/lit/ - Literature

>>18767551
>I find this to be
...A problem worth considering if you don't want nondualism to devolve into crypto-nihilism. Posted too quickly

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan addresses this. He's a decent neo-Vedanta thinker, much more intellectual than Swami Vivekananda. I personally don't find his arguments all that convincing, but that's possibly because I'm not so sure that crypto-nihilism is a bad thing. You can find some of his stuff online for free (A Hindu View of Life, where he discusses something similar) but afaik his better book, An Idealist View of Life (he's not very inventive with titles) isn't online.

>>18767551
I suppose a conventional Advaitic response would be similar to the response to accusations of crypto-Buddhism: the "return" to Brahman isn't a negation of anything, it's an affirmation of reality, and the suppression of the person/individual is the dispelling of illusion. I don't think there's an honest Advaitic way of cutting it which doesn't acknowledge that individuality and personality are discarded; the response to Christian mysticism would be that the beatific vision is a delusion which comes from attachment to ego and a reliance on saguna Brahman. Even Radhakrishnan, who I mentioned above, acknowledges that the ultimate end is the cessation of the universe as we know it: his way of dispelling the accusations of crypto-nihilism (world-negation is the phrase he uses) is that, as long as there are jiva-atmans, there will be liberated souls who re-engage with the world in order to help. He says that love can only come from a non-dual source, but in all honesty I can't remember his argument for that. Anyway, read An Idealist View of Life.

>>18767551
>as God is love
Perhaps in Christianity, not in India

>>18767551
>furthermore, as God is love, a monistic view would have God only love Himself

Well not all monists would say that God is love, or at least they would be employing love in a very different definition than 'i love this/i love that".
More commonly in eastern monism the supreme foundation of reality is equated to consciousness and bliss, also used in a technical way but less easily confused with a subject/object mundane view.

>>18767624
>not in India

Of course. Just look at the holy Ganges river.

>>18767551
Theistic union is higher than monistic union. The latter appeals to self-hating Indians and drug using westernizers.

>>18767551
>Can any Hindus on this board address this problem?

Hindus will tell you you're bad and egoist if you don't aspire to become a like a block of granite.

>>18767685
The former appeals to people who can't face reality.

>>18767603
>I'm not so sure that crypto-nihilism is a bad thing.
What makes you say this?

>>18767685
Theistic union being most supreme is not only wrong, it's obviously wrong; even people who have had no mystical experiences can intuitively understand why this is the case. The very assertion that theistic union is supreme immediately posits an irreconcilable dualism between the theistic principle and the principle responsible for reality as it is, which is an unexplainable splitting of reality, no matter how wonderful the experience of union might be.

>>18767765
>it's wrong because it's obviously wrong

Got it.

>>18767551
>mysticism in Christianity has the individual's characteristics be set ablaze by the beatific vision
Isn't this just Bhakti yoga? Why does the author act as if dissolution is the only path in Hinduism?

>>18767685
>you'll always be separate from god, goyim

>>18767743
My personal, autistic theology from a few years of studying it at uni. I can explain if you really want me to

>>18768246
Sure

>>18767551
>I have come to the conclusion after years of personal contemplation and reading that the nature of reality, the ground of being, is inherently non-dual. Lately I've been reading Meditations on the Tarot by Tomberg, and although I generally disagree with his interpretation because I am not a Christian, his refutation of monism is interesting. In a nutshell, he says that sramanic/yogic religions, by virtue of seeing the highest spiritual achievement as a return to God/the ground of being and dissolution, result in the annihilation of the person;
This whole argument relies on an entirely subjective definition of what a "person" is. For Advaita Vedanta the real essence of the person, the Person, is the Purusha of pure consciousness which is the Atman; whereas the individuality contains the ego, habits, beliefs etc and is superfluous and exterior to the Person. So Tomberg is presupposing a particular conception of person as the only valid one and arguing from there. This lacks force as an argument because it relies on circular presuppositions. For Advaita Vedanta the Person, aka Purusha aka Atman is never annihilated and can never be.

>furthermore, as God is love
For Advaita Vedanta God is not love but rather is bliss, love would seem to necessitate a duality but bliss doesn't.
>Tomberg asserts that mysticism in Christianity has the individual's characteristics be set ablaze by the beatific vision, while eastern mysticism has the individual suppressed by a return to the whole.
In Advaita Vedanta it's not about "suppressing" individuality but is about distinguishing it from something else which is the Person. Once the difference between the two is clearly understood and seen, the issue resolves itself and there is no "suppression" needed.
>I'm still not convinced by Christianity at all and this thread isn't about this, but I'd like to know if any of you are aware of authors/books that address this issue and provide a good counter-argument to it. Can any Hindus on this board address this problem?
Rene Guenon talks about this exact point in his book on Vedanta.

>>18768685
From Guenon's book:

>It follows from this that human individuality is at once much more and much less than Westerners generally suppose it to be: much more, because they recognize in it scarcely anything except the corporeal modality, which includes but the smallest fraction of its possibilities; much less, however, because this individuality, far from really constituting the whole being, is but one state of that being among an indefinite multitude of other states. Moreover the sum of all these states is still nothing at all in relation to the personality, which alone is the true being, because it alone represents its permanent and unconditioned state, and because there is nothing else which can be considered as absolutely real.

>All the rest is, no doubt, real also, but only in a relative way by reason of its dependence upon the Principle and insofar as it reflects it in some degree, as the image reflected in a mirror derives all its reality from the object it reflects and could enjoy no existence apart from it; but this lesser reality, which is only participative, is illusory in relation to the supreme Reality as the image is also illusory in relation to the object; and if we should attempt to isolate it from the Principle, this illusion would become a pure and simple non-entity. We thus observe that existence, that is to say conditioned and manifested being, is at once real in one sense and illusory in another
- Man and His Becoming According to the Vedanta

>>18768018
Yeah, the Gita has a whole chapter about how the deepest secret Krishna can impart to Arjuna is that whoever truly loves will be saved.

>>18767705
>Hindus will tell you you're bad and egoist if you don't aspire to become a like a block of granite.
A block of granite has no consciousness like the Brahman/Atman does, so that's a false equivalency.

>>18767876
>It's wrong because [my explanation of why it's wrong]
You were probably better off just not responding to my post because now you look like a fool.

>>18768880
Sounds like someone has never seen a gorgeous granite countertop. The entire universe is contained in a single pore of granite.

>>18768913
>The entire universe is contained in a single pore of granite.
proof?

>>18768917
Atavamsaka sutra

>>18768913
>The entire universe is contained in a single pore of granite.
Based. As above, so below; as within, so without. I believe this is one of, if not the most important attainable realization in this life that is possible to articulate with words.

>>18768939
Citing a text isn't proof of anything. Can you cite the argument it provides and repeat it here?

Are there any schools of Hinduism that retain a distinction between the subject and the ultimate reality? Christianity does it with divinization/theosis. Is there an eastern equivalent?

>>18768939
Can I just read Entry into the inconceivable or do I have to buy that absolute unit of a tome that is the Flower garland sutra? I just want to read about the whole indra's net thing.
I've read the dhammapada, some suttas and heart sutra but not much else by the way.

>>18769009
Yes, Gaudiya Vaishnavism, which is the school ISKCON (the Hare Krishnas) belong to. There’s more, but that’s the biggest and most important one.

>>18769044
What are their foundational texts? Are they considered a fringe or heterodox sect compared to Advaita Vedanta which seems like the most popular modern interpretation of Hinduism?

>>18769009
>Are there any schools of Hinduism that retain a distinction between the subject and the ultimate reality? Christianity does it with divinization/theosis. Is there an eastern equivalent?
Vishishtadvaita Vedanta
Dvaita Vedanta
Bhedabheda Vedanta (which includes Nimbarka and Gaudiya Vaishnavism)

On the other hand, Advaita Vedanta, Kashmir Shaivism and often Shaktism too denies a distinction between the subject/soul and the Absolute

>>18768997
Indra's net, used as a metaphor for Mahayana Buddhist doctrine of sunyata, meaning all things are by nature empty, or empty of a self-nature, or empty of other-than-emptiness, etc. Gets a bit scholastic depending on who you ask, but the point is that all phenomena reflect all other phenomena endlessly like mirrored jewels in a web. It is an expression of an interdependent non-duality, everything contained in everything else. The more technical arguments of why dozens of philosophers' theories other than emptiness are wrong (various creation theories, materialisms, atomism, eternalism, annihilation, etc.) is given copious treatment elsewhere, e.g. Nagarjuna, Heart Sutra, prajnaparamita sutras, the nikayas, etc.
>>18769020
Avatamsaka is enormous but Entry has excerpts from it in addition to translations of chinese Huayen masters' commentaries so you coyld go without it. Cleary translated both. I would read Entry before Avatamsaka. Get with your tax return or something I agree it's a lot to lay out for a book. The Lankavatara makes a lot of similar points and is far more accessible, plenty of used copies of the Suzuki translation available. (Haven't read the Red Pine one)

>>18769064
Their foundational texts are the Bhagavad Gita and the Bhagavata Purana. English speaking followers use Prabhupada’s translations. As for whether they are fringe or heterodox, it depends on who you ask. They will say they’re heterodox, while Vedantists and other non dualists will say they’re fringe. Regardless, it’s one of the largest schools of modern Hinduism.

>>18769044
>There’s more, but that’s the biggest and most important one.
Ramanuja's Sri Vaishnavism denies that the soul is the Absolute itself (the individual soul is more a subservient slave or body part of the Absolute), and Sri Vaishnavism has more followers than Gaudiya Vaishnavism, has existed for longer than it and has been more influential in Hindu philosophy than Gaudiya Vaishnavism. I'm not trying to disrespect Gaudiya Vaishnavism but those just seem to be the historical facts.

>>18769009
The majority of them do not preach non dualism. Advaita is only a fringe movement imported to the west by German idealists and theosophists.

>>18768981
This is the only sort of "perennialism" I take seriously, if a given "tradition" arrives at it or not is often due to the chance of a great mind taking birth somewhere or other and coping with the idiots around him to express it. It seems more commonly arrived at in dharmic faiths.

>>18769067
>>18769085
Much appreciated

>>18769097
I'm generally skeptical of perennialism too save for a few principles. The interconnectedness of reality and everything containing everything else seems to have been formulated in pretty much every religion in one way or another. The second principle you can find everywhere and that makes sense is love and compassion being the key, but as this is more experiential than intellectual, it doesn't resonate with me as much.
>It seems more commonly arrived at in dharmic faiths
I think "as above so below" is also expressed in Kabbalah and Sufism. Christianity I'm not sure about unless you count Christian Hermeticism of course.
What is amusing to me is that Indra's net is gaining traction among the materialist "muh science" crowd as well since physicists are starting to realize things mystics have been aware of for millennia.

