/lit/ - Literature

>>12589594
Coomaraswamy's 'Hinduism and Buddhism' is very good and can be found on lib-gen

>>12589532
Most educated Hindu priests who have been instructed in an Advaitist lineage would mostly likely tell you something like that. Vishishtadvaita is about as popular in India as Advaita but there are still a large variety of Advaita sects and organizations including the Smarta sect (a major Hindu denomination), groups that are based on the temples that Shankara founded, to modern orders like the Ramakrishna one, to various ascetic/sannyasa groups (which still exist and have in some cases tens and hundreds of thousands of members), there are also innumerable smaller temples/orders (Maths) which teach Advaitic doctrine despite not being affiliated with any of the temples Shankara founded like the Svarnavalli Matha, Ramachandrapura Math, Kanchi Matha, Chitrapur Math, Shri Gaudapadacharya Math, Sri Samsthan Dabholi Math, and the Ramakrishna Math; they are found all over India including in Goa, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, West Bengal, Uttarakhand etc. Some Advaitist Maths don't even have English presences on the internet. The German orientalist Deussen wrote about how something like 90% of sannyasas were Advaitins.

The average layperson who goes to the lessons and speeches offered at these locations might not be able to exactly explain it in every case but generally if people have been appointed to a senior position in these religious orders it's because they've studied a lot of Vedantic texts including Shankara's where he explains that kind of stuff repeatedly.

>>11336770

Not exactly sure what you mean here, could you elaborate?

>If things may be more or less limited in the manifested world it assumes there is a principal which it tends toward or away from which would be absolute limit, or in other words the non-existence of the thing.

There is no non-existence or void that exists separately from Brahman in Advaita metaphysics, everything is Brahman. The unmanifest is the more real aspect of Brahman, for it is unchanging, eternal and contains infinite possibilities, including all those contained within the manifest. The phenomenal world is in a sense delineated by the way that Brahman manifests in that moment, by which possibilities take shape in the manifest; although this is considered illusionary because of how it appears to be concrete reality when it's not. It's less real than the unmanifest by being ephemeral, temporary and a limitation of the infinite possibilities of the manifest. Only one set of possibilities are present at one moment in the manifest so in comparison to the infinite contained in the unmanifest it is like a little tiny slice of reality. The unmanifest is not an 'absolute limit' but is rather the unlimited absolute.

>this means that Brahman emanates both being and non-being. If both of these principles are of Brahman then the implications of what is good and true appears to be absurd and meaningless.

Not sure exactly what you are trying to say or whether I already answered it in the above paragraph, the Advaita view is that the only absolute truth is the reality of Brahman, all other truths are conventional. If by 'non-being' you are referring to the unmanifest that in no way changes anything. If what you are trying to imply is if that 'non-existence' (the unmanifest) is also Brahman than that somehow means that anything in the phenomenal world is meaningless, that's a misunderstanding. Brahman comprises both the manifest and the unmanifest, the former is illusionary by its appearing as reality when it's not absolute reality, but is still itself divine in the sense of being an emanation from, and a manifestation of Brahman. The manifest is not contradicted by the unmanifest, but is rather an actualization of an infinitesimally small portion of the possibilities contained in the unmanifest at any given moment.

Brahman itself is beyond any sort of attributable qualities such as good or bad. There is a relative good in the sense of acting morally, and the higher good which may be regarded as that which leads to Brahman and helps living beings act in accordance with Dharma and to realize the truth of things; but unlike truth there is no 'absolute good'.