/lit/ - Literature

>>17374484
>Yea I just can't be convinced by Advaita's paradox of a perfect being like Brahman muddying itself with illusion.
Advaita Vedanta doesn't teach this, only people who have not read Shankara believe this. The Atma-Brahman is completely unaffected by maya/avidya, It is eternally liberated and pure.

Often times, a source of this misconception is that people don't understand the difference in Advaita between the Atma and the reflection (chidabhasa) of the Self in the intellect. The Atma does not perceive maya or avidya, the Atma does not have maya or maya-objects for the object of its vision but instead the Atma forever abides in non-duality that transcends knower, known and means of knowing. The Atma-Brahman is totally unclouded and unaffected by maya/avidya, and the reflection of the Self in the intellect of the jiva is what seems to have experiences and ignorance and which seems to have subject-objection distinctions etc.

>>17374534
>Ramanjacharya's Vishishtadvaita does not have this problem since the multiplicity of jivas is a feature of a unitary Brahman
The problem with that interpretation is that Upanishads condemn the perception of multiplicity and say that it leads to further death in both Brihadaranyaka Up. 4.4.19 and in Katha Up. 2.1.10. Also, to say that jivas are parts within the whole of Brahman has its own problems such as that the Svetasvatara Up. says that Brahman is partless in verses 6.5. and 6.20. Also, the very relationship of parts and whole is contradictory as Shankara explains in his Brahma Sutra Bhasya, because if things were parts of a greater whole ; then, were this whole to exist anywhere, then it must necessarily exist in the parts of which it is made, because if it did not exist within its parts then it wouldn't exist anywhere else and would be non-existent. But the whole also cannot exist within its parts, because the whole, by definition, cannot be contained within individual parts which are incomplete components of the whole; because then the same whole would be both the complete whole and the incomplete non-whole, violating the law of non-contradiction. I'm not trying to hate on Ramanuja btw I like him, I just think Advaita is more logically refined and closer to the Upanishads. Even following Vishishtadvaita would still qualify as meditation on the Saguna Brahman though which according to Advaita grants access to the Brahmaloka at death, which you can attain liberation from; they are not so opposed as people often assume.

>>17343646
>So ultimately the Brahman isn't in relation with anything
>So he is closed, without windows to the world
>Inreacheable, he doesn't perceives anything
>He's blind, dead and means nothing to us
all refuted here >>17344966

>>17343630
So, I couldn't read everything, but I didn't find the arguments that I read to be very convincing for me personally, for example:

https://www.reasonablefaith.org/media/reasonable-faith-podcast/a-question-from-india-on-gods-personhood/

>1. For an impersonal God to exist, the universe has to be eternal because an impersonal God cannot freely create the universe.
Why can a sentient God who consists of impartite and eternal self-knowing sentience not wield his power to give rise to the universe if it is that very God's timeless and uncaused inherent nature to do so, and that this God has always been doing so without any beginning, such that time has itself been flowing from and sustained by this power, while the wielder of this power is outside time? I cannot think of a good hypothetical reason why God could not do that.
>2. But the universe is not eternal because it had a beginning.
Advaita would say that *this* universe had a beginning, but that every universe created through the eternal reoccurring cycle of emergence and dissolution are all just different modifications of the same root primordial matter, or mula-prakriti, which is itself inseparable from the maya that is the Lord's power. But since Advaita adheres to the Vivartavada doctrine all this is only taking place 'as it were', and so the arguments against an infinite universe don't fully apply to the Vedanta model of the eternal cycle of universes, since the whole array of universes is sublated in liberation as unreal and as never having truly existed to begin with (in absolute reality), so trying to figure out contradictions in that and then disproving Vedantic doctrine that way (such as al-Ghazalis argument against an infinite succession of moments on the basis we could never arrive at the present moment) is like trying to figure out what the illusory snake superimposed on the rope by ignorance eats and how digests its food that it doesn't really eat. The arguments don't apply if the thing itself doesn't truly exist in the end. Shankara speaks about this point exactly somewhere in his Brahma Sutra bhasya where he mentions that though the mutual relation between karma and ignorance is beginningless, that it's eventually sublated as not having really existed to begin with.
>3. Therefore, an impersonal God cannot exist.
Or can it?

>>17325807

>>6803971
>>6804225
>>6804304
>>6804805
Why follow the inferior unorthodox Buddhist path which is only a rip off the Upanishads? Adi Shankara Acharya already demolished all your heretical views and asserted the absolute superiority of the Aryan Vedas and the Advaita Vedanta philosophical system.