>>18769078
>Indra's net, used as a metaphor for Mahayana Buddhist doctrine of sunyata, meaning all things are by nature empty, or empty of a self-nature, or empty of other-than-emptiness, etc.
Stating that all things are empty of self-nature isn't an argument that shows that the whole universe is contained in a block of granite.

>Gets a bit scholastic depending on who you ask, but the point is that all phenomena reflect all other phenomena endlessly like mirrored jewels in a web.
Where is the evidence to support this? You haven't offered any arguments for this.

>It is an expression of an interdependent non-duality, everything contained in everything else.
Where is the evidence to support this?

>The more technical arguments of why dozens of philosophers' theories other than emptiness are wrong (various creation theories, materialisms, atomism, eternalism, annihilation, etc.) is given copious treatment elsewhere, e.g. Nagarjuna, Heart Sutra, prajnaparamita sutras, the nikayas, etc.
I have seen refutations of Nagarjuna's arguments elsewhere, I don't see any reason for conceding that Nagarjuna or some other sutra's bad faith and sophistic arguments against 4 or 5 schools of early Buddhist and Hindu philosophy proves emptiness as true, this is just a "God of the gaps" style argument whereby you look at a few alternatives and find reason to reject them and then wrongly presume that it follows from this that sunyata is true.

There is no way to know or prove that sunyata is true unless on has examined and found fault in literally every other possible explanation for existence/phenomena which Buddhist texts never did. For example there is no Buddhist text in which the positions of Advaita Vedanta, Vishishtadvaita Vedanta or Kashmir Shaivism are treated in depth. In order to truly show that sunyata was the only acceptable alternative Buddhists would have to show that the positions of these Hindu schools cannot logically account for things being as they are, but no Buddhist school, text or thinker has ever done this. Hence sunyata cannot reasonably be taken as having been philosophically demonstrated to be true because Nagarjuna's et al arguments for it are full of holes, and moreover because there are all these alternative explanations found in India, Greece, Europe etc which Buddhism never dealt with or refuted.

>>18769093
>Advaita is only a fringe movement imported to the west by German idealists and theosophists.
It's not fringe in India but is well-known and has temples and Mutts all across the country. You are confusing "elitist" for "fringe". Advaita is spiritually elitist and is designed for a small amount of spiritual elite who take up monasticism and not for the masses. That doesn't make it fringe though.

>>18769162
>Advaita is spiritually elitist
That doesn't make it right

>>18769093
>>18769162
>>18769317
What the fuck? Advaita isn't popular among Hindoos? I thought every man there follow this philosophy.

>>18769135
I guess there are western currents that capture it in some sense but these are treated as esotericism here while eastern systems that is more exoteric.
>>18769154
I get that you don't like granite but expecting Buddhism to specifically refute Hinduism+ that arises well into the middle ages when the intellectual interest in Buddhism has collapsed in India and moved east is a bit much, and even more ridiculous is having expected it to respond to Plato or whoever else. I haven't done a deep dive into those but they are likely covered as variations of what was already refuted e.g. in the Brahmajala Sutta, which goes down a schema of like 60 wrong views. To be clear I also don't think any philosophy ever gets "refuted" either and I do not respect the pokemon battle dialectics of guenonfag. Philosophies go out of fashion, not because a more complete one comes around but because one that has more meaning to the audience is developed. Your own theistic systems literally rely on god having done x or y as their axioms, hardly something with fewer gaps than sunyata.

How can I get the taste of non-duality? The separation between me and world seems too obvious and real.

>>18769317
I didn't say that it did, I was just pointing out that the elitism of Advaita was being wrongly misconstrued as fringe. Something actually fringe in Hinduism would be Bhaskara's particular formulation of Bhedebheda theology which has no surviving sampradaya which practices and teaches it today, unlike Advaita, Vishishtadvaita etc.

I see Advaita as being right for other reasons having to do with the consistency and logical nature of their metaphysical doctrine, the agreement of this doctrine with how we experience consciousness, and with the agreement of their scriptural exegesis with the contents of the scriptural texts themselves.

>>18769351
>What the fuck? Advaita isn't popular among Hindoos? I thought every man there follow this philosophy.
Advaita is well known in India and Shankara is popularly regarded as a national symbol of the prototypical Hindu philosopher/theologian-saint but the average Hindu is more likely to be a follower of something like Sri Vaishnavism; and this is because of the reason that in the traditional schools representing Advaita you can only be initiated into it if you become a sannyasin or ascetic monk and hence the average working man with a home and wife cannot at once have those things and be initiated into Advaita.

It should be noted though that there are a range of other smaller schools who have been influenced by Advaita and who incorporate some of its perspectives while being intended to be practiced by a wider non-monastic audience.

>>18769351
It's been considered "cryptobuddhist" by most Hindus for a thousand years.

Shankara's commentaries were influential but immediately after he died he was already refuted, sometimes even by his own followers admitting it was just buddhism. Most hindus are qualified nondualists or dualists the bhakti revivals just cemented this as most are bhakti also.

Ironically the people who cared most about Shankara were Mughal sufi syncretists like Dara Shukoh, whose translation of the Upanishads with Shankara commentary was the first version of the Upanishads translated into European languages.

Shankara really just launched a neo-hindu revival that went far beyond him, by assimilating Buddhist idealism as organized Buddhism was declining in India but its ideas were still dominant and more popular than brahman orthodoxy. Most of the people who continued this work disagreed with his actual positions.

>>18769392
Thank you for answering

>>18769353
>but expecting Buddhism to specifically refute Hinduism+ that arises well into the middle ages when the intellectual interest in Buddhism has collapsed in India and moved east is a bit much, and even more ridiculous is having expected it to respond to Plato or whoever else.
As Buddhists and Buddhist scholars freely admit themselves, there is no one single clinching argument that establishes sunyata, but rather Madhyamakins try to establish it through the refutation of other views/philosophies which is ostensibly supposed to leave sunyata as the only viable alternative. In order to follow this to its natural conclusion it would quite literally require all other views to be refuted before one could say that sunyata has been logically established. This is not ridiculous but is just holding Buddhists to their own standards and reasoning. Since Buddhists have not done this there is no basis whatsoever for saying sunyata has been logically demonstrated, established or shown to be true.

>I haven't done a deep dive into those but they are likely covered as variations of what was already refuted e.g. in the Brahmajala Sutta, which goes down a schema of like 60 wrong views.
They are not refuted in the Brahmajala Sutta. I'm more familiar with Advaita than the others but I already know right now that the Brahmajala Sutta fails to refute any Advaita doctrine, if you think otherwise than post something from it that you think refutes anything and I'll explain why it doesnt.

>To be clear I also don't think any philosophy ever gets "refuted" either and I do not respect the pokemon battle dialectics of guenonfag.
Except when you want to claim that other views are refuted in the Brahmajala Sutta, its funny how you are inconsistent like that.

>Your own theistic systems literally rely on god having done x or y as their axioms, hardly something with fewer gaps than sunyata.
Except it doesn't, the gap you think theistic systems have is God doing X, the Buddhist "God of the gap" is "Abhidhamma, Samkhya and Nyaya cannot explain the world, therefor sunyata did x", in each case it's one gap. The Buddhists invoke sunyata as their god of the gaps without any foundation for doing so.

>>18769392
>AV is so buddhistic you need to be a monk or it's pointless so the Hindu laity follow other systems
Amazing, everyone was wrong all along. He's not ripping off Mahayana at all; it's Theravada!

>>18769408
Very interesting.

Then there is no reason to read Avaita I think.

>>18769408
>It's been considered "cryptobuddhist" by most Hindus for a thousand years.
Only by people who either didn't read or didn't understand him

>Shankara's commentaries were influential but immediately after he died he was already refuted, sometimes even by his own followers admitting it was just buddhism.
Shankara and his writings were never refuted. None of his followers admitting it was just Buddhism. Sriharsa gets the closest to saying so but even Sriharsa says an irreconcilable and fundamental difference is that for Advaitins consciousness is unconditoned and eternal while for Buddhists its not and this is so fundamental a difference so as to make them entirely different philosophies. Sriharsa only says that Buddhism would be like Advaita *IF* Buddhism accepted certain Advaita doctrines which would make them not Buddhists anymore.

>Most hindus are qualified nondualists or dualists the bhakti revivals just cemented this as most are bhakti also.
Yes, Advaita is the school of a small spiritual elite and it has always been this way, that doesn't mean it's wrong though.
>Ironically the people who cared most about Shankara were Mughal sufi syncretists like Dara Shukoh, whose translation of the Upanishads with Shankara commentary was the first version of the Upanishads translated into European languages.
That's not true at all that the only people who cared about Shankara were Mughals, from Shankara's time to the present day in almost every century there are notable Indian Advaitins who cared about Shankara and who wrote texts in Sanskrit about Advaita. Also, do you have any proof that the Upanishads edition Dara had translated included Shankara's commentary?

>Shankara really just launched a neo-hindu revival that went far beyond him, by assimilating Buddhist idealism as organized Buddhism was declining in India
This is totally incorrect because Shankara rejected the very basis of Buddhist idealism and ferociously attacked it as logically untenable and contradictory to our experience. The "idealistic" aspect of Advaita predates Buddhism and is found in the pre-Buddhist Upanishads which discuss Advaita teachings.

>>18769446
>Amazing, everyone was wrong all along. He's not ripping off Mahayana at all; it's Theravada!
That's wrong, because the pre-Buddhist Upanishads predate Buddha by centuries and even in the pre-Buddhist Brihadaranyaka Upanishad it talks about the importance of becoming a monk. The focus on becoming a monk was taught by Hindu scripture before Buddha even existed.
>>18769466
That post is full of incorrect information, you can see it being corrected and exposed as wrong here >>18769487

>>18769443
I am pointing out the Brahmajala sutta for the convenience of autistic neoscholastics on /lit/. I assume in ordinary life the people I deal with are not deeply invested in the idea of a supreme creator of the universe being based and all other systems being cringe, but that's what /lit/ believes for whatever reason. My point is that it is hard to really refute anything entirely such that it either loses all truth value or goes away entirely from discourse. So for instance, to me it is evident that any system of a transcendent creator god has no value even without studying dependent origination or whatever other Buddhist explanations for the arising and ceasing of phenomena. If such a creator did exist he is not very interested in us, or perhaps more ominously, has died like everything else which would be why he stopped calling us. But that's another issue entirely and not put forth by Buddhism against Hinduism per se, except to the extent that Buddhists would argue Brahma is arisen and therefore must have cessation. And of course that's not what the Hindus say, they say Brahman is eternally uncaused. This turns into those pokemon battles after a while because the pan-Indian style of scholasticism in particular is to preserve strawmen of your enemy and beat them using super-effective tropes. You apparently find scholasticism to be a useful way of arriving at beliefs; I prefer skepticism and good metaphors. Scholasticism is after all a highly formalized and ritualistic presentation of thoughts bubbling on the surface of the mind anyway.

