>>25092400
he still didn't take the poo to the loo

No. Atman and Brahman are conceptual ideas of the deluded thought of man. It is literally the definition of maya. It has yet to be proven. He also plagiarized Mahayana Buddhist and claimed it as his own.

>>25092400
I have great reverence for most mythologies, but Indians are just repulsive to me

>>25092400
Hinpoo will and always be poo

>>25092400

Yes, end of story, period.

Moreover, some of his criticisms were so potent that at least one major Buddhist philosopher would later recycle his arguments themselves.

>>25093841
> He also plagiarized Mahayana Buddhist and claimed it as his own.
False, all his doctrines come from the Upanishads.

>>25092400
What's his little stick for

>>25093951

Advaitin monks in the tradition of Adi Shankaracharya carry a staff called a daṇḍa, specifically an ekadaṇḍa or single staff. It primarily symbolizes renunciation, self discipline, and dedication to the realization of Brahman in Advaita Vedānta. The staff represents commitment to spiritual knowledge and control of body, speech, and mind, while also serving practical purposes such as support while walking and as a visible sign of monastic life. The small bundle sometimes attached near the top is usually a piece of saffron cloth that may wrap minimal personal or sacred items, reflecting the monk’s life of simplicity and renunciation.

>>25093951
that's the buddha anon

>>25092446
fpbp
/thread
OP BTFO

File: 1652236369549.jpg (30.3 KB)

30.3 KB JPG

>>25092400
>Did he really BTFO Buddhism out of India with facts and logic?

Let's see what Tibetan historical sources say about the matter:

>In all the eastern and southern regions the tÏrthikas (non-Buddhists) prospered and the Buddhists were going down . . . there lived two brothers who were the acaryas of the tÏrthikas. One of them was called Dattatrai (Dattetreya). He was specially in favour of samadhi. The second was Śaṅkarācārya, who propitiated Mahadeva. He chanted spells on a jar placed behind a curtain. From within the jar emerged Mahadeva up to his neck and taught him the art of debate. In Bhamgala he entered into debates. The elders among the bhikshus said, ‘It is difficult to defeat him. So acarya Dharmapala or CandragomÏ or CandrakÏrti should be invited to contest in debate.’ The younger panditas did not listen to this and said, ‘The prestige of the local panditas will go down if a debater is brought from somewhere else. We are more skilled than they are.’ Inflated with vanity, they entered into debate with Śaṅkarācārya. In this the Buddhists were defeated and, as a result, everything belonging to the twenty-five centres of the Doctrine was lost to the tÏrthikas and the centres were deserted. About five hundred upasakas (buddhist monks) had to enter the path of the tÏrthikas.

- Taranatha, “dpal dus kyi 'khor lo'i chos bskor gyi byung khungs nyer mkho” (History of Buddhism in India)

>>25092400
Buddha was a bodhisattva, born to attain complete realization and support dhamma in the world.
Shankara, to the capacity he is known through his work to us, is only a glorified theologician and no more. Buddha didn't care for philosophy, he was a real jñāni. No philosopher compares to a tathāgata. It is not possible. These comparisons are for the profoundly foolish. Learn what the Buddhas are, Gotama was a teacher of men and gods. Even a larper is more noble than you heretics.

Buddham Saranam Gacchami
Buddham Saranam Gacchami
Buddham Saranam Gacchami
Dhammam Saranam Gacchami

>>25092400
No, all his arguments fall into circular reasoning, you have to already accept advaita's dogmas to make his "refutations" work, his análisis of pratikiasamutpada is laughably bad and his notion of arman Is just the buddhist svasamvedana recicled for vedic practicioners

>>25093995
Here's another historical tibetan source:
>Sri Shankaracharya's last and final challenge was a debate with the then
leader of the Tibetan Buddhists, one Lämä guru. At that time all the sects
of Buddhism revered the Lämä as their Jagadguru (world leader and
preceptor). Before the debate began it was agreed by both parties that
the loser of the debate would have to relinquish his life by plunging himself
into a large vat of boiling oil. The debate is poignantly described in the
book Sabdartha Manjari, written by the famous monist scholar, the
venerable Siromani: ‘Sri Shankaracharya, after conceding defeat in a scriptural debate
with the Buddhist Jagadguru, gave up his life by plunging into a
vat of boiling oil, as per the terms of debate. In this manner, in
the year 818 AD the world lost a beacon of light upon the
departure of Sri Shankaracharya.’
The ‘Shankara Vat’, as it is known, is preserved in Tibet till today. The
Buddhist monks honour it to commemorate their spiritual leaders’ grand victory. It seems that history refuses to sweep the noble sacrifice of
Sri Shankaracharya into oblivion

>>25092400
Reminder that Self and no-Self is not actually different. There is a Self and it's no-Self, it's not contradictory because the Self isn't an object of knowledge. Saying there is a Self but it's Absolute, undivided, and not objective is not different from saying "there is no Self" because "there is" is an objective statement, and the Self isn't objective. People get confused because they think affirming a negative is somehow contradictory, if that were the case we couldn't meaningfully communicate nor describe reality. If I say "there is no elephant in this room", I'm affirming a negative, superficially it is contradictory, how could something which doesn't exist be? But if I were to negate the negative it would mean there IS an elephant in the room. Basically, there is no such thing as a negative in it of itself, do absences exist? Well they can, and they also cannot. An absence can be, or it cannot be, there is no water in the cup, or the absence of water in the cup is not.

>>25092400
he was a step backwards. Like an astrology chick in the modern world

>>25094989
>Here's another historical tibetan source:

Incorrect, that's almost certainly fabricated quote. For starters, the Śabdārthasāramañjarī is a text about grammer and semantic meaning and it's not about history of Vedanta and it doesn't mention Shankara.

Secondly, Vajrayana was only first entering Tibet around the time Shankara died and so if that dating is correct then its impossible that there could have already been a community of Tibetan Buddhists to debate with him. Shankara is said to have died around 750 AD and the entry of Vajrayana into Tibet is said to have happened only a few years before when Padmasambhava first traveled there around 747-749 and it took him many years of work before an actual community of Tibetan Buddhists emerged.

>>25095364
Exactly, tibetans aré not good with history, both accounts of shankara aré false, most Indian accounts of shankara aré false, tibetan documents even More, you can't choose to believe the one that made him look good just because you like advaita

>>25095287
>because the Self isn't an object of knowledge.
Sure, but then you can't establish there's someone or something "knowing" and you pretty much are practicing buddhadharma, which confirms Shankara as a crypto-buddhist guru

>>25095489
>Sure, but then you can't establish there's someone or something "knowing
In Advaita Vedānta, the Self (Ātman) is empirically self-established (svāsiddha) in that it is directly and immediately known in every conscious moment, without requiring inference or another observer.

Consciousness /=/ true atman

awareness /=/ true atman

sentience /=/ true atman

this alone makes the atman useless
till you reach nirvana the atman is attaboy

>>25095489
You are correct, but this understanding is not particular to buddhism. Even in the upanishads it's written that the Self is not an object of knowledge or perception. People get confused in the semantics without thinking what this actually implies, when you think about it it's really no different from saying "there is no Self", because "there is" is a statement of objectivity. The intuitive realization is not any different, the sense of "I" or "me" dissapears. Saying there is no Self is no different than saying there is an absolute, undivided, unborn, unchanging Self. Because anything that is relative, divided, which arises and passes, which changes, is objective. They are both correct, there is a Self, and it's no-Self; there is no Self, and that's the Self. It's not contradictory because it's only in respect to each other, in the same way 2+2=5 is true only insofar as it's false, and it's falseness is true. Basically, there are no negations in it of themselves. If I ask you whether the water in a bottle of water exists or not, yes, it exists. If I then ask you whether the absence of water in a bottle absent of water exists or not, yes, it exists. But how could something which is absent be present? Because non-things unlike things do not abide by the law of identity. It's only things which are themselves, or at least they appear to be. I would say the reason for saying there is a Self as opposed to there isn't is more of a practical one for the seeker. Because there is a Self, then there is a path, there are degrees of realization, but that path culminates into the realization there was never anyone here, nor a path, but you won't reach that without engaging in the relative.

>>25095543
You can't know the act of knowing just like a knife can't cut itself or an eye see itself, you can't empirically know the knowing, because if you do that would imply that this knowing is an object of knowledge, and who or what "knows" that object? You end up in a regress to infinity, but if this knowing Is not an object of knowledge by deffinition you can't know about it

File: Acharyaabhinavagupta.jpg (592.1 KB)

592.1 KB JPG

Second grade nondualism.

File: what-is-neoplatonism.jpg (228.9 KB)

228.9 KB JPG

>>25095657
>You can't know the act of knowing
lmao
>laughing in SUPERIOR neoplatonism

File: 1651079351425.png (626.5 KB)

626.5 KB PNG

>>25095657
>You can't know the act of knowing just like a knife can't cut itself or an eye see itself, you can't empirically know the knowing, because if you do that would imply that this knowing is an object of knowledge, and who or what "knows" that object? You end up in a regress to infinity, but if this knowing Is not an object of knowledge by deffinition you can't know about it

This objection rests upon a category mistake that Advaita Vedānta explicitly rejects: it assimilates consciousness to the structure of object-directed cognition. The argument presupposes in a circular manner that to know anything is necessarily to render it an object (viṣaya) of a further act of knowing, and it then concludes that any attempt to “know knowing” must either generate an infinite regress or collapse into unknowability. Advaita denies the initial presupposition. Consciousness (cit) is not an epistemic object, nor is it an instrument or act (kriyā) requiring further illumination; it is the very condition of possibility for all objectification. Analogies such as a knife cutting itself or an eye seeing itself therefore fail by equivocation, since they model knowing as an instrumental operation rather than as immediate luminosity (prakāśa). Objects are revealed through consciousness, but consciousness is not revealed as an object; it is self-luminous (svayam-prakāśa), meaning that its manifestation does not depend upon a distinct, higher-order cognitive act. Once this distinction is maintained, the alleged regress never arises, because no secondary act of knowing is required to certify the presence of consciousness itself.

Moreover, the claim that “if consciousness is not an object, it cannot be known” rests on a false dichotomy between object-knowledge and ignorance. Advaita maintains that the Self is neither known in the manner of an object nor unknown in the manner of an absence, but is immediately evident as the non-negatable subject of all experience. Even the judgment “I do not know the Self” presupposes the self-presence of consciousness, since denial, doubt, and error themselves occur only in its light. The certainty of consciousness is thus not pramāṇa-siddha—established by perception, inference, or testimony—but anubhava-siddha, established by its ineliminable immediacy. To deny the self-established status (svasiddhatva) of consciousness would not merely undermine Advaita but would destabilize epistemology as such, since no cognition, including the objection itself, could be accounted for without tacitly presupposing the very self-luminous awareness it seeks to reject.

