/lit/ - Literature

>>16757589

Shankara in his works uses Avidya and Maya practically interchangeably, there is no complex relationship where Avidya and Maya and the Jiva and the material Jagat all interface in a complex network. Instead, there is just Brahman and His power of maya. And maya includes everything else within itself without any further sub-division or bifurcation. The Dvaitist Madhva makes the same mistake where he introduces this false bifurcation into maya and then criticizes as proof of contradiction were none actually exists in Shankara's Advaita. In Shankara Advaita being liberated in the body allows one to experience the residual awareness of the physical world for the duration of one's last remaining embodiment (i.e. until the death of that body), but samsara persists for everyone else.

And all of these sorts of criticisms which attack these cosmological factors, miss the more subtle but perhaps more fundamental point that, as a contingent thing which is sublated, the maya universe never has to have an interior clockwork making it clank along by it's own self-sufficient machinery of internal factors, instead the entire thing is directly sustained by God or Brahman through His limitless power, similar in a way to Islamic occasionalism. So asking "how does the maya universe power itself through these mechanisms" is like asking "how does the false-snake we imagine the rope to be capture and digest food and then excrete out those remains"; the question is ultimately irrelevant if the thing is question is A) has its existence/appearance directly sustained not by its own parts but through being completely dependent on God (or on the superimposition of the viewer in the example of the snake-rope) and B) it is eventually sublated as non-existent

>In any case, Ajnaana is the cause for the creation of this world. Where is the proof to say that there is a positive Ajnaana, which gets transformed into this world? Where does this Ajnaana exist? What is the object that it covers? Knowledge of what or whom, we do not get because of Ajnaana?
These criticisms are all actually meaningless and inapplicable to the Advaita of Shankara for the reasons I have explained