>>18769466
You should still read Shankara, he is a great philosopher and he breathed new life into the study of the Upanishads. Just be aware that he is selectively interpreting them in accordance with Buddhist philosophy to create the idealism he wants to see in them, but which is really only partially there. If you are interested in Hinduism and going to read other commentators anyway, you should definitely look into Shankara's too.

>>18769487
Sorry but our local advaita expert, Guenonfag, has even admitted advaita is cryptobuddhism now. Shankara has been refuted even by his own followers. Probably most often by his own followers. That is the nature of trying to fuse Buddhism with the Vedas.

>>18769495
>actually Hindus invented monasticism we just stopped doing it for a thousand years since the big bad Buddhists made us forget the Vedanta
>t. brahmin breaking victim

>>18769495
Sorry, our Shankara expert Guenonfag debunked this too. Monasticism comes from Buddhism in India.

>>18769512
>My point is that it is hard to really refute anything entirely such that it either loses all truth value or goes away entirely from discourse
So you start out acting like Buddhists refuted non-sunyata views, but when pressed you admit that this can't actually really happen, how amusing!
>because the pan-Indian style of scholasticism in particular is to preserve strawmen of your enemy and beat them using super-effective tropes.
Shankara refuted Buddhism by demonstrating contradictions in the teachings which buddhism espouses. His treatment of Madhyamaka is very brief and suggests that he wasn't familiar with their doctrine or read their works, but Madhaymaka still falls victim to and is refuted by some of Shankara's refutations of other types of Buddhism anyway because of how Madhyamaka contains some of their same flaws; if Shankara had read Madhyamaka works he probably would have realized this and pointed it out in his works.
>My point is that it is hard to really refute anything entirely such that it either loses all truth value or goes away entirely from discourse. So for instance, to me it is evident that any system of a transcendent creator god has no value even without studying dependent origination or whatever other Buddhist explanations for the arising and ceasing of phenomena. If such a creator did exist he is not very interested in us, or perhaps more ominously, has died like everything else which would be why he stopped calling us
Whether a transcendent creator God is interested in us is a separate question from whether systems which have such a God have value, the latter question is not dependent upon the former.

>>18769566
>His treatment of Madhyamaka is very brief and suggests that he wasn't familiar with their doctrine or read their works, but Madhaymaka still falls victim to and is refuted by some of Shankara's refutations of other types of Buddhism anyway
This is my exact point as to Buddhist "refutation" of specific Hinduisms you are asking for, except I have conceded that refutation is largely a ritual of self-convincing and not actually able to banish something entirely. So you're allowed to get away with this yawning gap of half-assery but not Buddhists?

>>18769530
>>actually Hindus invented monasticism we just stopped doing it for a thousand years since the big bad Buddhists made us forget the Vedanta
It was never stopped, plenty of Hindu texts from the time of the Vedas and Upanishads down to Shankara's time mention and praise monasticism including Itihasa, Puranas, Dharma-sastras, Manusmriti etc. The monasticism that had already existed in Hinduism since the Vedas was just made more formalized with Shankara.

i am assembling a team of non-dualism refutators

>>18769591
Every scholar in a hundred years on this subject disagrees with you.

>>18769596
Look no further than Guenonfag himself. His favorite hobby is refuting non-dualism.

>>18769590
>So you're allowed to get away with this yawning gap of half-assery but not Buddhists?
The difference is that in those Buddhists texts attacking other types of Hinduism or eternalism, they never actually refute something that is the Advaitist position, which is easily demonstrable. While on the other hand it's undeniable that things which Shankara attacks in other types of Buddhism are indeed actual tenets of Madhyamaka including:
1) the supposed non-reflexivity of consciousness
3) beginningless co-dependent origination being what is responsible for the delusion of samsara and nothing else

>>18769591
Point is he took over a role Buddhism was doing for India's renunciants until it declined, that is to say having so elite a monastic praxis that it was pointless for the laity to even be involved. Shankara evidently took this role over and was able to cite the Vedas appropriately to reinvigorate it, which is nice, good for him, but doesn't change the fact that Buddhism had dominated that space for centuries between Shankara and whatever OG monastics being claimed.

>>18769605
>that last paragraph
kek

>>18769602
>Every scholar in a hundred years on this subject disagrees with you.
It doesn't matter, they are all disproved by the texts themselves, quotes abound from the Puranas, Mahabharata, Manusmriti, other smritis etc all talking about Hindu monasticism and sannyasin from the time of the Vedas/Upanishads onwards.

Also, that's also wrong when you said "every scholar" since Ananda Coomaraswamy and Chandradhar Sharma are scholars who both agree with me.

>>18769613
>My interpretation is superior to a thousand years of Hindus and 200 years of scholars (including Hindus)

Very impressive... But here I have Guenonfag himself agreeing with the opposite interpretation, so checkmate.

>>18767551
The individual cannot be annihilated if there is a state beyond duality: the ideas of annihilated/surviving, dead/alive, existence/non-existence are dualistic ones (as is the idea of unity/separation with god).

>>18769622
Based and Vajrayanapilled (Samsara is Nirvana)

>>18769610
>Point is he took over a role Buddhism was doing for India's renunciants until it declined, that is to say having so elite a monastic praxis that it was pointless for the laity to even be involved.
That's not true, it was always going on in Hinduism so it wasn't a unique Buddhist role which Shankara was taking over. Moreover there had always been both non-Buddhist and non-Hindu monastics as well such as the monastic Jains (who predated Buddhism too just like the Upanishads) as well as the monastic Avijikas. So it is pure foolishness and ignorance of the historical facts to say that monasticism was the exclusive province of Buddhists.

>>18769607
>1) the supposed non-reflexivity of consciousness
What, so he thinks a cogito proves consciousness is eternal or something?
>3) beginningless co-dependent origination being what is responsible for the delusion of samsara and nothing else
Sure let's add a thirteenth link in the chain, that should explain things better.
Whatever Shankara uses in his refutation could plausibly be refuted I am sure. Or it will be so nested in architectonics as to require an earthquake to knock it down, which will happen as happens to all philosophies sooner or later.

>>18769619
>Very impressive... But here I have Guenonfag himself agreeing with the opposite interpretation, so checkmate.
No, that's not true, citing one opinion of a scholar is not endorsing their other opinions, nor is citing a book as being good in some aspects the same as endorsing everything the books says. It seems like you don't understand basic logic.

>>18769626
the amount of casuistry you go through to maintain your positions in the face if universal mockery and disagreement from every expert is amazing, i can't imagine what your cognitive dissonance is like

all this effort, and none of it spent on learning sanskrit or joining a real monastery. how many years has it been now that youve been doing this?

>>18769626
I said Buddhists had dominated that space, not that they were the only monastics. The nikayas themselves evince that there were rival monastic communities.

>>18769627
>What, so he thinks a cogito proves consciousness is eternal or something?
No, the point is that the Madhyamaka analysis of consciousness refutes Madhyamaka since if consciousness is non-reflexive it leads to an infinite regress because in that case A1 has to be known by A2 to take place in our awareness, but since A2 isn't self-knowing it requires A2 to be known by A3 for A1+A2 to take place in our awareness, but since A3 isn't self-knowing, it requires A3 to be known by A4 in order that A1+A2+A3 to take place, this causes an infinite regress that makes it impossible for us to have any knowledge of anything, which refutes the Madhyamaka claim that consciousness is non-reflexive.
>Sure let's add a thirteenth link in the chain, that should explain things better.
No, that's wrong, the thing being proposed is outside the chain. And this gets to the whole point, that the chain cannot explain itself without something outside the chain, a 13th link is still something inside the chain which leaves the chain unaccounted for.

>>18767551
How does love necessitate a duality? Knowing doesn't even necessitate a duality (i.e. doesn't necessitate a separation between the knower and the known, as humans have self-reflective capacity, this latter point being Linnae's criterion for establishing homosapiens as a species.) Love can be infinite. Love is a classic example in any child's grammar book of an infinite verb. It doesn't necessitate an object, though it can be directed at one as well. It's like saying light needs an object to exist rather than it colouring and defining the contours of the object over which it is cast. What's more, God isn't an agent of love, the scriptures state God is Love, further eroding the notion that this directional, transactional exchange between parties is the basis of Christianity. Your theologian seems corrupted by market culture, probably a fervent anti-communist of some sort.

>>18769659
Both of your points are just summed as going "the regress stops here because I say so." So much for cycles of existence, huh?

>>18769630
>the amount of casuistry you go through to maintain your positions in the face if universal mockery and disagreement from every expert is amazing,
Nothing I have said is casuistry. None of those people are real experts, the only real experts are the heads of those religious traditions, who actually agree with me in the case of the heads of Advaita orders/schools.
>i can't imagine what your cognitive dissonance is like
I don't have nay
>all this effort, and none of it spent on learning sanskrit or joining a real monastery. how many years has it been now that youve been doing this?
Why should all my life be devoted to one thing? I have multiple areas of interests and pursuits where I excel, some of which have no relation to religion, and I don't feel the need to devote myself to one to the extent that I cannot also enjoy the others.

>>18769634
Being the most numerous is not dominating, a small minority of rulers and elites dominates a ruled population. The Buddhists did not dominate that space because they didn't control or rule it but there were always monastics outside their fold like Hindus, Jains and Avijikas.

>>18769668
>Both of your points are just summed as going "the regress stops here because I say so." So much for cycles of existence, huh?
In the Advaitist model there is no problematic regress to begin with, there is only an infinite regress in the Buddhist model, I'm not sure why you don't understand this. It suggests you didn't think about what I wrote for more than a minute.

How did guenonfag get to this point? He used to be so confident and aggressive, now he seems beaten down and broken.