>>25095657
>>25096097

Finally, the denial of self-evident, self-luminous awareness does not merely generate local difficulties but precipitates a global failure of conceptual coherence, since it renders the fact of cognition itself inexplicable and reintroduces precisely the infinite regresses the objection purports to avoid. This diagnosis is not confined to Advaita Vedānta: sophisticated Buddhist epistemologists likewise acknowledge that some form of non-objectifying awareness must be granted to halt regress and ground intelligibility. Thus Śāntarakṣita, in his synthesis of Madhyamaka and Yogācāra epistemology, and Mipham Rinpoche, in his expositions of reflexive awareness, both recognize that denying an immediately evident mode of awareness collapses explanation into either vicious circularity or infinite regress. The Advaitic claim of svasiddha consciousness therefore articulates a structural requirement for any coherent theory of knowledge, rather than an idiosyncratic metaphysical postulate.

>>>/his/

>>25095840
>Second grade nondualism.
Read Sharma's chapter challenging Trika's positions in 'The Advaita Tradition in Indian Philosophy'. Trika gets very close to the truth in certain aspects but at the end of the day it isn't as consistent or well-grounded metaphysically as Advaita. The distinction is between Prakasha and Vimarsha is also ultimately arbitrary and it isn't supported by experience which presents Prakasha as being already immediately self-reflexive itself in a self-sufficient manner; Advaita correctly recognizes this but without adding some weird cope about there being some additional reflexivity that is both different and not-different at the same time.

>>25093951
you stick a sausage and then your hands wont burn when you cook it over a fire.

>>25096097
>>25096098
Consciousness is what something does, not what something is. Consciousness and awareness is no different from saying observation or perception, and observation/perception is not a thing. Furthermore, it implies a subject and an object, the consciousness/awareness/observation/perception of what, and by what? Consciousness is analogous to dancing, because dancing, like consciousness, is the action of someone. The excitation of a person from rest is dancing, the excitation of a subject from rest is consciousness. Consciousness, therefore, by definition is not the Self. Saying it's the Self would be like saying dancing itself is the dancer when it's only the expression of the dancer. The entire methodology of liberation would be incoherent without a subject. The point of the apophatic methodology is to find out what you are by chipping away at what you are not, like chipping away at rock to leave gold. And there are degrees of purification in the same way there are degrees to gold purity, although gold itself, like the subject, is always pure. This is important to note because you must ask, what is being concentrated? If what you are saying is true, it would be consciousness that is being concentrated in the methodology, until we're left with pure consciousness, but that makes no sense because consciousness is what's being rid, it's the rock. Consciousness is analogous to a perturbation of water, when it's still it's clear, when it's perturbed then you can "see" the water, it's this "seeing" that is consciousness, the unseen could not by definition be consciousness.

>>25096097
>>25096098
fucking write something yourself instead of asking chatgpt in every damn thread

>>25095657
I think you mean you can't know the knower or see the seer.

File: b70df01afc32ad37be0fbb1f4926262f.jpg (34.6 KB)

34.6 KB JPG

>>25096714
>Consciousness is what something does, not what something is.
This is just an unsubstantiated assertion that Consciousness is an action or a relation and not an entity or reality. This is a specific philosophical claim that not everyone agrees with, it's not any kind of a priori truth upon which arguments can be erected, when taken as an argument that is supposed to refute something else it becomes fallacious because it begs the question.
>Consciousness and awareness is no different from saying observation or perception, and observation/perception is not a thing.
That's incorrect, observation and perception are of a nature that is quite clearly contrary to the immediate awareness that Advaita regards as the Self. This is not special to Advaita either but is a common Hindu position also shared by Sankhya and Patanjali-Yoga. Observation and perception are of a determinate character consisting of name and form, they arise and vanish and are replaced by one another in time, they are revealed by awareness as objective contents, as 'this'.

Awareness (Brahman) is the opposite of all of this, awareness is indeterminate and partless, devoid of name and form, it is non-arising and always remains present, it is not another objective content consisting of 'this' but is the self-disclosing space-like luminous presence in which objective content appears or manifests, it is known self-evidently and effortlessly always without becoming an object consisting of 'this'. The fact that it is always present and immediately known to us self-evidently is precisely why liberation in Advaita is not the acquisition of something not already-present or a self-knowledge that is not already-known, liberation cuts through the false concepts the intellect projects (but only from the intellect's POV) over this ever-present and ever-self-disclosed Reality that obscure its nature from the mind.

>Furthermore, it implies a subject and an object
It doesn't because Advaita explicitly says that the pure awareness of the Atman is non-dual, without parts and not object-directed (non-intentional). It only would suggest that if you are selecting Advaita doctrines at random and trying to understand them without considering the other things Advaita says which clarify what it actually means.

>>25096714
>>25096998
>Consciousness, therefore, by definition is not the Self.
Not according to Advaita, they would simply say your definition is wrong. The Brahman-Atman is not reducible to the term 'Consciousness' alone but is also infinite etc, but despite having a nature that is unobjectifiable and which eludes definition Brahman is intrinsically sentient by virtue of being an infinite unconditioned Awareness. This is the Consciousness par excellence or Awareness par excellence, and any other usage of such terms such as in connection with the mental activity of individual beings is a derivative and relative usage of the term and does not truly pertain to Awareness as such. Advaita is careful to classify all such mental activity as thoughts, perceptions, etc as belonging to the manas and buddhi and their modifications like vrittis etc, they are quite explicit that none of this is consciousness per se although it can deceptively mimic the Consicousness per se when illuminated by the light of Awareness (Brahman) as Śaṅkara explains in the following passages:

>>25097003
>>25096714

>The self is called light, because it is self-effulgent (i.e. reflexive, self-luminous), for through this light, the self-effulgent Ātman, this aggregate of body and organs sits, goes out and works, as if it were sentient, as a jar placed in the sun (shines). Or as an emerald or any other gem, dropped for testing into milk etc., imparts its lustre to them, so does this luminous self, being finer than even the heart or intellect, unify and impart its lustre to the body and organs, including the intellect etc., although it is within the intellect; for these have varying degrees of fineness or grossness in a certain order, and the self is the innermost of them all.

>The intellect, being transparent and next to the self, easily catches the reflection of the intelligence of the self (like a translucent object glowing with light). Therefore even wise men happen to (mistakenly) identify themselves with it first; next comes the Manas (mind), which catches the reflection of the self through the intellect; then the organs, through contact with the Manas; and lastly the body, through the organs. Thus the self successively illumines with its own intelligence the entire aggregate of body and organs. It is therefore that all people (mistakenly) identify themselves with the body and organs and their modifications indefinitely according to their discrimination. The Lord also has said in the Gītā, 'As the one sun, O Arjuna, illumines the whole world, so the self, the owner of the field of this body, illumines the whole body' (G. XIII. 33) ; also, '(Know) the light of the sun (which illumines the entire world, to be Mine),' etc. (G. XV. 12). The Kaṭha Upaniṣad also has it, 'Eternal in the midst of transitory things, the intelligent One among all intelligent beings' (Ka. V. I3) ; also, 'It shining, everything else shines ; this universe shines through Its light' (Ka. V. I5). The Mantra also says, 'Kindled by which light, the sun shines' (Tai. B. III. XII. 9. 7).

- Śaṅkara, Bṛhadāraṇyakopaniṣadbhāṣya 4.3.7

buddhism sucks, taoism is better

>>25097005
>>25096714

>And knowledge is a sense conveyed by a root (dependent on a noun). Accordingly, Brahman becomes impermanent as well as dependent.

>Answer: No, since without implying that knowledge is separable from Brahman, it is referred to as an activity by way of courtesy. (To explain): Knowledge, which is the true nature of the Self, is inseparable from the Self, and so it is everlasting. Still, the intellect, which is the limiting adjunct (of the Self) becomes transformed into the shape of the objects while issuing out through the eyes etc. (for cognizing things). These configurations of the intellect in the shape of sound etc., remain objectively illumined by the Consciousness that is the Self, even when they are in an incipient state; and when they emerge as cognitions, they are still enlightened by that Consciousness. Hence these semblances of Consciousness, a Consciousness that is really the Self, are imagined by the non-discriminating people to be referable by the word knowledge bearing the root meaning (of the verb to know); to be attributes of the Soul Itself; and to be subject to mutation. But the Consciousness of Brahman is inherent in Brahman and is inalienable from It, just as the light of the sun is from the sun or the heat of fire is from fire. Consciousness is not dependent on any other cause (for its revelation), for it is by nature eternal (light).
...
>Brahman, though intrinsically identical with knowledge, is well known to be eternal. Thus, since this knowledge is not a form of action, it does not also bear the root meaning of the verb. Hence, too, Brahman is not the agent of cognition. And because of this, again, It cannot even be denoted by the word jñāna (knowledge). Still Brahman is indicated, but not denoted, by the word knowledge which really stands for a verisimilitude of Consciousness as referring to an attribute of the intellect; for Brahman is free from such things as class etc., which make the use of the word (knowledge) possible. Similarly, Brahman is not denoted even by the word satya (truth), since Brahman is by nature devoid of all distinctions. In this way, the word satya, which means external reality in general, can indirectly refer to Brahman (in such expressions) as Brahman is truth', but it cannot denote It. Thus the words truth etc., occurring in mutual proximity, and restricting and being restricted in turns by each other, distinguish Brahman from other objects denoted by the words, truth etc., and thus become fit for defining It as well.

- Śaṅkara, Taittirīyopaniṣadbhāṣya 2.1.1

>>25096714
>>25097009

As you can see from the above passages, (1) Awareness is different from the the entire aggregate of intellect-body, (2) the intellect-body aggregate is insentient and is illuminated by the sentient intelligence (awareness) of the Self and thereby enabled to function, 3) what people commonly think of as consciousness in connection with mental and physical acts/sensations only "stands for a verisimilitude of Consciousness" and is not Consciousness itself.

>The entire methodology of liberation would be incoherent without a subject.
The Self is already eternally free and liberated without beginning or end, subjectivity inheres not in the Self but only in the jiva's buddhi when it is illuminated and glows with a 'verisimilitude of Consciousness' (Śaṅkara), The Self is partless non-dual Awareness that is beyond the subject-object divide. It pervades experience from the side of the intellect (and is therefore easily confused with the intellect and the empirical subject) and not from the side of the object because only the intellect and not the objects are translucent to and therefore capable of reflecting It's light. The jiva is what is bounds, what acts and is what is freed, but as Śaṅkara notes in Brahmasūtrabhāṣya 2.3.50 all the jivas are only like so many reflections of the sun (the Self) in water, and when one reflection stops being reflected there is no change induced by that in the sun, the reflection realizes that its indwelling Self is the Sun which is already-free and was never bound to begin with.

