/lit/ - Literature

>>16855786
The majority of these can be found online for free in PDFs etc through the combination of search engines and searching on lib-gen and archive.org

For a short (less then 300 pages) high-quality overview of the different schools of Hindu and non-Hindu philosophy so you'll have more contextual information that you know when reading Shankara
>The Essentials of Indian Philosophy by Hiriyanna

A dense book explaining how all the metaphysics of Advaita ties together by one of the more notable western scholars of Advaita, Eliot Deutsch from the University of Hawaii.
>Advaita Vedanta: a Philosophical Reconstruction by Deutsch

A shorter book which presents a very informative analysis of some of the various principals within Advaita and relates them to other religions, Guenon does a good job here of succinctly explaining the underlying structure of the metaphysics which much else in Advaita is based on.
>Man and His Becoming According to the Vedanta by Guenon

A book which compares Buddhism, Advaita, Kashmir Shaivism, the author has an idiosyncratic/alternative view of Buddhism closer to Guenon's which is rejected by most Buddhist scholars and Buddhists, the section on Vedanta is very well-written and lucid though, if you wanted to you could just read that one section and benefit from reading it alone without the other sections on the other sects/schools, although I learned a good deal from reading them too.
>The Advaita Tradition in Indian Philosophy by Sharma

A longer book which especially focuses on how Shankara's writings have a very precise pedagogical value and how at critical points they function so as to clear away the misconceptions of the reader and direct them to intuitive and immediate realization
>Saṃkara’s Advaita Vedanta: A Way of Teaching by Hirst

A book wherein a Jesuit priest who teaches at the Harvard Divinty School gives a comparative theology of Thomism and Advaita, and speaks of the same above topic that Hirst does of the reader engaging with and being changed by their reading of the text (by which he means Shankara's prose commentaries)
>“Theology after Vedanta” by Clooney