>>18769678
>The Buddhists did not dominate that space because they didn't control or rule it but there were always monastics outside their fold like Hindus, Jains and Avijikas.
Cope, a number of wealthy Buddhist kingdoms lavished and endowed monasteries across India for centuries. Again I never said those non-Buddhists did not exist, but there was very much a historical period of Buddhist preeminence that lasted centuries before declining relative to Hinduism, which even started treating Buddhism as a subsect of Vashnaivism due to having to incorporate it, and you only have to incorporate sizable minorities, as Buddhists would have been until completely disappearing during the Islamic period.
>>18769684
The Vedantic model has god as the first cause, to avoid infinite regress. Not a terribly impressive answer. No one is unfamiliar with that belief.

>>18769704
>Cope, a number of wealthy Buddhist kingdoms lavished and endowed monasteries across India for centuries.
Yes, but that's not dominating monasticism but is just helping one certain type of it. Even when they were doing this, non-Buddhist monasticism still existed and was undominated by anyone else.
>>18769684
>The Vedantic model has god as the first cause, to avoid infinite regress. Not a terribly impressive answer. No one is unfamiliar with that belief.
Yes, but when you have God in your system in the way Advaita does there is no infinite regress left in the system, while on the other hand Buddhism does include unresolved infinite regresses, hence why Buddhism has that flaw and why Advaita doesnt.

>>18769605
Dangerously based

>>18769704
I meant to cite this post in the second part of >>18769743

>>18769663
>Your theologian seems corrupted by market culture, probably a fervent anti-communist of some sort.

Let me preface this by saying unless this guy was an asset, the "BBC" wouldn't have him monitoring Soviet broadcasts pertinent to the cold war a few months after he defected. Also strange the BBC had their own Soviet broadcast monitoring wing. NBC needs one of those.

>Tomberg is given a new opportunity to earn a livelihood through his employment at the BBC. He is given charge of the recordings of the broadcasts of the Soviet broadcasting service.

Yup. Ye old glow nigga retroactively trapping 4chan fags thinking they're being trad. Lol.

>>18769743
There's no regress because you've, for no good reason other than the infamously deceitful faculty of reasoning, concluded that everything has a cause and therefore something had no cause to cause. This is not unique to AV at all. It really is just indo-thomism but in a different context using another vocabulary and set of scripture for cross reference. As for the monasteries, you are forgetting there is a very secular component to all of this, that the most supported monasteries are going to have the most people interested in them, noviating there, and so on, regardless of who has the better arguments for their philosophy and practice.

>>18769780
>There's no regress because you've
Except for

1) the infinite regress that results from when Buddhists including Madhyamakins deny the reflexivity of consciousness

2) the infinite regress that results from saying ignorance is the product of co-dependent origination which is produced/furthered by prior ignorance, this leads to an unresolved regress when determining what permits any of these to exist at all.

>>18769795
I am talking about your view. You say you have no regress, literally because you say so, that even though there are causes there is an uncaused cause. But if everything is caused, how is this so that something is uncaused? It's just a railing you've put on the grand canyon to keep idiots from falling in. If anything requires no explanation it is ignorance. You asking for an explanation of things is good enough proof as there can be for beginningless ignorance.

>>18769820
>You say you have no regress, literally because you say so, that even though there are causes there is an uncaused cause.
Not just because I say so, but because of logic. The regress with dependent origination has to do without what provides for it to exist, it being unable to provide for itself. When you arrive at something which isn't dependent origination and which provides for it to exist, the regress terminates. There is nowhere where this regress ends though in Buddhism though, it stretches on forever. Advaita doesn't contain this flaw.

>But if everything is caused, how is this so that something is uncaused?
Only non-eternal things are caused, an eternal thing by definition is uncaused, because if it was caused that would mean a time when it didn't exist and then it wouldn't be eternal.

>>18769922
Again, you are merely avoiding infinite regress by saying something is uncaused. This would not be so different from Buddhism really, which has things like dharmadhatu or emptiness/sunyata as uncaused or as the ground for what is experienced, but the opposing AV view sets up the uncaused as something with various knowable attributes and logical definitions and goes so far as to make it god. If this has rid you of a flaw it has introduced plenty of new ones by means of theology.

>guenonfag is still having the "jivas aren't real but they are" "maya isn't real but it is" argument with random anons every day 3 years later
>still nobody has ever said "That makes sense, thank you"

>>18767551
> In a nutshell, he says that sramanic/yogic religions, by virtue of seeing the highest spiritual achievement as a return to God/the ground of being and dissolution, result in the annihilation of the person
That's not what annihilationism is in the Christian tradition. Annihilationism was a polemic concerning the annihilation of the souls after the last judgement.
That being said, Tomberg is right in that they seek to annihilate the "person", but it has nothing to do with the "personalized" love that judeo-christian religions predicate from God. Thats why you should read those topics from academics (catholics and orientalists) and not from schizophrenics.

>another potentially interesting thread ruined by guenonfag
>>18769596
Where has nondualism been refuted ITT? Nondualism =/= advaita

>>18769758
Wait what? Tomberg was a spook?
Is there anyone in the 20th century who doesn't have ties to the fucking glowniggers? This is getting worrying

>>18770097
Start with the pre-televisionaries

>>18769154
I don't like saying this because it's a bugman argument but science so far is unironically proving sunyata to be true.

>>18770084
This, don't conflate nondualism with dog shit Advaita.

>>18770004
>Again, you are merely avoiding infinite regress by saying something is uncaused.
There is no infinite regress that exists as a problem to be addressed to begin with if anything is eternal at all, that's what you don't seem to be understanding. Questions of infinite regress only arise with regard to the existence of something which didn't already exist, an eternal thing always "already existed" and so there is never any origin for it which needs to be explained without resulting in a regress.

>This would not be so different from Buddhism really, which has things like dharmadhatu or emptiness/sunyata as uncaused or as the ground for what is experienced, but the opposing AV view sets up the uncaused as something with various knowable attributes and logical definitions and goes so far as to make it god.
Advaita Vedanta does so because the revealed scriptures of Hinduism teach the reality of Brahman, but Advaita Vedanta is still superior to Buddhism logically, philosophically, metaphysically etc because unlike Buddhism Advaita can actually provide an explanation for how relative experience takes place that doesn't violate the law of non-contradiction or contain any infinite regresses.

The Buddhist explanation does, co-dependent origination results in an infinite regress that arises as a first problem to begin because according to Buddhism samsara/pratityasamutpada/ignorance are non-eternal and hence arise on the basis of other things like prior ignorance, this leads to an infinite regress when determining what provides for these non-eternal things to be arising on each other. Then, after basing their metaphysics on an unresolved infinite regress, they further fail to adhere to logic when they violate the low of non-contradiction by saying that that samsara is the same as Nirvana. When pressed on how this can be true when mutually exclusive things are predicated of both by Buddhists, they respond by saying that the perception of Nirvana as samsara was a delusion, and hence there is supposed to be no contradiction, but since this very perception of Nirvana as samsara is part of the samsara that is ultimately identical with Nirvana, the contradiction is never resolved and this defense just ends up being an attempt at misdirection.

>>18770097
>Is there anyone in the 20th century who doesn't have ties to the fucking glowniggers?
Rene Guenon (pbuh)

>>18770160
No, it's not

>>18769596
>>18769602
Buddhism is nondualistic too.
>>18769622
>>18769624
Could you tell me more about this?
Either way, Tomberg's point is more about annihilation in the conventional sense, i.e. the dissolution of personhood and identity, which is why he calls yogi "mystics who cannot cry" as opposed to Christian mystics for whom the beatific vision does not destroy the ego/individuality but makes it infinitely more vivid and filled with God's love.
>>18769663
His point is that without duality, God only loves himself.
>>18770036
Yes, my use of the term was improper.
>you should read those topics from academics (catholics and orientalists)
Do you have any recommendations?
My main interest here and what I want to figure out is if it is possible to reconcile the affirmation of individuality present in the Christian mysticism Tomberg defends with nondualistic metaphysics. I'm seeing good arguments from either side, but I'm not fully satisfied with one or the other. Christianity seems convoluted and almost like wishful thinking in its depiction of the afterlife and of the highest possible goal for the soul; yet nondualism as described by Hindus ends up being a negation of the individual, as Tomberg himself points out when he also criticizes Eckhart.

>>18770174
Why would non-eternal things need an eternal cause? What ever needed to be eternal but the levels of cope wrought by priestly doctrines of an unknown transcendent god and his heaven? You are still adding god to causation to stop an infinite regress, an extremely childish doctrine. How can you pretend to care about laws of argumentation when you've erected such laws to defend an object of pure conjecture? The entire well is poisoned.

>>18770216
Ever heard of nonlocality? Face it, all modern theories since Bohr have made physics lean heavily towards the idea of all things being interrelated and not truly separate from each other, as well as being like mirror images of the surrounding universe.

>>18770249
In some regards that's true, but that doesn't account for what provides for those things to exist such as they are to begin with, which is where you still end up with an infinite regress if you are without God or an equivalent transcendent principle.

>>18770241
>Why would non-eternal things need an eternal cause?
Because they have to arise on the basis of something else and so the same question is true of that thing and so on ad infinitum. None of these things within the ad infinitum are capable of allowing for the existence of the ad infinitum itself which is where the infinite regress that refutes Buddhism comes in.

>>18770249
Based uncertainty affirmer

>>18770313
>what provides for those things to exist
That's not what I'm arguing about, I don't care about the autistic debates of dependent origination vs Brahman. Just saying sunyata seems to be the most likely metaphysical model to be true.
>>18770317
It's not really about uncertainty, rather that the constituent elements of reality can't be said to be separate from each other

>>18770341
Well if they cannot be separated we can only approximate them as durations, or cluster of points on a plane, or some other fuzzy composite that is effacious for us as a species but not actually objective.

>>18770240
>My main interest here and what I want to figure out is if it is possible to reconcile the affirmation of individuality present in the Christian mysticism Tomberg defends with nondualistic metaphysics. I'm seeing good arguments from either side, but I'm not fully satisfied with one or the other.
Have you actually read through Shankara's main commentaries in particular his Upanishad and Gita ones? This is really the only good way to know this yourself, to read both Tomberg and Christian mystics but also the central sources of non-dualism.

If you do so and concur that Advaita can't, there are also a smattering of other Hindu 'non-dual' schools which have their own distinct philosophical literature which take different approaches to non-dualism which sometimes treat the individuality/ego differently than Advaita, like the many Vaishnava, Shaktist and Shaivist schools which treat the soul as linked to or united with Brahman in some way. It would make sense to begin with Advaita first though because there is way more secondary literature written about it and Christianity compared to the other Hindu schools and because it influenced these latter ones in some cases.