>>25096714
>>25097013

>The point of the apophatic methodology is to find out what you are by chipping away at what you are not, like chipping away at rock to leave gold.
I don't think that you've thought very carefully about what 'via negativa' actually means in a Vedantic context. It would be logically impossible for apophatic methodology to lead to the correct and enlightened knowledge of our own Self if this Self were not already-known and self-evident and simply misrepresented or filtered through a layer of mind-imposed conceptual delusions which are then negated or sublated by the apophatic methodology, because if the Self were not already-known in such a manner then no amount of via-negativa can produce self-knowledge if its currently-absent just like no amount of subtracting numbers from zero can generate a positive sum. Self-knowledge does not randomly arise ex-nihilio when you subtract from zero enough times.

>And there are degrees of purification in the same way there are degrees to gold purity, although gold itself, like the subject, is always pure. This is important to note because you must ask, what is being concentrated? If what you are saying is true, it would be consciousness that is being concentrated in the methodology, until we're left with pure consciousness, but that makes no sense because consciousness is what's being rid, it's the rock.
Consciousness cannot be gotten rid of because it's our Self and any sort of experience presupposes consciousness, they very notion of 'getting rid' of it is nonsensical because it posits a kind of unknowable unconcious-experience which is absurd and cannot even be conceived of since we only know experience through consciousness and not otherwise. Vedanta-texts teach discrimination (Viveka) between Self and non-self using various helpful analogies and conceptual maps like the munja grass, the 5 sheathes, the 3 trikayas etc, all of these are designed to help discriminate between the self-luminous Self of awareness vs the insentient aggregate of intellect, mind, body, organs etc. The Upanishads teach us about the actual nature of the Self but clarify that it eludes conceptual objectification, and then the via negativa methods works principally by sublating the false concepts that had been mis-representing the Self that had already previously been known self-evidently as one's own Awareness for all of one's entire existence even in a state of ignorance, the same awareness that is already self-evidently known right now in this very moment. The cataphatic descriptions in the Upanishads and Vedantic tradition properly ground and situate the via negative by informing us about what the nature is of the ultimate reality that the via negative is aimed at, and the accompanying via negativa restricts this cataphaic description from being mistakenly taking as objectifying Brahman conceptually.

File: Adi_shankara.jpg (251.8 KB)

251.8 KB JPG

>>25097013
>the reflection realizes that its indwelling Self is the Sun which is already-free and was never bound to begin with.

A man of realisation, after his death, has no change of condition—something different from what he was in life, but he is only not connected with another body. This is what is meant by his becoming 'merged in Brahman'; for if liberation was a change of condition, it would contradict the unity of the Self that all the Upaniṣads seek to teach. And liberation would be the effect of work, not of knowledge-which nobody would desire. Further, it would become transitory, for nothing that has been produced by an action is seen to be eternal, but liberation is admitted to be eternal, as the Mantra says, 'This is the eternal glory (of a knower of Brahman),' etc. (IV. iv. 23). Moreover, nothing but the inherent nature of a thing can be regarded as eternal. If liberation is the nature of the self, like the heat of fire, it cannot be said to be a consequence of human activity.
...

Nor can liberation be a mere negative something—the cessation of bondage, like the breaking of fetters, for the Supreme Self is supposed to be the only entity that exists. As the Śruti says, 'One only without a second ' (Ch. VI. ii. x.). And there is no other (real) entity that is bound, whose freedom from bondage, as from fetters, would be liberation, for we have spoken at length of the absence of any other (real) entity but the Supreme Self. Therefore, as we have also said, the cessation of ignorance alone is commonly called liberation, like the disappearance of the snake, for instance, from the rope when the erroneous notion about its existence has been dispelled.

Those who hold that in liberation a new knowledge and bliss are manifested, should explain what they mean by manifestation. If it means ordinary perception or the cognition of objects, they should state whether the knowledge or bliss that is manifested is existent or non-existent. If it is existent, it is the very self of that liberated man to whom it is manifested; hence, there being possibly no bar to the perception, it will always be manifest, and for this reason it is meaningless to specify its being manifest to the liberated man. If, however, it is manifest only at certain times, then because of the obstacles to its perception, it is different from the self, and therefore there arises the question of its manifestation through some other means; hence there will be the necessity' of these means also.

>>25097113
But if the knowledge and bliss in question have the same support as the perception, then, there being no possibility of obstacles, they will either be always manifest or always hidden; there is no warrant for conceiving an intermediate stage between the two. Now attributes that have the same support, and are a part and parcel of the same substance, cannot have the relation of subject and object to one another. Besides, the. entity that is subject to transmigration before the manifestation of knowledge and bliss, and liberated after it, must be different from the Supreme Self, the eternally manifest Knowledge Absolute, for the two are totally different from each other, like heat and cold; and if differences are admitted in the Supreme Self, the Vedic position will be abandoned.

Objection: If liberation makes no difference from the present state, it is unreasonable to make a particular effort for it, and the scriptures too become useless.

Reply: No, for both are necessary to remove the delusion created by ignorance. Really there is no such distinction as liberation and bondage in the self, for it is eternally the same; but the ignorance regarding it is removed by the knowledge arising from the teachings of the scriptures, and prior to the receiving of these teachings, the effort to attain liberation is perfectly reasonable.

Objection: There will be some difference in the self that is under ignorance, due to the cessation or continuance of that ignorance.

Reply: No; we have already (pg. 477) said that it is: admitted to be the creation of ignorance, like a rope, a desert, a mother-of-pearl and the sky appearing as a snake, water, silver, and blue respectively!

Objection: But there will be some difference in the self due to its being or not being the cause of ignorance, as in the case of man affected with the eye-disease called Timira or free from it.

Reply: No, for the Śruti denies that the Ātman by itself is the cause of ignorance, as in the passage, 'lt thinks, as it were, and shakes, as it were' (IV.iii. 7); and the error we call ignorance is due to a combination of diverse activities. Another reason is that ignorance is an object 'witnessed' by the self. He who visualises the error of ignorance as something distinct from his own self, like a jar etc., is not himself under that error.

Objection: Surely he is under that error, for one feels that one sometimes has the notion, 'I do not know, I am confused.'

>>25097114
Reply: No, for that too is distinctly perceived. He who distinctly perceives a thing cannot surely be said to be mistaken about it; it is self-contradictory to say that he perceives it distinctly, and at the same time, that he is mistaken about it. You say that a person feels, 'I do not know, I am confused': thereby you admit that he visualises his ignorance and confusion, in other words, that these become the objects of his experience. So how can the ignorance and confusion, which are objects, be at the same time a description of the subject, the perceiver? If, on the other hand, they are a description of the subject, how can they be objects and be perceived by the subject? An object is perceived by an act of the subject. The object is one thing, and the subject another; it cannot be perceived (as an object) by itself. Tell me how under such circumstances the ignorance and confusion can be a description of the subject. Moreover, a person who sees ignorance as something distinct—perceives it as an object of his own cognition—does not regard it as an attribute of the perceiver, as is the case with thinness, colour, and so forth in the body (Similarly the effects of ignorance also are not attributes of the self).

Objection: But everybody perceives pleasure, pain, desire, effort, etc. (as belonging to himself).

Reply: Even then the man who perceives them is admittedly different from them.

>>25097116
Objection: Well, we have referred to the person—who says, 'l do not know what you say, I am confused.' What do you say to that? ,

Reply: Let him regard himself as ignorant and confused; we, however, accept one who sees like this as knowing and possessed of a clear perception. For instance, Vyāsa has said that the owner of the field (the self) reveals the entire field (body and mind), including desire. And there are hundreds of texts like the following: '(He truly sees who) sees the Supreme Lord living the same in all beings—the immortal Principle in the midst of things perishable' (G. XIII. 27). Therefore the Ātman by itself has no difference due to bondage or liberation, knowledge or ignorance, for it is admitted to be always the same and homogeneous by nature.

Those, however, who, considering the reality of the self to be different, reduce the scriptures dealing with bondage and liberation to mere plausible statements, would dare to find the foot prints of birds in the sky, to pull it with their clenched hands, or to cover it as with a skin. But we can do no such thing. We hold that it is the definite conclusion of all the Upaniṣads that we are nothing but the Ātman, the Brahman that is always the same, homogeneous, one without a second, unchanging, birthless, undecaying, immortal, deathless and free from fear. Therefore the statement, 'He is merged in Brahman' (this text), is but a figurative one, meaning the cessation, as a result of knowledge, of the continuous chain of bodies for one who has held an opposite view.

- Śaṅkara, Bṛhadāraṇyakopaniṣadbhāṣya 4.4.6

>>25097017
You can think something is present when it's actually absent, that's what an illusion is. The The nature of Self can only be understood through it's complete absence, it's inherent nature is that it's unknowable, the ignorance lies in thinking it's knowable. The only sense it's known is in the same sense I know there is no elephant in my room, the elephant doesn't exist obviously, nevertheless I know it's not in my room. Likewise, you finally understand the nature of Self when you realize there was no Self in the objective world, in other words, that it can't be known. That's the only sense it's immediately self-evident, that in your moment to moment experience there is no more sense of a contracted I or me which is the desire to project a Self where it can't exist.
>they very notion of 'getting rid' of it is nonsensical because it posits a kind of unknowable unconcious-experience
This is literally possible, it's called nirodha samapatti. There's an absence of perception and feeling in respect to the time spent absorbed in it, in other words, you're unconcious.

Consciousness implies a subject which is conscious, and the subject is prior to conscious experience. That's why when you take jhana to it's zenith you don't have pure consciousness, you have unconsciousness, and pure subjectivity, ie no time, no space, no objects, nothing.

>>25097420
To add on to that, there are degrees to Self-realization though, because even though no object is ultimately the Self, there are states of being that are "more" you. A level of reality which, while ultimately contingent, is independent in respect to the lower levels of reality, and thus closer to the truth yet not it, in the same way 2+2=5 is closer to the truth than 2+2=10, yet still not "it". I say this because this is how we can even comprehend the notion of a Self, because there are degrees to reality, and that implies a reference point from which we know things are more or less that point of reference.

>>25096109
Based. Moder Hindus (hindoodoos) dont know that REAL Brahminic knoledge is a product of pork and beef based sausage consumption.

