/lit/ - Literature

After Atma-Jnana, is it possible to fall out of moksha and end up in samsara again? Can Maya arise again after Moksha?

>>13124158
>hurr durr maybe if I try to overwhelm someone with a bunch of citations they won't see through my bullshit
Your cope is obvious, it's really amazing how bad Shankara triggers you clowns, you must not be practicing Buddhist teachings very well, I'll take your allegations in order

>Advaita's and Buddhism's theories on True Reality and Maya are similar,[7]
In the pre-Buddhist Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, it already says Brahman is the 'truth of truth' (2.1.20. & 2.3.6), and most of the Upanishads describe Brahman as the ultimate reality in various ways, the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad also already mentions the doctrine of Maya by name (2.5.19) which also appears throughout the Upanishads. Thus, the idea of the Absolute as ultimate reality and of this being obscured by Maya predate Buddhism, Buddha took these from the Upanishads, or if we are to mirror your style, Buddha 'plagiarized' these

>Frank Whaling states that the monastic practices and monk tradition in Advaita are similar to those found in Buddhism.[8]
Again, in the Brihadaranyaka it talks about and enjoins monasticism (4.4.22 & 4.5.2), the emperor Yajnavalkya is described as renouncing the world and becoming a monk as part of his enlightenment, this predates Buddhism

>Advaita took over from the Madhyamika the idea of levels of reality.[57]
Again, in the Brihadaranyaka, Brahman is described as the 'truth of truth', also Shankara's is different from Madhyamika's anyways. The idea of there being a higher reality to be realized is implicit in the doctrine of Maya which predates Buddhism, you can't have Maya obscuring the truth of something without necessarily separating those concepts into "that which appeared due to Maya' and 'that which appears after Maya is overcome', the idea of two truths is just an elaboration of Maya, again all this predates Buddhism

>'Shankara and his followers borrowed much of their dialectic form of criticism from the Buddhists
WRONG, Sharma notes "technique between Gaudapáda on the one hand and the Mádhyamika and Vijñánávádí Buddhists on the other should not be taken to mean that Gaudapáda has borrowed these from the Buddhists. Gaudapáda flourished at that when Maháyána was prevalent and he was fully conversant with the Maháyána philosophy. Terms are the heritage of language and like current coins can be used by anyone who writes in that language. The dialectical method though developed in the Mádhyamika school did not originate with it or even with Buddha. Its origin is found in the Upanisads and its first exponent is the sage Yajñavalkya. The doctrinal similarities, as pointed out by Gaudapada himself,are due to the fact that Buddha himself took these doctrines from the Upanisads and these were developed in the Maháyána schools."

>His Brahman was very much like the sunya of Nagarjuna
lol, Shankara just accepts the Upanishad descriptions of Brahman and lets them speak for him and takes them literally, this is completely retarded

>>12259662
Huxley largely based his perennialism on the earlier work of the Traditionalists and he even took the same view of theirs that Advaita or general non-dualism was the common thread which unites most of them. I have read Island and enjoyed it but don't remember the context of that quote. But it sounds like he is saying one truth is that there is the separate and abiding substance and the second truth (a negation) is that it's false that all existence is relationship and change (whitehead btfo). These two statements are not mutually exclusionary and could be part of the same truth if the separate and abiding "whatever" is the reality remaining when the relationship and change mentioned in the second truth negated by the statement of it not being all of existence.

Which leads us back to Huxley's perennialism and the idea as expressed in Vedanta, of the unchanging, spotless and beginningless Paramatman which was the reality all along and not an effect one attains but when illusion is destroyed so that one no longer perceives reality for other than what it is, or as in Jonang Buddhism the Matrix-of-one-gone-to-bliss is not an effect but the all-pervading essence underlying everything which is the unchanging pure Self of all beings which simply has to have the impurities obscuring it removed, or as the Sufi Ibn Arabi writes, existence is God observing the mirror of his own creation and living beings are just deluded and have confused themselves with their reflection in the mirror when they are really God the witness. In all these cases these doctrines among others expressly say there is a separate, abiding, unconditioned 'essence' (God, the Self) which is the witness, and that what was thought to be the reality and what consisted of change and conditioned things was unreal (which does not mean non-existent) but was more like a mirage or when you fool yourself into seeing a person in the dark.

I don't know the context of that quote but that's what I'd guess.

>>11665617
His criticisms are actually pretty good, although most of them pertain to how 8th century Indian Buddhism (and the several preceding centuries) largely misunderstood Buddha's original teachings and were presenting a very corrupted form of them. As a general rule of thumb Buddhists who think Shankara or Hinduism is brainlet-tier tend to know very little about them. As just one example Shankara points out that dependent origination and the doctrine of momentariness are mutually incompatible with one another and cannot both be true without producing inexcusable contradictions, this is true and most of the evidence indicates that Buddha never actually taught the doctrine of momentariness but that it was the invention of later schools who read way too much into Buddha describing phenomena as generally being transient. Most of his other criticisms pertain to how it's illogical and nonsensical that an (illusionary) world can exist without something like Brahman or how dependent origination could arise despite everything being devoid of inherently reality. These criticisms are also valid and these reflect a distortion of Buddha's teachings that were interpreted as his, namely that Buddha never denied an impersonal unchanging Atma but just denied the permanence and continuance of the same aspects of the being (such as ego, mind, memory, etc) which Vedanta also agrees are transient and unreal, this was later misinterpreted as Buddha denying Atma which he never did. Buddha largely just taught a stripped-down and somewhat simplified version of Upanishad metaphysics which was partially misinterpreted as teaching that there is no immutable and unchanging reality to anything whatsoever (one can find a rough outline of Buddhism in the pre-Buddhist Chandogya and Brihadaranyka Upanishads, which clearly influenced Buddha directly or indirectly). Once you account for the fact that most of the things that Shankara criticizes about Buddhism in his writings are themselves just distortions of Buddha's teachings produced by various Buddhist sects, there are very few of his criticisms which still apply were you to apply them to what Buddha actually taught.

Buddha didn't elaborate in detail about Atma and other metaphysical subjects because he thought it could be an obstacle to progress, due to the Pali it was recorded in not reflecting the nuances of the Sanskrit Buddha used there was stuff lost in translation such as this subject. While Theravada is still useful as a method of self-control and overcoming emotions/stress etc it actually largely bases itself in these distortions. Ironically enough it's actually the Tibetan and Chinese Mahayana Buddhism that westerners love to claim is a superstitious distortion of their imagined 'scientific' and 'psychological' Buddhism which in their Mahayana sutras come up with all sorts of metaphysical concepts which bring them way closer to an understanding of what Buddha actuality taught, and by extension the Upanishads.

>>11302766
*laughs in Sanskrit*

>*plagiarises buddhism*