>>18770354
We can also acknowledge they simply form a whole, a single entity.

>>18770317
Is this dude worth reading or is he just a meme?

>>18770541
Well from the Buddhist pov that wouldn't be sunyata per se but if we are set on it being a body or entity perhaps dharmakaya, which would of course be empty anyway
>>18770617
Sextus Empiricus's Outlines of Pyrrhonism is what you're looking for. Less a meme and more of an acceptance that memes are in circulation that cannot be reasonably demonstrated.

>>18770649
What is dharmakaya exactly?

>>18770365
>Christian mystics but also the central sources of non-dualism
These two often intersect. Tomberg's interpretation isn't a mystical one.

>>18770734
Well it literally means body of dharma and in some of the mahayana schools it is described as an all-pervading cosmic permanent body, ie. basically the universe, and is thus attained with buddhahood.

>>18769687
he's been broken alright

>>18771905
Welllll I reckon a wee bit o' brahmin breakin' done set him right. Never see him do none of them Vedic rituals no more.

I think there has to be a way to reconcile the divide between dualism or non-dualism - or rather, that the divide is maybe an artificial construct rather than a true and literal gulf between two irreconcileable philosophies. I haven't fully worked out the issues with such a view or completed it but I have an inkling of how to reach that point, even if I don't do so for a long time.

Bump

>>18772224
Isn't that what Buddhism does with "neither existence nor nonexistence"?

>>18772224
>I think there has to be a way to reconcile the divide between dualism or non-dualism
Why? And why would you even be interested in doing that?

>>18771905
No, I pointed out the contradictions in Buddhism and the Buddhists here were unable to absolve Buddhism of that charge

>>18773872
take meds, schizo

you're not convincing anyone

>>18767551
the problem is applying logic, something relative (for instance in the sense that it is a product of a human point of view) to the absolute. the idea that God must be three in order to be loving lacks insight into this distinction. What can be said is that no relative point of view can present a real reality about the absolute. It can be known, however, that creation is guided by a principle of Love, and from this we make the leap and the assumption that God is loving. But as for whatever operations truly beget anything- I surely don't know of any possibility of acquiring true knowledge into the matter. Monism is about the realization of one-ness with this incomprehensible.

>>18774122
>I surely don't know of any possibility of acquiring true knowledge into the matter
because knowledge requires distinction, but God IS

>>18767551
> Tomberg asserts that mysticism in Christianity has the individual's characteristics be set ablaze by the beatific vision, while eastern mysticism has the individual suppressed by a return to the whole.
Why is this a good thing? Should your existence as a solitary soul be exalted? I dont think so, the world should be exalted because the world is beautiful, the individual "you" only gets in the way of the beauty of the world. I'm probably in over my head on this though.

>>18774282
Self-denial is bad. You are part of the world but you are not the world

Bump

>>18767551
Could you please post where Tomberg says this?

>>18774282
I never understood the other way around. Why would you want to dissolve into a cosmic ocean? What's the point of creation then? God simply is, and you are a faded inferior form of being that thinks it is but isn't, such that your only aspiration is to negate your inferior pseudobeing and 'remember' your real being. Why would inferior being exist at all in the first place then? Why would God create something inferior to him whose only aspiration is to negate its shadowy pseudoexistence?

Why wouldn't it be the case that God was doing something we don't yet understand but that is somehow greater than simply existing, by creating instead?

>Companions the creator seeks, not corpses, not herds and believers. Fellow creators the creator seeks -- those who write new values on new tablets. Companions the creator seeks, and fellow harvesters; for everything about him is ripe for the harvest.

Also if God created something, why wouldn't everything about it be a unique mystery worth investigating? Some things are just aggregates of other really existing fundamental phenomena, like particular material objects, but why would anything be incidental or merely exist to be negated? Shouldn't we take the miraculous fact that God created individual souls, with the unprovable but innate feeling of certainty that they are free and important, as some kind of irreducibly important phenomenon to be investigated like an esoteric symbol?

>>18775475
Not him but it's in the first 40 pages of Meditations on Tarot.

>>18775475
>dissolve into a cosmic ocean? What's the point of creation then? God simply is, and you are a faded inferior form of being
Hinduism isn't like that at all, Krishna's love extends to all beings equally and joining him isn't described as annihilation

>>18775475
>negate your inferior pseudobeing and 'remember' your real being
This is the case in hermetic Christianity too. In all traditions you eventually shed the impure parts of your personality, ascension is not a loss but a gain, an opening up into an unimaginably larger reality.

>>18775503
Advaita is only nominally opposed to annihilation. They call it by another word but what they mean is annihilation.

>>18775533
While there's a purgation in many traditions, including Christianity, Advaita goes beyond mere purgation. You are to void everything about your existence and self that has been given to you. The Brahman essentially gives it to you only to to say it's all shit and you should be happy when it destroys it all.

Purgation != annihilation

>>18775537
I said Hinduism not advaita
How can you read the Gita and conclude that it is about annihilation?

>>18775548
I won't argue with that. The Gita is bhaktic as far as I understand. It's not about annihilation, you're right.

>>18775546
Nondualism is not necessarily annihilation. Everything being connected in the sense of nothing being inherently self-existent is not the same as everything being the same thing. At least not according to mystical experiences, where people mostly report their individuality being retained or even expanded while also at the same time feeling deeply the interconnection between all of existence.
I don't really understand it but it would seem that nondualism is true yet that our individual existences are not illusions.

>>18775566
Do you think jnana yoga and karma yoga are annihilationist?
I am just as skeptical as you towards eastern annihilationism but I became interested in Hinduism specifically because some of its branches seemed perfect in all regards: the opposite of annihilationist while also not being dualistic.

>>18775588
Bump

>>18767551
People often recommend this book but it's honestly underwhelming

>>18775546
>>18775569
It's wrong to use Advaita Vedanta as an example of Nondualism because it's only a trivial example of it. "Nothing exists except Brahman which is Atman" is a very specific position, and it's not held by all nondualists (or even all monists) within Hinduism. Likewise, Buddhism has dozens of different monistic positions in it which all reject Shankara's nihilistic one. If we look outside India, we see Taoist Monism also being radically different, to say nothing of Pre-Socratic monism or Modern monistic theories (whether Spinoza is Modern or merely modern is really an irrelevant point here, he's not a pre-Socratic).

To put it another way, Shankara's denial that chariots exist is actually really unique to him, most monistic traditions would absolutely agree that a chariot exists, they'd just argue about what it means to "exist".

>>18777129
Any good books on the varieties of nondualism?

>>18767616
>the "return" to Brahman isn't a negation of anything, it's an affirmation of reality, and the suppression of the person/individual is the dispelling of illusion
that's exactly what a mahayana buddhist would say, just change "God" with "ultimate reality"

>>18773872
lol no, you always backtrack to your axioms without actually engaging in any of the points you should actually need to adress in order to prove anyone wrong

>>18769154
>Where is the evidence to support this? You haven't offered any arguments for this.
not that anon, but Leibniz monad system as a whole provides a grea targument in favor if that ontology, if you wnat a logical proof of indra's net, you should go there

>>18777129
so other nondualists don't do the same circular nihilistic bs guenonfag does?

>>18777494
Correct. Both Buddha and Parmenides for example say that it's impossible for "nothing" to even exist. If something is, then it's real, and it exists, and it can't actually start not-existing (it CAN, however, change "how" it is existing). This also means that something that currently doesn't exist can't come into being, therefore nothing can truly be created or destroyed (it just changes how it exists). This is basically the entire point of On Nature.

It should be noted however that Taoists and Neo-Confucians absolutely believe that things can be created and destroyed (but even this could be argued as really just being "changing how", depending on how you analyze the Wuxing). I'm not saying that non-dualism implies that creation and destruction aren't possible, just that Shankara is a very specific thinker who held specific ideas and not everyone who can reasonably be classed with him held those same ideas.

>>18770174
>There is no infinite regress that exists as a problem to be addressed to begin with if anything is eternal at all, that's what you don't seem to be understanding. Questions of infinite regress only arise with regard to the existence of something which didn't already exist, an eternal thing always "already existed" and so there is never any origin for it which needs to be explained without resulting in a regress.
this is ilogical since denies movement and becoming, also it's dual since you need an eternal world outside the world of change, an d any bridge you try to build between the two will be full of contradictions

>>18777536
>also it's dual
No, the only thing that exists is Brahman. There's nothing else for Brahman to even interact with. Even time and space are just made of nothing and as such don't exist. This is why Advaita Vedanta is a trivial solution to the whole "One and Many" thing: there's literally only one thing, nothing else, and nothing ever occurs other than Brahmans constant self-reflexive translucent awareness of its own opacity.

>>18777555
>Even time and space are just made of nothing and as such don't exist.
wrong dumbass, they are made of maya which isn’t nothing, nothingness cannot be perceived, maya and illusions are perceived
> Brahmans constant self-reflexive translucent awareness of its own opacity.
Brahman isn’t opaque for Advaita and you are contradicting yourself by calling it both translucent and opaque

/lit/ is still shilling this sloppy advaita vedanta metaphysics? embarrassing

or is just the guenonfag trying to cope to himself?

>>18777960
but if time and space are made of maya, and maya is made of brahman isince there's nothing else, and brahma is eternal, so a negation of time and space, then time and space is made of that which negates time and space
which is like saying time and space are made of nothing

>>18777336
Seconding this

>>18778112
>but if time and space are made of maya, and maya is made of brahman since there's nothing else
That's wrong, maya isn't made of Brahman, it's Brahman's power or energy which He possesses while remaining different from it.
>and brahma is eternal, so a negation of time and space
Brahman is transcendent to time and space, that doesn't negate or prevent time and space from existing conditionally within our experience of maya
>then time and space is made of that which negates time and space
>which is like saying time and space are made of nothing
That's wrong, because the reasoning you used to arrive at this is incorrect and falsely imputes multiple positions to Advaita which are not taught by it.