>>25097420
>You can think something is present when it's actually absent, that's what an illusion is. The The nature of Self can only be understood through it's complete absence
The Self is never absent but is the necessary light that reveals each and every act of directed cognition and sensation, the immediate non-conceptual awareness that we have of ourselves in any moment is nothing but the automatic and effortless self-disclosure of the Self and without this we would be blind and lack any sensation or experience, "the vision that is identical with the light of the self is never lost" - Śaṅkara, BrUp 4.3.32

>it's inherent nature is that it's unknowable, the ignorance lies in thinking it's knowable. The only sense it's known is in the same sense I know there is no elephant in my room,
This is laughable nonsense and it isn't taught by Advaita, according to them the Self is only unknowable conceptually and perceptually using the inner organ, the antaḥkaraṇa, but the Self is always known by us directly and non-conceptually through the automatic self-disclosure that occurs in awareness, awareness is ultimately nothing but this simple self-disclosing presence, a technical term that Śaṅkara uses for this is that the Self is nitya-upalabdha-svarūpa—“of the nature of constant apprehension". The ignorance lies not in "thinking that the Self is knowable" but Advaita is quite explicit that ignorance in relation to the Self specifically consists of the mutual superimposition of the Self and non-Self and their natures onto each other, *not* in thinking that the Self is knowable. The whole point of the Upanishads is Self-knowledge and this is what all their discourses are structured around. The elephant example fails because it concerns an object and the Self is the ever-present subject or the transcendent non-dual subject that is abiding beyond or behind the empirical subject residing in the intellect.

>Likewise, you finally understand the nature of Self when you realize there was no Self in the objective world, in other words, that it can't be known.
Every act of knowing an object already presupposes knowledge of our own self-disclosing awareness and cannot occur without it, the Self is not known 'as' the object, but the immediate non-mediate direct non-conceptual knowledge of the Self occurs simultaneously with the knowledge of the object and permeates it as it were, ergo knowledge of objects is not even possible without the simultaneous knowledge of the Self also occurring.

>>25097420
Moreover, the memory argument for reflexive awareness demonstrates that no knowledge of objects is actually possible without simultaneous self-luminous knowledge of our own awareness occurring simultaneously:

1) To remember an object, you must have actually known it previously.
2) Memory does not fabricate the prior act; it preserves what was already present in consciousness.
3) For memory to succeed, the original act of knowing must have been directly and self-evidently accessible to us in some way at the time it occurred.
4) If awareness were not immediately self-manifesting, the revealing awareness that revealed the initial perception in the remembered event would require another act for it to be manifested and made accessible, ad infinitum in a vicious regress.
5) Therefore, every experience is accompanied by an immediate, non-objectifying reflexive awareness that reveals the objects of that experience while also making its own presence as such known.

According to Advaita this immediate non-objectifying reflexive awareness that is known self-evidently always in every experience is the Self. Some later schools of Buddhism regard this awareness as being something like Dharmakaya or empty Buddha-nature and not a Self but they agree with the Advaitins that experience requires this immediate self-luminous awareness and is incoherent without it. If you are denying that we have self-evident knowledge of our own self-luminous awareness in every moment then your understanding of awareness becomes incoherent and collapses under the resulting vicious regress.

>>25097420
>>they very notion of 'getting rid' of it is nonsensical because it posits a kind of unknowable unconcious-experience
>This is literally possible, it's called nirodha samapatti. There's an absence of perception and feeling in respect to the time spent absorbed in it, in other words, you're unconcious.
This is completely wrong, Buddhism denies that nirodha samapatti is actually experienced and they say its only known before or after it occurs through means like inference but they say its never experienced or perceived directly while its ongoing and if it were there then Buddhism says it would no longer consist of a purported absence of consciousness. So, for you to cite that as an example of how there can be an experience of an absence of consciousness just shows that you don't know what you are talking about. You seem to be arguing for some weird heterodox Ken Wheeler dilettante pseudo-buddhist (mis)interpretation of Advaita, but even your knowledge of Buddhism is wrong too.

Moreoever, Advaita simply holds that Buddhism's analysis is faulty here and all that is occurring in such a state is the mind ceasing to function temporarily while Consciousness remains without any objects to illumine. Nirodha Samapatti simply correponds to what Advaita terms as Prajna, equivalent to swoon-states and dreamless sleep. Prajna is merely a temporary state (like Vaisvanara = waking and Taijasa = dream) that comes and goes while the fourth, Turiya, that is the Paramatman of Awareness, remains as the constant background that permeates all the 3 states invariably. Turiya is the stage upon which Vaisvanara, Taijasa and Prajna enter and leave, Nirodha Samapatti is just Prajna entering this stage of Turiya before its replaced by another state.

>and the subject is prior to conscious experience.
A subject that is an empty insentient placeholder would be fundamentally incapable of participating in knowledge relations if it were not either itself intrinsically consciousness and self-aware or a mode-of-being or mode-of-appearance of consciousness. An inert unaware “subject” could not know, be aware, or recognize objects, absence of intrinsic awareness would preclude memory, recognition, or even the intelligibility of presence and absence, the very notion of a placeholder unconscious subject is completely nonsensical and absurd on its face.
>That's why when you take jhana to it's zenith you don't have pure consciousness, you have unconsciousness, and pure subjectivity, ie no time, no space, no objects, nothing.
"pure subjectivity and unconsciousness" as both characterizing the same thing is a contradiction in terms which violates the law of non-contradiction, like saying something is both dry and a pure liquid. Subjectivity only has meaning in relation to consciousness. If something is devoid of consciousness and awareness then it cannot be said to be a subject in any meaningful sense.

Is that referring to the poems of the poet hanshan.

My grandma is a buddhist and I'm an advaitin but we still love each other

>>25097876
Knowing only before or after and there being a gap in experience, like you just removed frames from a film, is what is implied by the cessation of perception and feeling in respect to time. You're in it for however long, and there is no perception and feeling, and therefore no sense of time or space. To even say there's consciousness at that point wouldn't make sense because what kind of consciousness is it if you aren't even aware? Without an object to be conscious of, there is no consciousness, and without consciousness there are no objects, which is exactly what happens in nirodha. You're treating consciousness as the substrate when it's not, consciousness implies someone who is conscious, this someone can also not be conscious which is exactly why nirodha is even possible, if consciousness were permanent it would be impossible because there would be no one prior who could cease it's own awareness. What there is is the subject, because the subject is always prior to whatever it is conscious of. The fact that there is nothing in nirodha should clue you in on the nature of what the subject is. The way you know by means of inference instead of directly as an object of knowledge is the same way you know the Self, not directly, but in it's absence. When you go up the levels of being, each subsequent level is independent of the level proceeding it, yet conditioned to the level antecedent to it. What's antecedent is the ground of what's proceeding, that "ground" is what we call the Self, the subject, the absolute. The ground antecedent to all, the ultimate absolute subjective reality, cannot be phenomenal or objective in anyway, because if it were then it wouldn't be the ultimate ground. There are not subsequent levels of "more" consciousness, in fact you are less conscious because each subsequent level there are less objects to be aware of.

>>25092446
There is no loo

There is only poo

Buddha could not graap this

>>25098640
>>25097876

Also, I am aware that nirodha is a lack of experience, I just misread what you were getting at there. You wrote it's impossible to rid consciousness, which is what I denied, because it is possible. Consciousness is not something permanent to the subject, it can also be unconscious, in fact, consciousness is an illusion. There is no experience in the first place. So the subject really is the one who is "appearing" as consciousness, like how pic related appears crooked. So if the straight lines were the "appearer", "appearing" is what it "does", it appears as the appearance of crooked lines. Likewise, the subject is the "appearer", "appearing" is what it "does", it appears as consciousnness even though consciousness doesn't ultimately exist. Because it doesn't ultimately exist, that's why nirodha is possible, because consciousness is not permanent, and therefore not really real. It's not anymore real than waves are, when water is disturbed, there are waves and the water is unclear; when the subject is disturbed, there is space, time, motion, consciousness, but that is nothing other than the subject itself, like how a wave of water is ultimately just water.

File: crookedlineillusion.jpg (160.3 KB)

160.3 KB JPG

>>25098747
forgot pic related

>>25098640
>like you just removed frames from a film, is what is implied by the cessation of perception and feeling in respect to time. You're in it for however long, and there is no perception and feeling, and therefore no sense of time or space. To even say there's consciousness at that point wouldn't make sense because what kind of consciousness is it if you aren't even aware?
It makes perfect sense so long as you are talking about non-dual self-luminous consciousness which simply remains present as self-knowing or self-disclosing awareness even in the absence of any objects to illumine. As already explained, this is absence of objectivity and perceptions is simply the Prajna state which still occurs 'within' the Turiya-awareness and is pervaded and revealed by the Turiya-awareness.
>Without an object to be conscious of, there is no consciousness, and without consciousness there are no objects, which is exactly what happens in nirodha.
Incorrect, the non-dual Consciousness of Brahman is unconditioned and depends on absolutely nothing much less the presence of objects, whether the light of Consciousness happens to fall upon objects or not is irrelevant to Consciousness and induces no change in it, like how whether the sunlight emerging from the sun illuminates distant objects or not is irrelevant to the sun and induces no change in the sun. The claim that there is no consciousness is nirodha is not even something that can be directly experienced or proven since this would involve consciousness actually being present which falsifies the premise, it can only be inferred on highly questionable grounds, which Advaita rejects as faulty.

>You're treating consciousness as the substrate when it's not
It is a not a conditioned substrate in which attributes inhere, it is identical with the supreme non-dual Absolute Brahman Itself as the supreme Consciousness par excellence, Advaita says this supreme awareness is the 'substratum' (adhiṣṭhāna) of the appearance of all samsara.
>consciousness implies someone who is conscious
Only in the everyday conventional usage associated with living organisms, not the Supreme Consciousness of Brahman that the Upanishads and Advaita are talking about. Simply saying "we have to be constrained by the every-day mundane usage of terms and any other usage is invalid" is just a question-begging fallacy and is not a logically-valid argument. Advaita specifically rejects as invalid and as superceded by Shruti the mundane every-day view of consciousness assumed by uneducated people.

>>25098640
>this someone can also not be conscious which is exactly why nirodha is even possible, if consciousness were permanent it would be impossible because there would be no one prior who could cease it's own awareness.
Because nirodha simply consists of all perception and feeling belonging to the mind/intellect becoming inactive/withdrawn while unconditioned Awareness remains as an eternal and simple luminous presence before, during and after this absence of perception then indeed nirdoha is still possible even when consciousness is permanent.
>What there is is the subject, because the subject is always prior to whatever it is conscious of.
A subject that is not already itself conscious prior to any relation would be fundamentally incapable of knowing anything, because an insentient unconscious thing does not magically become conscious when another unconscious thing (the object) comes into a relation with it, from the perspective of a subject that lacks intrinsic awareness there is no difference between the presence and absence of objects, so the mere addition of an object cannot generate consciousness for the subject if the subject isn't already intrinsically conscious. Your understanding of mind and consciousness seems to basically the same as a reductionist materialist where you think consciousness magically emerges from some nonsensical "god of the gaps" unexplained combination between two unconscious things, like the idea that if you add enough unconscious matter together in a special combination then consciousness eventually magically emerges.
>The fact that there is nothing in nirodha should clue you in on the nature of what the subject is.
How would you even know if you are incapable of experiencing it firsthand? You have literally zero grounds to take presumed claims about what happens in nirodha as evidence of anything because you yourself don't admit the presence of any perception or anything else that would allow you to determine "this is what it is like".

