/lit/ - Literature

>>12474989
>How do the Hindus hold up to the Greeks?
They are similarly influential (in the east) as the Greeks were to the West. Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Tantra and innumerable smaller sects and philosophers arose out of the early Hindu period during the 1st millenium BC. The Platonic/Neoplatonic tradition aligns with the Vedic/Vedantic one quite nicely.

"The Upanishads ... are among the noblest and most inspired books in the world; in them, the whole of the Indian wisdom is already contained; later teachers could but expand and comment on them, but in no way departed from this original treasure of wisdom." ... "The Upanishads teach the wisdom of Atma, the Supreme Self of all beings; the same divine Life which Philo of Alexandria later called the Logos, the Divine Mind, the collective spiritual consciousness of our universe. They tell us that, while each of us may seem to be a wanderer and exile, lonely, desolate in our world of shadow and of sorrow, we are in reality neither alone nor desolate, but undivided, unseparated rays of the Universal Self, the Logos. What is needed to secure our immortality—an immortality which is still conditional, until this victory is won—is the realization of our oneness with the Supreme Self. The Upanishads show how, step by step, we may mount the golden stairs; they tell us what we must leave behind; what we must gain, as we tread the small, old path; what we must achieve; with the promise that we shall in the fullness of time be initiated into the fullness of that eternal, universal Supreme Self of all beings. "The whole aim of their teachings is this: to point the path by which the personal self may win immortality and divinity, by becoming united with the Higher Self, which always possessed immortality and divinity."—Charles Johnston

>Are they the logical second step after starting with the Greeks?
Yes I'd say so, if you've already read a lot of Greek philosophy that would prepare you well for it and early Hindu philosophy and related groups are a good stepping stone to the rest of eastern philosophy.

>>12413698

You'll need to do some preparatory reading before you can understand the commentaries, they presuppose a pretty in-depth understanding of Hindu philosophy, you can get this from Hiriyanna's 'The Essentials of Hindu Philosophy', Rene Guenon's first two books (intro to hindu doctrines + Man and his Becoming) also explain like 90% of the words and concepts you'll need to understand Shankara's commentaries although you may still need to look up words on occasion. You can find free translations of all of Adi Shankara's commentaries as free pdfs here but it's something like 3,500+ pages so you may want to get hard copies or port them onto a kindle or something so you don't strain your eyes reading them on PC. I recommend starting with his 2-part commentaries on 8 of the Upanishads because these are shorter and easier to digest than his 600-900 page commentaries on the Brihadaranyaka, Chandogya, Brahma Sutras and Gita. I've read about 1/3 of his works so far, they're quite good.

>Shankara's commentaries on 8 principal Upanishads part 1
https://archive.org/details/EightUpanishadsWithSankarabhashyamSwamiGambhiranandaVol11989
>Shankara's commentaries on 8 principal Upanishads part 2
https://archive.org/details/EightUpanishadsWithSankarabhashyamSwamiGambhiranandaVol21966
>Brihadaranyaka Upanishad commentary of Shankara
https://archive.org/stream/Brihadaranyaka.Upanishad.Shankara.Bhashya.by.Swami.Madhavananda
>Chandogya Upanishad commentary of Shankara
https://archive.org/stream/Shankara.Bhashya-Chandogya.Upanishad-Ganganath.Jha.1942.English
>Brahma Sutra commentary of Adi Shankara
https://archive.org/details/BrahmaSutraSankaraBhashyaEngVMApte1960
>Bhagavad-Gita with Shankara's commentary
https://archive.org/details/Bhagavad-Gita.with.the.Commentary.of.Sri.Shankaracharya


>Right now I'm reading some selections of the Rigveda and Upanishads, and looking especially for commentaries on either, or on Vedic ontology specifically if the latter exists.
Coomaraswamy has a very interesting book called 'Perception of the Vedas' where he skillfully and convincingly argues that the earlier pre-Upanishad portions of the Vedas take for a given and demonstrate an understanding of the same doctrines of the Upanishads (which would support the Hindu understanding of them as an internally-consistent revealed text), although as I mentioned this is not the mainstream view in academia. It's free on lib-gen. I would recommend only reading this after you have a decent amount of experience reading Hindu philosophy in particular Vedanta because it's quite dense

http://libgen.io/book/index.php?md5=EA5EB71D19BB3DF22AE017638C8D5A24

>>12323783
Coomaraswamy has a good book available on lib-gen called 'Perception of the Vedas' full of dense academic essays with endless DFW-tier footnotes on how the ideas of the Upanishads are already implicitly taught and contained in the pre-Upanishad portions of the Vedas while continuously drawing parallels to the western tradition viz Plotinus, Proclus, Hermes, Philo, Dante, Pseudo-Dionysus, Meister Eckhart etc. If you already have some knowledge of eastern philosophy (without which it would be incomprehensible) It may be good to read alongside the Rig-Veda.

Also something to be aware of, some scholars dispute that even the professional translations are correct and maintain that there are so many unclear elements that it's more proper to say the Rig-Veda is undeciphered. This web-page has a link to multiple articles covering this topic

http://www.rigveda.co.uk/

Here is one article discussing the recent Jamison & Brereton translation

http://www.rigveda.co.uk/speak-for-itself.pdf

>>12286538
>Advaita is in an inferior place in the dialectic vs Christianity- heck, even relative to Aristotle, who settled it decisively when he crushed Parmenidean monism.
The opposite is actually true, Christian thinkers have almost no history of or experience with writing critiques of non-dualism aside from a faint shadow of it in Neoplatonism (which they were more influenced by than opposed to) while Vedanta has literally a multi-thousand year history of people writing elaborate critiques of every sort of argument for a separate uncaused creator God. Aristotle's thoughts on Parmenides are not applicable to Advaita which is a completely different beast that's exponentially more complex and subtle than basic Parmenidean monism, I shouldn't even have to say this. If you think Advaita is equivalent to Parmenides go read about it first before replying to this post so you don't make any basic mistakes. Entry-level criticisms like the principle of non-contradiction are not applicable because of things like the doctrines of Maya, non-origination and the two truths; which offer a uniformly consistent explanation for how God at once is one way and appears to be another and all the other ostensible paradoxes people associate with Advaita or monism.

>Where Advaita affirms the One at the expense of the many, the Christian and Jewish scriptures affirm creation- the One *and* the Many, and the goodness of the Many.
It's not at the expense of the many, the many is not bad but is just subsumed into the One, it affirms the goodness of both (everything) because what was thought to be the many is in reality really just the One and the good etc so there is only That remaining.

>Creation and differentiation doesn't violate immutability, since creation is not a change in God, but in his creatures.
This is nonsensical, before the first creation there are none of His creatures, only God. You are trying to say "well it's not violating immutability because the change occurs in something which is not God, Well before the FIRST appearance of those creatures the change cannot come from them because they didn't exist yet. After they are created change could hypothetically occur in them but the very first creation of them itself can only be caused by that which exists before them (God), but this violates immutability because before they are created when only God exists there exists none who can act to cause their creation except God; this act of FIRST creation itself by God violates immutability.

>He doesn't 'do' by committing parts of himself which he wasn't before; rather,
Okay, so here you admit that it's unfeasible that eternal parts of Himself are made into the non-eternal, I agree