>>18777336
>>18778219
Murti's The Central Philosophy of Buddhism covers Madhyamaka and Advaita Vedanta

>>18778259
Thank you anon, but I imagine both he and I were hoping for something more even wide ranging, that would cover as many non-dualist traditions, from both the west and east, as possible

>>18770313
>which is where you still end up with an infinite regress
God don't solve that tho, it's not answer but a way to just cop out of the problem altogether

causality being created form outside causality is something so vage than you can say a god created reality or that reality just created itself, you're so far from logic, you can just say wathever you want, you can even choose any trascendental pricniple in buddhism and say that's what created the universe, sunyata created teh universe makes just the same amount of sense that saying God created the universe, that's why you need causality, it's what gives your arguments any kind of weight

>>18778219
>>18777336

The Advaita Tradition in Indian Philosophy by Sharma is good. He overviews original Buddhism, Abhidharma, Yogachara and Madhyamaka Buddhism, and also Advaita Vedanta and Kashmir Shaivism.

Most Buddhists will disagree of his portrayal of Buddha and Nagarjuna as teaching an Absolutism where Nirvana actually exists as the Absolute, specifically how Sharma interprets Madhyamaka is rejected by most academics and Buddhist schools. Kashmir Shaivists will dislike his treatment of Kashmir Shaivism wherein he portrays Kashmir Shaivism as being less philosophically-sound than Advaita. The section of the book on Advaita Vedanta is quite good IMO. For all the quibbles that some people may have with it I think the book is good overall though.

https://archive.org/details/TheAdvaitaTraditionInIndianPhilosophyChandradharSharma

>>18778280
Too bad. Largely non-existent in western philosophy outside of esotericist or mystic currents. You can thank the bible.

>>18778259
The treatment of Advaita Vedanta is that book is quite brief, he only writes about it insofar as he relates it to Buddhism, he doesn't treat the subject of Advaita in itself to an extent that will leave someone informed and satisfied who was seeking to learn about Advaita.

>>18778286
Sharma is very in Shankara's camp as Sharma is a die hard advaitan so you should balance it out if you read Sharma

Dasgupta has good overviews of the major schools of Indian thought including Shankara, well balanced

>>18778245
>maya isn't made of Brahman
okey
>it's Brahman's power or energy which He possesses while remaining different from it.
so maya it's actually made of brahman, you're just trying to argue semantics again, if i shit myself then that shit was created by my body, even if i didn't want to do it
so by all definitions maya was created by brahma since it's his energy, which is logically a part of him

>Brahman is transcendent
but i thought advaita wasn't dualistic!

>>18773915
I've already demonstrated that there are unresolved infinite regresses in Buddhism, all the Buddhists have in response is cope and ad hominem attacks, they never actually explain why there is no issue.

>>18775475
>Why would you want to dissolve into a cosmic ocean?
In Advaita non-dualism, there is no dissolving into a cosmic ocean, but it's about realizing your consciousness *was* and *is* that ocean in it's totality. Ocean remains as ocean without dissolving.
>What's the point of creation then? God simply is, and you are a faded inferior form of being that thinks it is but isn't
According to Advaita you were never the inferior form of being to begin with, the notion that somebody was is just part of God's energy dancing around, you were the complete, undivided totality of God the whole time and were never inferior in reality. This you was never actually affected by the illusion/God-energy, although prior to enlightenment people have the wrong belief that you are.
>such that your only aspiration is to negate your inferior pseudobeing and 'remember' your real being. Why would inferior being exist at all in the first place then?
Because it's God's very uncreated nature to do so. If God were impelled to create or wield maya by something other than His own nature He would neither be unmoved nor the uncaused author/origin of causation.
>Why would God create something inferior to him whose only aspiration is to negate its shadowy pseudoexistence?
Because it is His nature, to ascent into the plenitude of infinite happiness is a noble aspiration.
>Why wouldn't it be the case that God was doing something we don't yet understand but that is somehow greater than simply existing, by creating instead?
Because for an Entity who is already completely fulfilled and complete, there is no motivation that would impel him to do so.
>Shouldn't we take the miraculous fact that God created individual souls, with the unprovable but innate feeling of certainty that they are free and important, as some kind of irreducibly important phenomenon to be investigated like an esoteric symbol?
Why should this investigation not lead to the God who is seated in the heart as the indwelling Self of every individual soul?

>>18775537
That's not true, nothing that was ever you at all is ever annihilated. The only things that end are things which are different from you and which pass before your mental vision like images on a screen.
>>18775546
>You are to void everything about your existence and self that has been given to you.
Wrong, the foundational Self in Advaita is never voided or negated

>>18777129
>To put it another way, Shankara's denial that chariots exist is actually really unique to him
Shankara only denies that chariots exist in Absolute reality, he didn't deny that chariots exist in our empirical experience, and he didn't deny that they exist independently of our sense perceptions and our subjective perception of them.

Yogachara Buddhists like Dharmakirti actually are nihilists unlike Shankara and he denied that objects exist outside of our subjective mental ideations representing them. Similarly, Madhyamaka which also is often characterized by nihilism insists that there is no unconstructed basis where the chariot exists but insists that it's all just vikalpa, conceptual construction from the ground up, except there is no ground in Madhyamaka but just conceptual constructs constructing each other forever back in time, even though this leads to an infinite regress, but don't worry! Madhyamaka only cares about infinite regresses when trying to refute opposing schools, but not when they occur in Madhyamaka doctrine

>>18777428
>any of the points you should actually need to adress in order to prove anyone wrong
What points? There is an infinite regress in Buddhism that results from saying samsara arises from dependent origination, and there is another which results from saying as Nagarjuna and Chandrakirti do that consciousness is non-reflexive. So far Buddhists have offered no 'points' which would rebut these criticisms of Buddhist doctrine.
>>18777484
I don't find his metaphysics very convincing; as just one example his conception of space seems obviously wrong to me compared to Newton's and the Akasha/Ether of the Indians and Greeks, moreover there are conclusions in Leibniz's system which are completely unacceptable to the Madhyamakin like the relation of the monadic universe to God, which Leibniz argued was real and supreme, so Leibniz's metaphysics cannot be taken as really substantiating sunyata.
>>18777525
>Correct. Both Buddha and Parmenides for example say that it's impossible for "nothing" to even exist.
So does Shankara, anyone who claims otherwise is either hopelessly confused or purposely gaslighting
>>18777536
>this is ilogical since denies movement and becoming
No, it's only denying them in Absolute reality which is eternal, and this is wholly consistent with logic, such the eternal does not change. While the Absolute remains eternal and unchanging, it's power provides for movement and becoming to happen within the relative non-eternal universe. Attributing movement and becoming to the eternal is very illogical.
>also it's dual since you need an eternal world outside the world of change
That's wrong, dualism means to set up two independent and equally real principles or realities. Maya is not independent but rather contingent, its also not eternal like Brahman is, and maya is also less real than Brahman is; for all these reasons it's not dualism.
>and any bridge you try to build between the two will be full of contradictions
How so?

>>18778368
>there are unresolved infinite regresses in Buddhism
This is cute coming from someone who believes an uncaused cause caused causation.

>>18778282
>God don't solve that tho, it's not answer but a way to just cop out of the problem altogether
Are you actually too stupid to understand this or are you just purposely being obtuse? There *IS NO* question of an infinite regress where there is just a changeless and eternal thing/entity/principle, an infinite regress only arises in connection with change, when discussing something where there is no change whatsoever, there is no infinite regress which can even be proposed or raised because there is no basis for it. The Buddhist faces the eternal regress problem because of the change involved in the constantly re-arising ignorance etc, while the Advaitist doesn't face any regress problem in his explanation of samsara.

>causality being created form outside causality is something so vage
It's not vague at all, it's just saying that a frame of reference arises from something outside that frame of reference, in a way that cannot be fully denoted in terms that work within the language or bounds of that particular frame of reference; this is hardly a vague or head-scratching concept.

>than you can say a god created reality or that reality just created itself, you're so far from logic you can just say wathever you want,
No, that's not true, because the way in which you say this still has to accord to logic in order to be philosophically tenable. If you propose that God is eternal and unchanging but still creates reality in a way that involves change, then that's an illogical explanation! Advaita doesn't do this though but their explanation is logical. This is you just arbitrarily trying to restrict the limits of accepted positions so everything you dislike is ruled out from the start.

>you can even choose any trascendental pricniple in buddhism and say that's what created the universe, sunyata created teh universe makes just the same amount of sense that saying God created the universe,
Except that doesn't make any sense because
1) Sunyata doesn't possess any power whereby it does so while Brahman does
2) Buddhists maintain that Sunyata refers to the nature/status of the phenomena themselves (i.e. they exist emptily), so they don't even really exist as something separate from Sunyata which it can create

>guenonfag is jivaposting again

noooooo RIP thread

>>18778314
>so maya it's actually made of brahman, you're just trying to argue semantics again, if i shit myself then that shit was created by my body, even if i didn't want to do it
Maya is not *made of* Brahman in Advaita. Just because you create something doesn't mean you are identical to it. If we follow your logic to its natural conclusions we arrive at absurd conclusions which show you are completely wrong.

A musician creates music, but a musician is a living breathing organism, while music is sound and is not a living organism, you can't maintain that these are actually the same without violating the law of non-contradiction. Maintaining that creations are always identical to or made out of their creator tends to lead to violations of the law of non-contradiction, which is a big clue that it's an incorrect metaphysical position to take.

>so by all definitions maya was created by brahma since it's his energy, which is logically a part of him
No, Brahman's maya is something He possesses while remaining different from it. A child possesses a toy and a man possesses a gun, the toy is not a part of the child and the gun is not a part of the man. Brahman is partless and contains no interior divisions or cordoned/sectioned off areas.

>but i thought advaita wasn't dualistic!
It's not, dualism means to set up two independent and equally real realities/principles. This does not denote the relation between Brahman and maya in the slightest so it's not an ontological dualism.

>>18778569
Jiva-kun, get in the Atmangelion

Your other Hindu thread got deleted. What gives?

>>18778570
>Brahman's maya is something He possesses while remaining different from it.
>It's not, dualism

>>18778457
>This is cute coming from someone who believes an uncaused cause caused causation.
That's different because in that case one is using the framework of causality to denote something outside causality, it's acknowledging it's limitation as a description but still using it as a symbol or communicative artifact to denote a concept (the transcendent source of causation which is outside causal relations) which the term "uncaused cause" is incapable of meaning literally.

There would only be an actual infinite regress at risk of occurring if Advaitists LITERALLY meant a being that was INSIDE the nexus of causal relations was the origin of that nexus of causal relations. This is however NOT what Advaita is talking about, but is rather talking about something more ontologically fundamental than causality and beyond causality providing for the projection/experience/illusion of causal relations within the relative universe to take place. Hence there is actually no risk of an infinite regress with the Advaitist position, because that risk would only arise if you place Brahman INSIDE causal relations while also maintaining He is the source of them, which is not what Advaita does.

