/lit/ - Literature

>>12734673
This trolling is becoming very meta and self-referential, and shows signs of serious butt-blastedness. I wonder what kind of person is motivated by their angst to go to such lengths by digging through the archives to find material to use as the basis of false-flag posts (anon show me on the doll where Guenon-fag touched you!)

You are false-flagging as a Vedantist claiming that Buddhism is actually Vedanta/Hinduism in order to make Vedanta look bad. It looks like you took that text from a post by someone who actually knew what they were talking who was discussing Rene Guenon's history with Buddhism but then added the false claim that Buddhism is just Vedanta. It is true that Buddhism was largely influenced by the pre-Buddhist Upanishads, and that the alignment in doctrine between areas of Buddhism and Vedanta can be partially attributed to them stemming in part from the same texts and the ideas associated with them; but Buddhism also diverges from Upanishadic teachings in important ways and anyone who knows anything about those teachings would never say that Buddhism is a subset of Vedanta, which is a super simplistic generalization and is completely incorrect. It is true that some Mahayana teachings align closer to Vedanta than the rest of Buddhism, but again this heavily depends on the school; there are a wide range of teachings and metaphysical positions and some come close to agreeing while others don't at all and are completely opposed.

When you false-flag as Vedantists you make Buddhist-posters seem like insufferable children who can't handle people comparing Buddhism to other things or even them talking about it with anything but slavish praise. It's not helping anything.

>>12734665
The chart that was posted in the thread is good but doesn't really cover Mahayana/Vajranaya much other than Nagarjuna. If you want an overview of the philosophy of the various schools including Mahayana I'd recommend Siderits' book "Buddhism as Philosophy". This goes into the doctrines of various schools in enough detail that if anything stands out as interesting you'll know enough to be able to order and read the texts of that school. It helps to have a good understand of the tripitaka/Pali Canon before you read much Mahayana philosophy because they take much of it as a given but adds increasing layers of other ideas built on top of them such that if you don't understand the base layers it won't make much sense.

>>12244242

The Mahāyāna, Vedānta and various ṣūfiyyah. Nāgārjuna is important in Mahāyāna, he has a self-critical onto-theological argument concluding that conditioned phenomena as well as the absolute are both empty of inherent existence (śūnyatā), and that there are additional process metaphysics-like aspects as well, he is grounded in Buddhism but seeks to demonstrate it through logic, he often uses the reductio ad absurdum. Most of Mahāyāna agrees with him or tweaks his ideas, although among Chán Buddhism and its derivatives some areas take opposing views and you also have the Tibetian Jo-nang school where Dölpopa explicitly argues that the absolute is not empty and that the Buddha, the Tantras and the Mahāyāna and Tathāgatagarbha Sūtras all actually meant other-emptiness. The Buddhist Yogācāra school also has ontology as one of its major focuses.

The Vedānta schools really flowered after the emergence of Mahāyāna, although its rooted in the pre-Buddhist Upaniṣads and Vedāntic thinkers were active from that era until the founding of the current schools. A major milestone is Gauḍapāda, who in his Māṇḍukya Kārikā on the eponymous Upaniṣad at times cites various Buddhist schools like Yogācāra and Mādhyamaka including the views of Nāgārjuna, at times agreeing with them but along with the other usual groups mostly refutes them and turns their own arguments against them. He also has a onto-theological first-principle analysis which agrees with Nāgārjuna on non-origination but which relies on logic to argue one can prove the eternal non-dual Paramātmāṇ that is also revealed by scripture, this attitude of applying logic to scripture is shared by most of Vedānta more or less. The central figure in Vedānta is Śaṅkarācārya, who agreed with Gauḍapāda's ideas while also introducing his own although most of his thought in the end derives from the Upaniṣads. In his writings explaining Advaita he makes heavy use of logic, referencing both epistemology and ontology and constantly comes up with hypothetical counter-arguments to his own that he refutes in turn. He followed a textual exegesis method called Anvaya-Vyatireka based on the principle of the the coherence theory of truth beloved by most of the German Idealists. The later schools of Vedānta share many of Advaita's ideas and methods while differing on doctrine more or less according to school. Both the later Vedānta schools as well as certain Yogic and Tantric thinkers like Abhinavagupta have various onto-theological treatises steeped in mysticism which often argue from the principle itself and not textual authority. In Taṣawwuf some of these same ideas are broached but in different ways, most notably Ibn Arabi who gracefully uses a symbolism-heavy cosmology to intuitively convey a poetic illustration of many of the same ideas and later ṣūfiyyah like Jāmī elaborate on this more in detail.

>>11937830
>Most Mahayana sutras are apocryphal fan-fiction.

Wrong kiddo, see >>11934238 and >>11928887, Mahayana contains ideas which were a part of pre-sectarian Buddhism, which were left out of the Theravada when their ancestors split from away from the larger Sangha at the 2nd council. Theravada is basically Protestantism. Scholars largely agree that the evidence points towards the proto-Mahayana Mahasamghika ideas and texts as being older and closer to the source than the proto-Theravada Sthavira. Academics who compare the very earliest Buddhist texts have generally noted the picture that emerges is one that aligns more with the Mahasamghika. The early Indian Mahayana sutras are the flowering of this understanding taught by the Buddha and the later Chinese et al ones are further elaborations of these concepts.