>>25098640
>The way you know by means of inference instead of directly as an object of knowledge is the same way you know the Self, not directly, but in it's absence.
Incorrect, Advaita specifically denies that the Self is known through inference (as opposed to luminous self-disclosure) and they actually refute that claim through formal arguments such as the following:

Argument 1) Inference presupposes prior awareness of the subject
a) inference requires pakṣa (subject), liṅga (sign), a known vyāpti (invariable concomitance)
b) The self is the knower or revealer of the act of inference itself.
c) to infer the revealing self, the knower would thus have to already have to be present as known because of (b)
d) If X is required to perform inference, X cannot be the conclusion of that inference, thus the self cannot be known by inference

Argument 2) No possible inferential mark
a) Inference requires a distinct, observable sign that is different from the inferred entity, yet is pervasively connected with it.
b) cognition, agency, memory, and unity of experience are all modes of mind which are only known because awareness is present
c) The alleged signs such as those above therefore already presupposes what it is meant to prove.
d) No independent liṅga or inferential mark remains, and if a sign depends on the presence of X to be known, it cannot establish X, because the reason depends on the probandum for its own cognition, the inference is epistemically circular and therefore invalid

>The ground antecedent to all, the ultimate absolute subjective reality, cannot be phenomenal or objective in anyway, because if it were then it wouldn't be the ultimate ground.
Nothing I have said has suggested or agreed with the notion that the ultimate ground is phenomenal or objective in any way. Simply stating that this ultimate ground of unconditioned supreme Consciousness is automatically self-knowing through a kind of automatic self-disclosure that is non-different from itself (awareness is inherently self-knowing) is not turning it into a phenomena or an object in any way.

What is the point of aligning yourself with non-dualism or Advaita in a kind of vague unspecified rhetorical way while taking a bunch of nonsensical positions that are explicitly rejected and criticized as illogical or misunderstandings by classical Advaita? Like if you are going to reject 95% of what they say and argue for the exact opposite, what is even the point of identifying yourself with it in a superficial way as you have been doing? I don't get it.

>>25098747
>So the subject really is the one who is "appearing" as consciousness, like how pic related appears crooked.
If the subject is not itself intrinsically aware/conscious, and is not itself acted upon by something else which is itself aware/conscious, then the subject is incapable of appearing as conscious, since that appearance as conscious like all appearances presupposes the presence of an awareness of consciousness which is real, unreal appearances cannot reveal their own manifestation without any real awareness being involved since unreal things are not self-aware.

>>25098975
>a) inference requires pakṣa (subject), liṅga (sign), a known vyāpti (invariable concomitance)
>b) The self is the knower or revealer of the act of inference itself.
>c) to infer the revealing self, the knower would thus have to already have to be present as known because of (b)

Yet what precisely is meant by “object” when Advaita Vedānta insists that consciousness can never become an object of consciousness? Obviously it can become an object of thought. Is the claim supposed to mean that although I can emptily (non-intuitively) intend consciousness in thinking about it, it is never intuitively given, i.e. experienced? This would go too far, since for Advaita, consciousness is something immediately given – it is just not given as an object. An object in the intended sense is, I would suggest, something I can bring “before me” (as standing opposed to me) and direct my gaze at – which involves a difference between gaze/consciousness and what is gazed at (this also includes the “immanent” experiential contents which, for Advaita, are also possible objects of consciousness). Objects of consciousness “are distinct from cognition of it [sic], they can vary in their relationship with cognition, and can be grasped by it through the standard epistemic instruments (pramāṇas)”.

Consciousness, in contrast, is never something that stands before my gaze, but always the very gaze itself. It is only revealed in the light it itself is, and is never something externally illuminated by this light, so to speak. “The sun does not need any other light for its illumination; Knowledge does not require any other knowledge than its own knowledge for its illumination” (Śaṅkara 1992, I.15.41; cf. ibid., I.17.40). This “it is only revealed in the light it itself is” is what the Advaitins call the self-luminosity (svaprakāśatā) of consciousness. By insisting that consciousness is never an object of consciousness, they by no means mean that we are not conscious of it; on the contrary, it is, in their view, the most evident of all things, the primally given: “Though it cannot be made an object of knowledge, the Self is still felt very directly. So it must be self-revealing” (Vidyāraṇya 1967, III.28).

We are immediately aware of being conscious. As stated above: No one (not blinded by some philosophical dogma) would find the question of whether (s)he is certain that (s)he is not an unconscious automaton to not be utterly ridiculous: that my consciousness at this very moment is taking place is absolutely indubitable. And this indubitable evidence is not based on some inference; rather we immediately experience our own being-conscious. From what should I infer the taking place of my consciousness? It goes without saying that I do not infer from my behaviour I observe that I am obviously a conscious being (apart from the absurdity of this claim, this would hardly yield the mentioned indubitability).

>>25099015

Perhaps one could hold that I infer from the objects of consciousness that I am conscious of them. Yet when I am, say, aware of a tree, no inferential path leads from the fact that over there stands a tree to the fact that I am conscious of it. I could only “infer” this from the fact that the tree is given to me – yet this is actually no longer an inference, since the givenness-to-me is my very consciousness of it, i.e. precisely what is supposed to be inferred. Thus, what tells me that I am conscious is not what I am conscious of, but rather nothing but my consciousness itself – consciousness involves its own revealedness.

That we know of our consciousness on the basis of the objects we are conscious of is indeed the claim of Dretske’s “displaced perception” theory of introspection: Given the representationalist thesis that all that is given in experience are the represented objects and their properties and never experience itself, he claims that our knowledge of our own experiences is not based on an immediate awareness of them, but is rather an “indirect fact-awareness” based on the awareness of the experienced object. This is a case of what he calls “displaced perception”, just as I “see” that the tank is empty by looking at the gauge on the dashboard. “If you ‘see’ k as blue and infer from this ‘fact’ – the ‘fact’ that k is blue – that you are representing k as blue, you cannot go wrong". Yet, it has to be countered, from this fact – the fact that k is blue – it definitely does not follow that I see k as blue. This can only “follow” from the fact that k is given as blue (i.e. from my seeing it as blue). So my seeing k as blue can only be the basis of my knowledge that I see k as blue (the in itself plausible thesis that “[t]o know I am experiencing bluely […] I need only the experience of blue”, Dretske 1995, 63) if this seeing involves its own givenness – which is precisely what representationalism denies.

So my consciousness is not something I posit on the basis of some other evidence, but something I directly experience – yet not in the way I experience perceptual objects where givenness and being do not coincide and where therefore doubts about the existence of the appearing object are possible (because it is always thinkable that the appearing of the object takes place without the appearing object existing): It cannot just appear to me that I am conscious, for this very appearing would itself be consciousness. Rather, in the case of consciousness, being and givenness fall into one: presence is its own presence, without any subject-object or givenness-given difference.

- Wolfgang Fasching, Consciousness as presence and its relevance for philosophy of mind

>>25097884
No. You must BTFO her in debate.

>>>/x/

>>25099018
>from the fact that the tree is given to me
>givenness-to-me is my very consciousness
That's circular reasoning, you'rentaking for garanted that there's a subject that "receives" the experience of the object, but there's nothing in the experience that can sustain ir affirm this idea, in fact the idea Is in itself contradictoriy, since that subject need to become an object to be established in your experience, which Is contradictoriy and creates a regress, this subject, turned into an object need itself a new subject that can establish it on experience ad infinitum
That "given to me" empirically doesnt present itself on experience and its logically incoherent

>>25096097
>Consciousness (cit) is not an epistemic object, n
Then you can't knownit exist, and there can't be another form of knowing, just like an eye can't "see in a way thats not seeing" or a knife can't "cut in a way thats not cutting", you're just abstracting the different moments of conciousness of something to establish a conciousness
-in-itself, the problem Is that the nature of conciousness Is being counciouss of something as something, you never aré "just conciouss" so this idea of mere conciousness Is not self-evident logically established, if you can't prove that conciousness can't exist by itself then there's no reason to entertain this self-luminous theory, the resto of the argument justbfalls aparte because you can't properly establish that
>Even the judgment “I do not know the Self” presupposes the self-presence of consciousness
But not of a self suficient, self-luminous conciousness, just of a interdependent conciousness concious of an object(denial, doubt, and error and other mental phenomena)
>Once this distinction is maintained
AND that's the problem, you can't mantain it

>>25099015
>We are immediately aware of being conscious
That creates a separation, "we" are aware of "consciousness" so there's an act of awareness different from this conciousness

>>25098968
>like how whether the sunlight emerging from the sun illuminates distant objects or not is irrelevant to the sun and induces no change in the sun
The problem with that example Is that the sún iluminates things different than himself, while in advaita nothing exist but Brahman, so the object iluminated Must be Brahman too

File: NiceFeet.jpg (58.7 KB)

58.7 KB JPG

>>25092400
Buddha was the only Indian who poo'd in the loo and kept his ass clean.

>>25093966
You just described a hobo with religious delusions.

>>25093918
No, he really didn't.
No one can even prove his historical life, let alone attribute any of his thoughts as his own given at the time.
There's a reason why no one considers Hindu philosophy as potent-- it's too self absorbed and too self-referncing. Same reason why no one takes contemporary evangelical "philosophy" as anything except babbling and repeatedly pointing to their Bible as any sort of grounds for debate concerning the modern world.

>>25093918
>Buddhist philosopher would later recycle his arguments themselves.
It's the exact opposite, shankara recycle the notion of svasamvedana from early buddhism

>>25096098
>since it renders the fact of cognition itself inexplicable and reintroduces precisely the infinite regresses
Nope, the act of cognition Is established by the object/experience of cognition,when i see a car, i know that i'm seeing a car(if not i couldn't be able to see the car), i don't need to know that i know that i'm seiing a car, this cognition of cognition just add an innecessary second step, which then creates this problem, if i need to know "that i know" that i'm seeing a car, then i also need to know that second order knowledge, since each act of knowing also needs to be know, thus a true regress to infinity Is created, thus this the act of knowing must be self-sufficient and the knowing of cognition Is revealed as logically impossible, the experience of seeing a car Is whtanis need in order for anyone to see a car

>>25096098
>Mipham Rinpoche,
Wrong, Mipham sees luminosity as just another way of naming the emptiness of all things,the active aspectnof emptiness the opposite of how advaita present conciousness
https://youtu.be/zrnUwfd71fA?si=D5m24sZk5C_00DNy this vid explain how some people mix the two

>>25100641

Your post here attacks a false strawman, you are either completely misunderstanding the position being advocated and are deliberately mis-representing it. Wolfgang is correctly noting in that quote that:
1) consciousness cannot be known by inference from an object because inference requires premises that are distinct from what is inferred, and no such distinct premise exists in this case.
2) This is because there is no inferential route from the object’s presence to the conclusion that one is conscious of it. Any appeal to the fact that the tree is “given to me” in experience does not function as an inference at all, because that very givenness just is the consciousness in question
3) Thus, consciousness is not established by reasoning, reflection, or observation; it is immediately present. Its being conscious consists precisely in its being evidently manifest or present

Nothing he is saying is affirming anything about a distinct hidden subject or anything about subject-object duality, it's just make a factually-true statement about the way in which consciousness is immediately self-evident without requiring inference or any kind of mediated-knowledge. Your reply does not actually challenge or address any of these above points

You claim this reasoning is circular because
1) It allegedly presupposes a subject that “receives” experience, even though such a subject is not given in experience itself
2) In order to be established, this subject would have to appear as an object of experience, which would generate a contradiction and an infinite regress: the subject would need to be objectified, requiring yet another subject to apprehend it, and so on without end.