Of course, you understand this already and know fully well that what Advaita is talking about doesn't actually result in an infinite regress, but you're just being dishonest because Buddhist logic sucks and so instead of defending it you'd rather lie about what other schools teach.

>>18778612
Yes, because maya is neither eternal like Brahman, nor is maya as real as Brahman, so it's not dualism which means setting up two opposing and independent realities.

I was never convinced by either the idea that existence is suffering or that metempsychosis is real. Can somebody justify these doctrines to me

>>18778627
If buddhist logic sucks why did Shankara copy it according to all the books you recommended
>>18769527
>>18769534
>>18769602
>>18769619

>>18778627
You're missing the point completely. Life itself is infinite regress and you've invented an imaginary first cause for it. Just as we never reach the bottom of subdividing atoms or time or space we never reach the first cause of anything. You've simply made one up out of convenience and claim priestly knowledge of this cause's attributes and powers. There is nothing more ridiculous than a priest calling someone dishonest.

>>18778645
>If buddhist logic sucks why did Shankara copy it according to all the books you recommended
He didn't.

I only recommended one book, the one by Isayeva, she takes as proof of Shankara's taking from Buddhist philosophy the point that there are allegedly no Hindu sources of the "rope-snake" analogy used by Advaitins.

But this is wrong! Because you see this very same analogy is used in the Katharudra Upanishad, which Shankara himself cites in his Brihadaranyaka Upanishad commentary, and so Isayeva really doesn't know what she is talking about when it comes to that topic of Buddhist influence as this very example shows. What she writes is demonstrably factually incorrect. I recommended her book for other reasons because I enjoyed some other parts of it (which doesn't require that I agree with all of it!)

The other people mentioned in those images are Academics whose views on certain issues I have mentioned before, or whose translations of certain texts I said were fine to read. That doesn't require me to agree with all of the other claims that they make across all of their books and articles though, only an extremely stupid person would make that assumption.

C. Sharma in his book "The Advaita Tradition" makes the point which I agree with that Advaita doctrine and logic comes from the Upanishads.

>>18778570
your example is just wrong and don't adress the problem at all

>A musician creates music, but a musician is a living breathing organism, while music is sound

both are physical phenomena, that's the whole point, both of them are part of the same reality, any living organism produce sound or vibration and any piece of music need material objects to exist(instruments) so in a categorical sense they're the same thing, just build in a different way
so this example just don't work since time and eternity are contradictory terms, you can't have change and eternalism at the same time

>dualism means to set up two independent and equally real realities/principles
so as you can see it is in fact dualist, since tehre's a world of change and becoming(time) and a world of brahman(eternity)

>He possesses while remaining different from it
you need to actually made an argument about this, you can't just axiomatically asume that, since i can said the same thing about the universe as a thing created ex nihilo

>>18778667
>Life itself is infinite regress and you've invented an imaginary first cause for it.
There is no proof or even plausible evidence for this, you are making wild and unsubstantiated claims to rescue yourself from the hole you are in but it wont work. Buddhism contains unresolved infinite regresses and is philosophically and logically untenable for this reason among others.
>Just as we never reach the bottom of subdividing atoms or time or space we never reach the first cause of anything.
ibid

>>18778520
>>18778520
>an infinite regress only arises in connection with change
since we live in a wolrd that changes we can assume then that there's indeed a question of infinite regress

>It's not vague
>in a way that cannot be fully denoted in terms that work within the language or bounds of that particular frame of reference

lol

>Advaita doesn't do this though but their explanation is logical.
no is not, you're confusing logical with axiomatic, just assuming there's a god that can create causality and at the same time exist beyond casuality is the most ilogicall thing ever, it's by definition a contradiction

>>18778638
repeating this question

>>18778638
>I was never convinced by either the idea that existence is suffering
read fichte, he made a more modern take on that, but really close to the true notion of suffering in buddhism

>>18778709
>both are physical phenomena, that's the whole point, both of them are part of the same reality, any living organism produce sound or vibration and any piece of music need material objects to exist(instruments) so in a categorical sense they're the same thing, just build in a different way
1) Just because you can identify a shared category which unites two things doesn't make them identical
2) things which have mutually opposing characteristics/natures can never be identical
3) to be sentient (musician) vs insentient (music) to be an animal (musician) vs a non-animal (music), these are example of mutually contradictory characteristics which prove that the musician cannot be the same as the music without violating the law of non-contradiction.

>so this example just don't work since time and eternity are contradictory terms, you can't have change and eternalism at the same time
I assumed, perhaps wrongly, that you were intelligent enough to understand that the eternity of Brahman taught by Advaita is not *within time* in the sense of an eternal duration *within time*, but rather as being free from any connection with time, never changing or decaying, existing as timeless, but not either being including inside or linked to a temporal frame of reference like a duration or timeline. A thing that exists timelessly is not subject to any temporal limits.

Just because the mind which is used to thinking in temporal terms cannot or struggles to imagine an eternity or eternal being *outside* of time does not mean that such a thing is impossible.

>>dualism means to set up two independent and equally real realities/principles
>so as you can see it is in fact dualist, since tehre's a world of change and becoming(time) and a world of brahman(eternity)
Yes, but this isn't an ontological dualism because only one is truly eternal (or rather timeless and undecaying), while maya ends. If you have two principles, one of which is timeless+independent and the other temporary+contingent, then that's not dualism.
>you need to actually made an argument about this, you can't just axiomatically asume that, since i can said the same thing about the universe as a thing created ex nihilo
I don't understand, what do you mean? What is the issue that I need to justify or argue for? I see no issue or gap.

>>18778716
>There is no proof
there's no proof of the existence of a first principle either

Hinduism allows you the choice to believe or not to believe it gives you the coice to be an atheist if u choose. It had a lot of freedom until at a period the brahmin (priests) flayed it to keep themselves . The bramins were the educated classs and influenced everyone. If you want a spiritual understanding of karma (duty) u may read the gita. Then there was the panchatantra which in contrast showed the use of intellect in situations. Sadly it has now been reduced to animal stories for children. Spirituality is understanding oneself if one does it professes that that there is god in everyone and through understanding oneself one can come to god. This is why meditation is so highly respected its basically cleaning the pool of all the floting waste and thus being able to see the jewel that lies at the bottom . I hope this helps in some way

>>18778716
>There is no proof or even plausible evidence for this, you are making wild and unsubstantiated claims to rescue yourself from the hole you are
You have the same exact hole if not for your uncaused, unprovable god pulling you out. Buddhism isn't worried about a first cause; god has little bearing on the metaphysics and soteriology since it is mental construction like other phenomena. It is your system that collapses if someone says "prove it."

>>18778741
>no is not, you're confusing logical with axiomatic
No, I'm not.
>since we live in a wolrd that changes we can assume then that there's indeed a question of infinite regress
Yes, but there is only a valid question of it *in reference to things that change*, when dealing with a hypothetical changeless thing, there is no infinite regress that arises when dealing with the subject of that timeless changeless thing just always being what it is, because there is no change here where any regress could possibly arises.

The notion of God being unchanging and eternal/timeless just being God forever contains no infinite regress because there is no change involved. The Buddhist model of constantly re-arising co-dependent origination being produced by prior components/products of that same co-dependent origination leaves to an infinite regress because of the change involved.

>just assuming there's a god that can create causality and at the same time exist beyond casuality is the most ilogicall thing ever, it's by definition a contradiction
Only if you are a complete retard and are wrongly assuming that Brahman/God is held to create causality BY methods that are included within the nexus of causal relations. This is not what Advaita teaches though, and as you are proving so many of the Buddhist arguments against Advaita involve taking pretend retard interpretations of what Advaita teaches that isn't actually taught by Advaita.

What Advaita teaches is that Brahman's energy appears *as* causality or the causal nexus in a way that doesn't involve Brahman in causal relations. There is no inherent contradiction with this. If causality is only valid as a frame of reference *within* the appearance, there is no inherent reason why the energy cannot appear *as* causality without Brahman being inside that appearance qua causal nexus which only 'exists' as a derivative appearance of the energy.

>>18778780
>1) Just because you can identify a shared category which unites two things doesn't make them identical
>2) things which have mutually opposing characteristics/natures can never be identical
>3) to be sentient (musician) vs insentient (music) to be an animal (musician) vs a non-animal (music), these are example of mutually contradictory characteristics which prove that the musician cannot be the same as the music without violating the law of non-contradiction.
you missed my point completly, what i'm sayign is that both of them are connected
both of them share the same way of existence, share their categories of existence, which don't happen with brahma since he love in the contradiction of creating time without being part of time

>>18778783
>there's no proof of the existence of a first principle either
It can be inferred from the logical impossibility of an infinite regress being unable to account for itself.
>>18778819
>You have the same exact hole if not for your uncaused, unprovable god pulling you out.
I don't because there are no infinite regresses in Advaita, unless you engage in bad-faith completely retarded misinterpretations of what Advaita teaches like the false notion that Advaita says "God is inside causality while also causing it" (that's wrong you dumbass).

Buddhism on the other hands fails on account of these very real regresses, which exist in its metaphysics and which have been commented upon by many people.

>>18778845
>you missed my point completly, what i'm sayign is that both of them are connected
That doesn't make them the same, you were arguing maya is made of Brahman and hence is Brahman.
>both of them share the same way of existence, share their categories of existence,
Brahman and maya don't share the same 'way' or 'catagory' or existence, so this would also fail to establish that they are the same or that one is made of the other.
>which don't happen with brahma since he love in the contradiction of creating time without being part of time
This is not what Advaita teaches you dummy, they say that He timelessly projects time as something other than Himself, as something which doesn't characterize Him or include Him within it. Brahman remains outside of and transcendent to time while projecting it, that's not "being part of time"

>>18778869
*the logical impossibility of an infinite regress accounting for itself (which it by nature can't)

>>18778869
>the false notion that Advaita says "God is inside causality while also causing it"
I have not said this. I have said that you rely on god as a first cause, i.e. god is uncaused and there is no further discussion of causality just because. This is just pure conjecture and does not rescue you from an infinite regress. You are not arguing with someone who care what the Upanishads say about the great lord of the universe.

>>18778896
>I have not said this. I have said that you rely on god as a first cause, i.e. god is uncaused and there is no further discussion of causality just because.
What do you mean by "no further discussion"? That's not true.

>This is just pure conjecture and does not rescue you from an infinite regress
It's not conjecture because part of the evidence that leads to accepting it is the logical impossibility of an infinite regress accounting/providing for itself.

