/lit/ - Literature

>it's devolved into an autism thread
Who could have seen it coming?

Asking the non-autists: When do I read the Brahma Surra commentary? After the principal upanishads or before?

>>13823579
They're very different from one another, to such a degree that criticisms and attempted refutations of Parmenidean monism don't actually apply to Advaita. Śaṅkara's explanations of Advaita are much more sophisticated and subtle than On Nature, although this may have to do with that we don't actually know the full extent of Parmenides because our surviving copies of his poem is incomplete. There is an element similar to monism in Advaita and so because of this people sometimes link it with Parmenides. His monism can be seen as agreeing with Advaita on some points, it remains possible that if we learned what the rest of his poem was that he would have agreed with Advaita even more. Śaṅkara's Advaita contains various phenomenological and epistemological aspects which include a critical idealist analysis of the mind similar to Kant where all knowledge is presented to the mind as representations; this takes place in a sort of mind-body dualism where there is something called a 'subtle body' that exists formlessly and which closely corresponds to the body and also houses the mind. Where Śaṅkara differs from these thinkers is that taking his cue from the Upaniṣads he makes an important separation made between this mind and the Self/Atma, which is both the Supreme Being and the inner consciousness and awareness who is the ultimate recipient of all the sensations of the mind, the seer of sight, the hearer of sound, the thinker of thought etc. The Atma actually exists in a 'monistic' undivided, uniform, immutable, infinite and boundless state of bliss; but is mistakenly identified with the mind that it illuminates with its awareness. The illusion of individuality and the appearance of the Universe come from the Supreme Being's power of Maya (illusion/divine art) which the Atma/Brahma exercises while remaining unaffected by it. A causation theory called Vivartavada is held to where the effect (the universe, samsara etc) is not a creation or a duplication but an appearance of the cause, causation is only apparent as a category of thought but isn't ultimately real.

What's the best religious text? What's the best translation/edition of it?

>>12255327
Fortunately, we can just read the primary Vedanta texts themselves in the form of the actual commentaries and the short texts which are super interesting. A lot of it is similar to Parmenides, Plato, Plotinus, Spinoza, Schelling, Hegel etc

>>11636670

>>11426985