However, both of these are attacking a position the original claim about consciousness is not espousing to begin with, the charge of circularity and regress rests on your incorrect assumptions rather rather than on the actual structure of the self-luminosity claim, and are therefore not a valid rebuttal to the claim of the self-luminosity of awareness.

>>25100641
>>25101445

Wolfgang in that article is not positing a hidden subject, nor is he advocating that consciousness is known by turning itself in an object. In fact, Wolfgang is explicitly denying the latter claim when he says that consciousness is immediately known without any inferential or observational acts at all.

When he says that the fact of the tree being given to him in experience is his very consciousness of the tree, he isn't making any claim whatsoever about there being a distinct 'subject' of experience, he is simply noting that the tree being given to him in experience already involves his consciousness so it cannot be a ground for inferring one's own consciousness since its already known in the very moment of it revealing something else like e.g. a tree (and is therefore no longer an inference about an unknown thing). This is making a phenomenological statement and it isn't making any claim about what role the 'subject' plays in experience or if the subject can be identified with consciousness or not.

The regress objection only applies if self-awareness is understood as reflexive objectification, as something taking itself as its own object in a relational-act, which is precisely what is being rejected both by Wolfgang and classical Advaita. Immediate self-luminous presence is self-evident without any relational-objectification so there is no regress since this self-evident knowledge is identical with awareness and not an additional action, function or relation, and moreover this has to be admitted as being necessarily-true or there is a regress that results from denying self-evident awareness as not just Shankara but also Shantarakshita and Mipham admit. Demanding that self-disclosure or self-manifestation appear as a relational object of awareness is a category error, since it frames the issue and its attempted rebuttal in terms that are explicitly rejected as invalid and incorrect by most of those who advocate self-luminosity. Philosophically, that's a category error, in logical terms that's a strawman fallacy.

uh oh eastern "philosophy" melty

>>25100666
>Consciousness (cit) is not an epistemic object, n
>Then you can't knownit exist, and there can't be another form of knowing, just like an eye can't "see in a way thats not seeing" or a knife can't "cut in a way thats not cutting", you're just abstracting the different moments of conciousness of something to establish a conciousness
1) It does not logically follow that we do not know Consciousness exists if it is not an epistemic object, because we know Consciousness directly and self-evidently through its self-disclosure which doesn't involve objectification. Arbitrarily ruling out any way of knowing something without objectifying it is just question-begging and is hence not a logically-valid argument. You have not actually refuted non-objective knowledge or demonstrated why it cannot exist if you just arbitrarily claim that it cannot and does not. Claiming arbitrarily that there is only one way of knowing is just question-begging, dressing it up in an analogy doesn't change this, it's still not logically-valid as an argument.

2) Nothing I'm saying is "abstracting different moments of consciousness" Distinct moments of time as well as of consciousness are themselves a mentally-imposed abstraction used to make sense of experience and are not fundamental or primary. Time is continuous and not discrete, Zeno paradoxes are reductio arguments that refute naïve pluralist and atomist conceptions of magnitude including the belief that either time or distance are composed of discrete, irreducible “small parts".

> if you can't prove that conciousness can't exist by itself then there's no reason to entertain this self-luminous theory
That's actually a non-sequitur, since the question of whether consciousness can exist by itself is actually a different question than whether it's self-luminous or no. Secondly, in addition to being a non-sequitur it's factually wrong because there are important philosophical, logical and phenomenological reasons to regard consciousness as self-luminous. Namely, without an immediately-self-evident awareness one's theory-of-mind and epistemology becomes completely coherent and there are vicious regresses that result. Just read Mipham or Shantarakshita if you want to see them elaborately argue for why this is true in Buddhist-compatible terms. Even when they disagree that its an Atman and regard it as empty instead they still argue that self-luminosity is necessary and they say other views are retarded and logically-indefensible.

>>25100666
>>25101479
>>Even the judgment “I do not know the Self” presupposes the self-presence of consciousness
>But not of a self suficient, self-luminous conciousness, just of a interdependent conciousness concious of an object(denial, doubt, and error and other mental phenomena)
1) Wolfgang isn't saying that Advaitic Atmam and all of the distinct things affirmed about it can be inferred simply from "I do not know the Self (or anything else), he is simply making a phenomenological claim about consciousness being inherently self-evident
2) For you to admit the judgment "I do not know the Self" presupposes the self-presence of any consciousness much less an interdependent one, is already conceding that Wolfgang is correct that consciousness is primally self-evident and is not known through inference, which was exactly the central point of that quote.

>>Once this distinction is maintained
>AND that's the problem, you can't mantain it
Why not? You never refuted the distinction directly or provided any argument as to why it's invalid. That part is specifically making a distinction between non-relational direct luminous self-disclosing presence versus knowledge-as-objectification. You never provided any logically-valid argument as to why the former cannot be true, you simply brought up invalid analogies that presuppose a relational model with multiple interacting parts when this not even what they are talking about, it's impossible to refute a non-relational model by drawing on analogies from relational models with multiple parts.

>>25101479
*Namely, without an immediately-self-evident awareness one's theory-of-mind and epistemology becomes completely INcoherent

>>25100764
>That creates a separation, "we" are aware of "consciousness" so there's an act of awareness different from this conciousness
That's merely a figure of speech and is not referring to any actual difference, especially since "we" are regarded as ultimately being nothing but awareness.

The sentence could easily just be restated as "consciousness is immediately aware of being conscious" and it would mean the same thing. This being-aware-of-itself-as-presence is just the basic nature of consciousness and is not any kind of additional property, relation, function or act that is different from consciousness.

>>25100766
>The problem with that example Is that the sún iluminates things different than himself, while in advaita nothing exist but Brahman, so the object iluminated Must be Brahman too
The things Brahman illuminates are the false appearances which are a false, epistemic, mode-of-appearance of that same non-dual absolute reality of Brahman. The sunlight example is just a dṛṣṭānta or a pedagogical illustration, they are not supposed to correspond 100% in every way with the point they are supposed to illustrate, just in one primary way that is used to illustrate primarily one specific point. Pointing out that the dṛṣṭānta does not correspond in every way to the thing it illustrates is not a logical refutation of a dṛṣṭānta since this is freely admitted by those who employ them and its not supposed to match it in every way.

>>25101100
>It's the exact opposite, shankara recycle the notion of svasamvedana from early buddhism
That's incorrect, self-luminosity is found all throughout the Upanishads, they describe the Self as the non-objectifiable principle that acts as its own light, being the immediate self-evident principle through which all is known while remaining a non-object.

Secondly, the Mīmāṃsā school of Hinduism develops a theory of self-luminosity centuries before Yogachara even existed. Śabara (1st-2nd century CE) in his Śābara-bhāṣya on Jaimini’s Mīmāṃsā Sūtra already argues that knowledge or cognition is self-evident, doesn't require a subsequent knowledge to be known, and that it reveals itself and its object simultaneously. He also uses the regress argument against non-reflexive models of knowledge. Dharmakirti and Dinnaga are like 2-3 centuries after this, self-luminosity was formalized in Hindu philosophy centuries before Buddhists wrote about. This Mīmāṃsā principle of self-luminous awareness was formalized to an even greater degree by later 7th century Mīmāṃsā philosphers like Kumārila Bhaṭṭa who use it to argue against Buddhist positions in works like Ślokavārttika.

Shankara was coming from and drawing upon this shared pan-Hindu intellectual heritage that includes self-luminosity in the Upanishads themselves, as well as Brahminical philosophical formulations of self-luminosity in Hinduism predating anything in Buddhism.

>>25101114
This reply is laughable and amounts to nothing more than a series of misrepresentations, incorrect conflations and logical fallacies. One has to wonder what a person is trying to achieve by posting such slop.

>Nope, the act of cognition Is established by the object/experience of cognition,when i see a car, i know that i'm seeing a car(if not i couldn't be able to see the car), i don't need to know that i know that i'm seiing a car, this cognition of cognition just add an innecessary second step,
Reflexive awareness is not "knowing that I know I am seeing", it is not a second higher-order cognition in relation to a prior one but in this particular example refers to the act of seeing being immediately, cognized and made manifest within experience in the exact moment it occurs in a self-evident manner without requiring any other mental act or state to interact with the initial perception in order that it be known. Reflexive awareness is non-iterative and non-reflective, there is no second-step but it refers to the self-manifestation of knowledge or awareness as belonging to or characterizing its very occurrence.

The regress argument has to do with this "who or what X is made manifest for" and not with second-order cognitions, if the experience or awareness is not immediately self-manifested in its very occurrence, then in order to be known and experienced at all it has to be evident for someone or something else, but if this latter things is also not reflexive and so on in a series then you get the vicious regress. Denying immediate self-manifestation leads to the absurd consequence that "one's own mind is a hidden object for oneself" as Mipham phrases it.

Secondly, your claim "the act of cognition Is established by the object/experience of cognition" is actually circular and not explanatory. To say “when I see a car, I know I’m seeing a car” already presupposes awareness of the act of seeing. The object (the car) can only “establish” cognition if cognition is already manifest as cognition. Otherwise, the object would be present without being known as present, which is incoherent. So the object cannot explain the fact that cognition is occurring; it can only explain what is being cognized. Confusing these two is a category error.

Third, you are reintroducing the vicious regress despite claiming to avoid it. When you say “I don’t need to know that I know that I’m seeing a car, when I see a car, I know that I’m seeing a car”, that "I know” is exactly the awareness whose possibility is under dispute". If awareness of seeing (i.e. the self-manifestation of awareness in its very occurrence) were not already present within the act itself, then something would still need to make it known as seeing. Appealing to the object does not stop the regress. The regress only disappears if awareness is self-manifest, which is precisely the reflexive-awareness thesis.