And there is no infinite regress to be rescued from with to begin with when you have an unchanging timeless God who simply is. You keep misunderstanding this or you keep trying to misrepresent this. There is only a problem of an infinite regress to be rescued from at all when you posit an explanation which involves change like dependent origination; with a timeless unchanging God there is no regress. The more you pretend to not understand this the more stupid and/or desperately coping you make Buddhists look.

>>18778919
>with a timeless unchanging God there is no regress
Doesn't exist, so the regress is back. I mean, to you he exists because he's your thomist tranny in the sky that we need to just accept for who he is and always was, but the emperor has no clothes.

>>18778944
>tranny in the sky
huh?

>>18778950
God as uncreated creator is idealists pretending they aren't idealists.

>>18778955
How so

>>18778961
When you make up an essential first cause and then say "it's not conjecture because I have as evidence your explanation's lack of a first cause"

>>18778976
Oh I see
well, there really isnt a good argument on the subject of first causes either way from conventional experience. We are too transcendentally limited to draw conclusions that way. But from unconventional experience I suspect that there is a first cause and that it is the triune Christian God. I have read a fair amount on arguments to the contrary but it seems like their biggest argument is just
>well its uncomfortable to conceive of an object being created or destroyed, so it cant happen
which I find unconvincing. We destroy thoughts all the time by ceasing to pay attention to them, and we create them all the time by choosing to assent to their preliminary forms. I dont really understand why some people are so uncomfortable with a first cause outside of time.

>>18779000
You're not the first cause of anything you've done except in a highly crude and naive way. You have parents who made your body. You've eaten other life to keep yourself alive to think more thoughts. And so forth.

>>18779019
Well the line is harder to draw for physical actions, but not so hard for thoughts. That's where the faculty of choice really shows itself most clearly.

Also I find the vedanta position on this quite illustrative if not 100% accurate: you can attribute causality to prior states of mind because resisting their current (karma) is not easy, but it is absolutely doable once you see what's going on. From there your mind progressively changes until you have either completely changed the course of those states, or cut them off to the degree that you can.

We think the world is purely deterministic or strongly deterministic if we fall out of the habit of resisting the current, but once you start doing it more, it becomes easier.

>>18779045
>the vedanta position
This is indistinguishable from multiple buddhist schools if taken in the isolated form you have given

>>18779081
sorry, I should have said dharmic. I meant to include Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism under the umbrella term

>>18778889
>That doesn't make them the same, you were arguing maya is made of Brahman and hence is Brahman.
indeed beause both are mad eby the same substance
>>18778889
>Brahman and maya don't share the same 'way' or 'catagory' or existence, so this would also fail to establish that they are the same or that one is made of the other.
yes they do if brahma is eveyrthing that exist

>>18778869
>It can be inferred from the logical impossibility of an infinite regress being unable to account for itself.
a creation ex nihilo also can be inferred by that same logic, god or no god is teh same when you can go form non causality to causality

>>18779233
>god or no god is teh same when you can go form non causality to causality
You have said what I tried to say as well, but somehow more eloquently and less eloquently at the same time.

Can someone explain the difference between Advaita Vedanta and Kashmiri Shaivism?
Also, is there a school of Hinduism that is non-dual while encouraging its adherents to embrace human life and experiences rather than following a purely intellectual path?

>>18779248
Heck who the fuck cares. You can start your own degenerate school in 'everything goes in Hinduism'.

>>18778896
>This is just pure conjecture and does not rescue you from an infinite regress
indeed, a first cause outside of causality is just a metaphysical cop out, just evade the problem altogetehr and let faith take over logic, since you need to believe blindy in a being outside the principle of non contradiction, that need of blind faith is what makes advaita a crypto nihilist school

>>18779409
>metaphysical cop out
Why is it so hard for some people to admit the possibility that reality in itself may buck the transcendental limitations of our sensation and reason

>>18779455
admit that (which i do) and call ilogical falacies a "logical metaphysical system" it's not the same, one thing is to embrace the uncertainty of ultimate reality, other totally diferent is to escape it by creating a pseudo rational system that doesn't make any sense, just because you're scared to recognize there's things outside your grasp

>another thread another Advaitin getting BTFO by Based Buddhists.

>>18778696
amazing how you just lie when convenient, true scum on par with butterfly, at least she's just stupid

>>18779248
>Also, is there a school of Hinduism that is non-dual while encouraging its adherents to embrace human life and experiences rather than following a purely intellectual path?
Sri Vidya

>>18779224
>yes they do if brahma is eveyrthing that exist
Brahman is only everything within Absolute reality, not everything that ‘exists’ within maya, so you’re wrong

How do monists/non dualists answer the problem of evil?

>>18778944
>Doesn't exist, so the regress is back
In a hypothetical explanation whereby time, causality etc are appearances or false understandings timelessly projected by an unchanging timeless God, there is no infinite regress to begin with, but there remains an unresolved infinite regress in the Buddhist model which makes it logically untenable.

>>18779233
>a creation ex nihilo also can be inferred by that same logic,
It’s not though because it involves more logical leaps to speak of something emerging into being from nothing, instead of a beginningless appearance projected by something else, but which doesn’t exist in its own right independently of its projection, which never had an original emergence in time, and which is ultimately revealed as never having actually existed as we thought it did. You should already know this because Buddhists argue against creation but not beginningless ignorance.

>god or no god is teh same when you can go form non causality to causality
That’s wrong, because the origin of causality has to basically be a God-equivalent (timeless and immutable) in order to end the regress. Otherwise you have just another contingent thing that arises via something else and it remains illogical.

>>18779409
>first cause outside of causality is just a metaphysical cop out, just evade the problem altogetehr and let faith take over logic
That’s not placing faith before logic, it’s the only logical answer, a being within causality cannot at the same time be the source of it without contradiction.
> , since you need to believe blindy in a being outside the principle of non contradiction
The Advaitist conception of Brahman doesn’t violate the law of non-contradiction; saying on the other hand as non-Advaitins do that creator = created or that essential nature = powers/abilities does violate the law of non-contradiction.
> that need of blind faith is what makes advaita a crypto nihilist school
You wont find any major school of Hinduism or Christianity which says you dont need faith, moreover having faith has no connection with nihilism, nihilists have an ABSENCE of faith in God. It seems like you dont even think about what words you are using but just seem to spout off any random word combination that comes into your mind without seeing if it makes sense.

>>18779485
>to escape it by creating a pseudo rational system
an unresolved infinite regress which is supposed to account for itself is indeed a pseudo-rational system

>>18769363
Enough meditation will get you there, more than an hour a day. If you haven’t done psychedelics, they can give the mind an initial kick out of its evolutionarily optimal rut and force it to experience different qualia, but I seriously doubt it’s needed or even wise. This was my experience anyway.

>>18780242
You can find this on libgen or maybe archive.org; the author examines many systems and concludes that of all religions and major philosophies only Advaita and Vishishtadvaita solve the problem of evil; the long story made short is that evil isn’t actually real

>>18780304
meant to attach this image to this post

>>18780242
Evil doesn't exist. This is an outdated discussion.

>>18780304
>only Advaita and Vishishtadvaita solve the problem of evil
Gnosticism solves it too.
How can evil not be real if suffering is real?

>>18780322
How does a single substance of infinite Good also emanate the potential for suffering?
Why would an omnipotent loving God allow suffering/evil?
You cannot reconcile omnipotence and benevolence with the potential for evil and suffering. The rest is all convoluted coping.

>>18780293
you can't resolve infinite regress, no philosophy ever could resolve it, that's why kant just declare it an antinomie of pure reason, a paradox of reason you just need to ignore if you want to developa metaphysical system rooted in reality and free from cheap speculations, like a non causal being creating causation, which is just a contradiction in terms

>>18780289
>it’s the only logical answer, a being within causality cannot at the same time be the source of it without contradiction.
it's not, it's logically a contradiction, non causality cant produce causality since it would stop being non causality, the only logical answer is to recognize the first principle or lack of it is something beyond our reach, that's how every philosopher of logic handle the problem

>The Advaitist conception of Brahman doesn’t violate the law of non-contradiction
yes it does, the advaita argument violates the principle of non-contradiction, since creates a substance that can be non causal and causal at the same time, there's nothign more illogical than that

>moreover having faith has no connection with nihilism
using faith to explain empirical phenomena is nihilism since you renounce the real world and retreat to a world of metaphysical speculation

>>18780238
>Brahman is only everything within Absolute reality, not everything that ‘exists’ within maya, so you’re wrong
so then something exist beyond brahma, making the whole cosmology dualistic
>>18780258
>because it involves more logical leaps
it doesn't since a state of non causality can't have any type of leap, sicne there's no cause, there's no need for logical argumentation, nothing is causing nothing else, just a first moment of causation form non causation, saying there's a god in non causation that created causation or saying there's nothing innoncausation and then tehre's causation it's teh same, since both are non casuation factors form whic causation "emerged", which doens't make any sense one way or another, a God that's is rooted in non causation and nothingnes are the same since both are inactive trascnednetal objects, this illogical spark of causlaity from non causality could proced form both of them, in order to articualte a logicla argument you need a cuase and a effect, if the effect or first cause doesn't need a previous cause, then you can use logic, you ca n come up with anything you want and it will be just as valid as anything else, since there can be burden of proof or logical articulation, a god outside causation is the smae thing as nothingess

>>18780474
>non causality cant produce causality since it would stop being non causality
This is dumb. Non-causality can contain causality, but not the reverse.

>>18780512
no,non casuality is the negation of causality, only one of them can exist, it's like saying something is moving and still or alive and death, you can't logicaly have a thing and it's negation at he same time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_noncontradiction
read parmenides

>>18780523
Doesn’t apply. You can have the appearance of causality (like in the universe) while having the underlying generating mechanism be non-causal.

A causal generating mechanism could never produce non-causal states however, as each state relies on the previous one.

>>18780539
>Doesn’t apply
if it doesn't apply then your system isn't logical, just axiomatic, which every religious system is
at least christinaty embrace it(" Credo quia absurdum")and actually articulates how to develop an axiomatic metaphysical system outside of logic

>mechanism be non-causal.
if it's a mechanism the it's by definition causal, i think you don't actually know what non casual actually entails

>>18780539
>existence itself is actually noncausality

this is the guy calling buddhist crypto nihilst

>>18780675
Yes when you rip something off and then try to compete against it as original philosophy donut steel you'll need to jump through some hoops