>post a bunch of links to allegedly guenonfag's posts in other threads like a whiny bitch "oh my god guys look at this!!! >:^(
>act surprised when you've bumped the thread a bunch of times

Buddhism, not even once

>>14429888
>allegedly guenonfag
ok guenonfag, go to bed now

>>14429917
You can't get a Kiwi to sleep that easily.

>>14426311
>‘I Am of the Nature of Seeing’: this is why mahayana and hindusim are wrong view btw

That's just Intellect, Being, God.
You just proved he never found the Ineffable One.

>>14426311
ok but how does this relate to Jesus Christ?

>>14428943

That's not him, it's me. It's also not classic, I've only posted it once. And, by the way, I'm still waiting for a reply.

>>14429978
Shankara retroactively refuted Hinayana

>>14431224
>the self is an illus-

I found OPs posts interesting and was looking forward to reading further discussion. Instead, this thread is full of childless bickering.
Can someone just tell me if there is a way out of this meme-box of a biological organism that I am? Must the "ego" die? Or is the word ego itself a type of clinging?
Are all experiences mine, or am I really in this thing and basically fucked? What is the ultimate end of this debate?
I don't give a shit about tge historicity. I want to know what I am.

>>14432821
http://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=5F6A1C1109FF8F26478546D90FAEE7E9

>>14432821
Try reading this, you may find in it the answers that you seek. It's short and be read in an hour or two.

https://realization.org/p/ashtavakra-gita/richards.ashtavakra-gita/richards.ashtavakra-gita.html