>>25101141
>Wrong, Mipham sees luminosity as just another way of naming the emptiness of all things,the active aspectnof emptiness the opposite of how advaita present conciousness
This is incorrect, for Mipham the ultimate nature (dharmakāya) is emptiness inseparable from luminosity, not emptiness alone. Dharmakāya is not a blank negation or even solely and exclusively the absence of sabhāva but is the empty-yet-cognizant ground from which appearances arise. Luminosity is not an “extra property” added to emptiness, but neither is it reducible to emptiness; it names the self-manifest capacity of empty reality itself. This is why Mipham insists that wisdom (ye shes) is not merely the absence of delusion but a positive, non-dual knowing/awareness that is empty of essence yet vividly present.

This distinction is central to how Mipham differentiates “mundane Madhyamaka” from Mahāmadhyamaka (great Madhyamaka). Mundane or merely dialectical Madhyamaka focuses almost exclusively on negation: dismantling reification, refuting intrinsic existence, and stopping conceptual fixation. Mipham argues this is necessary but incomplete and that Mahāmadhyamaka integrates Madhyamaka negation with Great Perfection insight, affirming that ultimate reality is empty and luminous, free from conceptual elaboration yet immediately knowable as wisdom. In Mahāmadhyamaka, emptiness is recognized as inseparable from self-knowing awareness, the very ground of awakening. Saying “luminosity is just emptiness” is precisely the error Mahāmadhyamaka is meant to correct: it mistakes the absence of inherent existence for the nature of awakened knowing.

> this vid explain how some people mix the two
Acarya Malcom follows an atypical interpretation of Dzogchen/Nyingma that differs from the mainstream interpretation of Dzogchen followed by the wider Nyingma tradition. Malcom doesn't typically specify this in his talks and interviews from what I have observed so people sometimes mistakenly conclude that what he is saying represents the normative Nyingma view when it actually doesn't and he is an outlier compared to the wider Nyingma tradition.

Mipham is regarded as the canonical synthesizer of earlier Nyingma teachings and his exposition of reflexive awareness is regarded as authoritative and correct by all the major institutions of the Nyingma tradition, his texts and teachings are used in modern Nyingma scholasticism and integrated into monastic curricula. They are also regarded as authoritative in Khenpo training programs.

>>25101141
>>25101646

Malcolm accepts some of Mipham's teachings including on the many topics he writes about besides reflexiveness awareness, but he disagrees with Mipham's formalization of the role of reflexive awareness and in doing so he idiosyncratically disagrees with his own tradition of Nyingma which accepts it. Malcom sees Miphma's formulation of reflexive-awareness as wrongly applying earlier Yogachara distinctions onto Dzogchen teachings and as introducing a duality into awareness, although Mipham himself is careful to distinguish what he is talking about from the Yogachara model and he also explains why he isn't actually positing any duality in the awareness that is Dharmakaya.

Malcolm notably accepts many of the attributes or trappings of reflexive-awareness as applying in principle to the Dharmakaya, but he rejects categorizing this as reflexive awareness, which I personally don't find to be a very convincing move logically or philosophically.

Malcom accepts that the Ground is
1) Immediately evident
2) A presence that does not require verification or mediation
3) Naturally manifest/evident by its very nature without requiring anything else, any phenomena, any mediation, any conditioning etc.

Malcom holds that when delusion ignorance is overcome and when the Ground is recognized this does not occur through 1) the human mind perceiving the Ground directly or 2) the Ground knowing itself reflexively, but rather proceeds instead from 3) The Grounds natural character of becoming automatically and evidently manifest in the absence of delusion.

Mipham openly embraces option #2 but formulates a theory of reflexive awareness that allows him to explain precisely how this occurs without duality in awareness.

Malcom, in tying the evident non-mediated disclosure to something about the nature of the Ground itself is, in effect, committing himself to a kind of a vague and undefined philosophically-unsystematic pseudo-reflexive-awareness that is still unacceptable for the Gelug critics of Nyingma who reject in principle there being any awareness that is just naturally- and immediately-evident, but without Malcom committing fully to the more philosophically-consistent systematic affirmation and exposition of reflexive awareness that Mipham follows.

Malcom's explanation of luminosity in that video also differs from Mipham and the wider Nyingma tradition that follows him, specifically Malcom seems to reduce luminosity to a way of explaining the original purity of emptiness, while Mipham is quite explicit that Dharmakaya is not just absence of svabhava but is a vivid awareness that is emptiness and luminosity inseparable, and that this awareness is non-dual knowing, he explicitly argues that if the Dharmakaya were not reflexively self-knowing in a non-dual manner then recognition of it would be impossible.

I have listen and read many many books and lectures but only Ashtavakra actually achieved the ultimate truth. There is nothing to be achieved, nothing to do, nothing to discuss and nothing to discover.

>>25101646
>is emptiness inseparable from luminosity, not emptiness alone.
Emptiness Is luminosity

>>25101445
>Its being conscious consists precisely in its being evidently manifest or present
The problem Is that Is not evident

>>25100975
Probably because he was not, infact, Indian.

>>25101479
>It does not logically follow that we do not know Consciousness exists if it is not an epistemic object,
Yes it does, an epistemological object is an object that,by deffinition,can be know, if it's not an epiatemological object, then it can't, "by deffinition", be know
>Claiming arbitrarily that there is only one way of knowing is just question-begging
No Is not, Is a mere a priori analitical observación, all i'm saying Is that the objects of knowledge can be know, a self-evident argument, what you on the other hand aré saying Is that something beyond the objects of knowledge can be "know" (how can something that's not an object/un the realm of knowledge can be know? It's like saying an object outside of the realm of the observable can be observed, such argument break the law of non-contradiction)so the burden of proof Is on you, you're question begging by establishing that unprove contradictoriy argument as self evident

>>25101646
>Acarya Malcom follows an atypical interpretation of Dzogchen/Nyingma that differs from the mainstream interpretation of Dzogchen followed by the wider Nyingma tradition
Lol no, Malcom is one of he most respected schoolars of dzogchen in the west, student of the legendary Norbu Rinpoche a tulku of adzom drugpa one of the best practicioners of dzogchen in tibets history, what Malcom Is saying is that your interpretation of mipham lacks a lingüístic context, you think that luminosity and emptiness aré different things because all you read about it is a poor translation or a poor interpretatión of the vajrayana concepts on your part

Does he ever explain how maya can be permanently vanquished? If maya emerged from undifferentiated brahman, and you overcome maya to join undifferentiated brahman, what's preventing it from emerging again

>>25101580
>The object (the car)
The object/"experience" is not the car, Is the experience of seeing a car, you can negate that when you see a car, there's an experience of seeing a car, but i can put into doubt that in order to see a car an a priori abstract conciousness Is necessary, because i never have an experience of that abstraction, so you are the one doing circular reasoning, i'm just making empirical observations
>>If awareness of seeing
That awareness, Is the seeing, that's why Is empty, Is not sustantially different from the act of seeing, i don't need to know that i see something, i just see it,seeing Is the cognition if there was a second cognition to the act of seeing as cognition, then that would then requiere even More acts of cognition,since no form of cognition seems to be enough, what numbers of cognitions aré enough to establish experience?

>>25102920
This Is the core problem of advaita, if maya emanates from Brahman, then going back to Brahman doesn't solve the problem, only gets you back at point zero, ready to repeat the whole thing again, the potentiality to revert to a state of advaya Is never solved, that's why buddhism Is a better philosophy, it's agenda is to destroy the possibility of Samsara itself, to extinguish the causes and conditions of suffering and samsara

>>25101658
>own tradition of Nyingma which accepts it.
That's just not true

>>25101535
Correction: the Mimamsa philosopher who advocates reflexive knowledge is Prabhakara who advocates a weak form of it, and not Sabara and Kumarila who reject it. It is the proto-Advaitin Brahminical philosopher Bhartṛhari who advocates a specifically Advaitin-type of immediate reflexive awareness in his works.

>>25102897
>>Its being conscious consists precisely in its being evidently manifest or present
>The problem Is that Is not evident
That claim has already been logically refuted literally over a millennia ago by the regress argument, which you have not even attempted to address head-on.

Bhartṛhari refutes it via regress argument in the 5th century in his Vākyapadīya
Śaṅkara refutes it via regress argument in the 8th century in his Brahma‑sūtra‑bhāṣya & Upadeśa‑sāhasrī
Śāntarakṣita also refutes it via regress argument in the 8th century in his Madhyamakālaṃkāra
Abhinavagupta refutes it via regress argument in the 10th century in his Īśvara-pratyabhijñā-vimarśinī
Gorampa refutes it via regress argument in the 15th century in his Lta ba’i shan ’byed
Mipham refutes it via regress argument in the 19th century in his Nor bu ke ta ka & the Beacon of Certainty

>>25103072
>That's just not true
Do you have a source to back that up? Because everything I see either explicitly says or indicates otherwise. Malcom is the only Nyingma-associated figure that I have ever seen distance himself from Mipham at all and especially his theory of awareness.

Every source I've seen says Mipham's works are standard in Nyingma institutions and Nyingma websites and written material tends to glaze him as a genius enlightened polymath. Contemporary Dzogchen teachers also use language that mirror his position, i.e. in Namkhai Norbus works and recordings of talks he explicitly says things like Rigpa knows itself and is immediately evident to itself.

>>25102906
>Yes it does, an epistemological object is an object that,by deffinition,can be know, if it's not an epiatemological object, then it can't, "by deffinition", be know
It's an obvious question-begging fallacy for you to arbitrarily insist all forms of knowing have to conform to the definition of 'epistemological object'. There is no logical reason why that would actually be necessary.
>all i'm saying Is that the objects of knowledge can be know, a self-evident argument,
If you mean this in an exclusive sense, as in, 'ONLY objects of knowledge can be known', then that is a textbook question-begging fallacy, since it presumes exactly what the argument is supposed to prove.
>(how can something that's not an object/un the realm of knowledge can be know?
This has already been answered: through reflexive awareness which is self-evident yet not an object.
>It's like saying an object outside of the realm of the observable can be observed
That's a false analogy which fails to be a logically-valid argument, because it presents an unproven and unjustified false dichotomy of either observed objective knowledge or non-knowledge and then attacks the idea of attaining knowledge without the supposedly-required means of observation, but this exposes no contradiction in Advaita but it merely presents its own unproven false dichotomy which is rejected by Advaita as invalid. It's impossible to logically refute someone's view by subjecting it to an unproven false dichotomy which is itself rejected by the view you are trying to refute.
>so the burden of proof Is on you,
Incorrect, anytime someone tries to established an unproven restricting principle like "only objects of knowledge can occur as knowledge, there is no non-objective knowledge", then the burden of proof falls upon them to establish that restricting principle. You are just asserting this restricting principle as a question-begging fallacy. Secondly, the regress argument already provides the logical justification for accepting reflexive-awareness as true so the basis for accepting it has already in fact been provided.

>>25102942
>The object/"experience" is not the car, Is the experience of seeing a car
This is trying to dodge the critique by shifting terms: the point was about cognition itself (the act of knowing), not merely the content of perception. By redefining “object” as “experience of the car,” you are trying to sidestep the original point. This is yet another straw man fallacy: attacking a weaker version of the argument that redefines its contention away from what it was originally about.

> but i can put into doubt that in order to see a car an a priori abstract conciousness Is necessary, because i never have an experience of that abstraction, so you are the one doing circular reasoning, i'm just making empirical observations
This fallaciously conflates what is empirically-observed with what is logically- or conceptually-necessary. Not experiencing something does not prove it unnecessary. The logical and phenomenological case for reflexive awareness is concerned with the logical preconditions of cognition or consciousness itself and not empirical content. For you to deny a priori conciousness because it is “not experienced directly” is a fallacy of empirical generalization, i.e. an appeal to ignorance: “I haven’t observed it, therefore it doesn’t exist or isn’t necessary.” That is actually a formal logical fallacy called argumentum ad ignorantiam.

https://philosophy.lander.edu/logic/ignorance.html

I suggest you read this link so you don't commit the same formal logical fallacy again.

>>25102942
>>If awareness of seeing
That awareness, Is the seeing, that's why Is empty
This is equivocating between the content of cognition (the car seen) and the act of cognition itself (the experiential fact of seeing occurring in experience or being revealed by awareness), the Advaitin’s argument, or those who employ the regress argument more broadly, is generally about is about reflexive self-awareness: awareness knowing itself as it occurs. Simply saying “seeing is the awareness” doesn’t address the question of how awareness itself is known, it just renames the act. It fails to engage with the arguments that explain why reflexive awareness is necessary and also why its absence is conceptually- and logically-incoherent.

> i don't need to know that i see something, i just see
That has already been refuted by the memory argument for reflexive awareness:

1) When you remember a past experience (say, seeing a car), you are aware of it as having been experienced.
2) But you can only remember it if the original experience was already self-manifest — that is, if awareness of the act of seeing was present at the time of the perception itself, even if you weren’t explicitly “reflecting” on it then.
3) If awareness were only of the object (the car) and not of the cognition itself, then there would be no fact of “having seen” to be recalled — memory would be impossible.
In short: the possibility of memory presupposes reflexive awareness in the original experience.

>inb4 Chandrakirti's reply
Evan Thompson has already pointed out why Chandrakirti's reply to the memory argument is fallacious because it commits a category error and doesn't actually engage with the point of the argument
https://evanthompson.me/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/evan-thompson-commentary-on-j-garfield.pdf

> if there was a second cognition to the act of seeing as cognition, then that would then requiere even More acts of cognition,since no form of cognition seems to be enough, what numbers of cognitions aré enough to establish experience?
The regress arises because if cognition or awareness is not self-manifest then every act of knowing would require another act to make it known, ad infinitum. Asking “how many cognitions are enough?” is ignoring the logical structure of the regress; it’s a red herring that is not actually engaging with the central point of the argument. The argument's claim is that one self-manifest awareness suffices to prevent a regress, the argument is not about counting cognitions but it is about the logical impossibility of cognition being established solely by objects.

>>25102920
>Does he ever explain how maya can be permanently vanquished?
Yes, the maya-universe functions in such a way that once beings uproot their own ignorance through the scriptural teaching (which is designed to accomplish this and is indeed a supernatural or divinely-originated means of doing so) and one's guru and the process of studying and assimilating the teachings; when this leads to one sublating all of one's false beliefs you are permanently uprooting them, once you understand fundamentally why it's wrong you can never fall into the same mistake again since you already known the error that is the cause of that false belief.

It was these uprootable false beliefs, in connection with their downstream consequences resulting from bodily attachment like craving etc which are the thing that is perpetuating the continued transmigration of the jiva. When these false beliefs and their downstream consequences are attenuated through the aforementioned process then that jiva has become enlightened and there is nothing causing their subtle body to transmigrate further so it doesn't continue on anymore when that person's physical body dies.

When an enlightened jiva's subtle body has dissolved or ended like this there is nothing that can bring it back into manifestation and animate it and make it transmigrate again, maya only influences the beginningless jiva's already present and it never creates new ones, so there is no force or principle in effect that would cause a fresh new jiva to emerge again.

So, basically the process of studying the divinely-revealed Shruti scripture and assimilated its teachings properly in the traditional way is designed from the outset to solve the issue and it accomplishes that as a main feature and not as an afterthought.

>If maya emerged from undifferentiated brahman, and you overcome maya to join undifferentiated brahman, what's preventing it from emerging again
That's the thing, there is no emergence or mergence ('joining') for your innermost Self but it's already eternally-free and completely identical with the infinite partless absolute Brahman. All the contents of maya that can be spoken of in terms of emergence or merger are non-Self. Shankara is talking about that very point here in this passage >>25097117 when he writes "Therefore the statement, 'He is merged in Brahman' (this text), is but a figurative one, meaning the cessation, as a result of knowledge, of the continuous chain of bodies for one who has held an opposite view", he is saying any 'merger' is purely figurative and refers to the chain of bodies for jiva ending and not any merger since the Self is already-free and identical with Brahman.

When you understand that the Self is eternally-free and is never bound or emerges then there is no actual question remaining of preventing its future bondage, that possibility is logically precluded by the tenets of the metaphysics itself.

>>25103068
>This Is the core problem of advaita, if maya emanates from Brahman, then going back to Brahman doesn't solve the problem, only gets you back at point zero
This is answered here >>25103899, there is no bondage or release for the eternally-free Atman-Brahman. Jivas by default are beginningless and are never re-created once freed. There is not even a remaining individuality post-release that could "return to samsara" but the different jivas are all just falsely appropriating the light of the same unconditioned partless non-dual reality to themselves and thereby falsely regarding it as individualized and bound, but at no point during or after this false belief by the jivas is the reality ever actually individualized or bound. The idea of there being an individual essence that can enter into and leave bondage even theoretically is itself a complete fiction, there is no philosophical problem that results from an idea which predicated on something which is untrue like that.

>that's why buddhism Is a better philosophy, it's agenda is to destroy the possibility of Samsara itself, to extinguish the causes and conditions of suffering and samsara
Both Buddhism and Advaita claim to target the causes and conditions of suffering/rebirth/samsaric existence, including ignorance. However, unlike Buddhism, Advaita claims to know why those conditions are present to begin with, or at least what grounds them metaphysically and permits them to be present as such; although not to the same extreme mechanistic degree found in some other Hindu schools.

It's sort of like the difference between two men claiming to know the way out of a labyrinth but only one of them claims to know how you entered into it to begin with, i.e. the precondition of you having become lost in it. The method taught by the man who doesn't claim to know how you entered the labyrinth isn't necessarily wrong and it could possibly be true, but it just seems more dubious than someone who can articulate how you ended up there in the first place.

>>25102919
>Lol no, Malcom is one of he most respected schoolars of dzogchen in the west
Yes, but he is also a translator and not just a teacher. When he is offering his own opinion of some historical nuance of Nyingma doctrine based on how Sanskrit terms was translated into Tibetan and what the term *akshually means* according to the Sanskrit original and not the Tibetan misinterpretation, he is speaking in his capacity as a translator who follows western critical academic methods, he isn't claiming that view it is the official Nyingma position as codified and passed down in its lineages. We already know that this is not the official position of the Nyingma school, as its contradicted in all of their writings from Longchenpa and Mipham down to contemporary teachers today. He has also claimed before that certain things considered official doctrine are actually just accumulated cultural detritus and not official doctrine, like the impossibility of regression past a certain stage, which I'm pretty sure Nyingma officially accepts. I presume he claimed this as a way to cope with the fact of certain advanced-level Tibetan teachers who become implicated in financial, sexual and physical-abuse scandals.

>what Malcom Is saying is that your interpretation of mipham lacks a lingüístic context, you think that luminosity and emptiness aré different things
No, I correctly said that in Nyingma, or particularly in Mipham's systemization, Dharmakaya or the Ground is considered to be luminosity and emptiness inseparable and not different things. Neither "absence of svabhava" nor "luminous awareness" is sufficient but its both of these at once and neither one reduces to the other.

Plotinus went beyond Shankara, unironically

>>25092400
Buddhism was too good for India, still is and will likely always be.

File: mogged.png (3.1 MB)

3.1 MB PNG

>>25104091

Shankara’s ontological vision, eclipsing the theurgic teleology of Plotinus, enacts a consummate apprehension of ens perfectissimum, wherein the manifold contingencies of phenomenal existence are sublated into a continuous, reflexive plenitude whose autoluminosity renders every finite locus an epistemically differentiated manifestation wholly participatory in, and ontologically dependent upon, the absolute substrate. Unlike the Neoplatonic One, whose hypostatic emanations preserve hierarchical asymptopia from the ens realissimum, Brahman is articulated as an all-encompassing immediacy, whose infinitude is neither attenuated by procession nor mediated through ontic gradation, but instantiates itself immanently in every quidditative appearance, cognizable only insofar as the epistemic act is inseparable from the reflexive luminosity of consciousness. Here, ontic and epistemic coalesce in radical apophatic immediacy, wherein the phenomenality of objects, discursivity of intellect, and transitoriness of temporal succession are parasitic upon the unconditioned ground, revealing a schema in which distinctions between knower and known, substance and accident, actuality and potentiality are subsumed within an indivisible plenitude whose self-manifestation constitutes the sine qua non of intelligibility. Thus, the metaphysical edifice achieves comprehensivity whereby contingent multiplicities are integrated as participatory loci within the all-pervasive substratum, rendering transcendence and immanence contiguous, and cognition itself an intramundane articulation of the absolute ens.

Whereas Plotinus’ hypostatic schema enjoins hierarchical emanation, wherein intermediate hypostases mediate multiplicity and impose ontological asymmetry, Shankara dispenses with such stratifications, achieving a metaphysical consistency unattainable in the Neoplatonic framework. In the Plotinian order, participation in the ens realissimum is derivative, rendering the absolute transcendent yet epistemically inaccessible, and leaving unresolved the ontological status of the manifold. By contrast, Advaita secures immediate participation of all phenomenal instantiations within the autoluminosity of Brahman, such that the finite is neither autonomous nor causally contingent, but emerges epistemically as a differentiated manifestation inseparable from the ground. This schema preserves both apophatic immediacy and reflexive coherence, ensuring transcendence and immanence are reconciled, the actus essendi of all loci systematically grounded, and no residual duality compromises the unity of Being. Shankara’s edifice thus subsumes Plotinian insights yet transcends their structural dependencies, offering a totalizing ontology in which intelligibility, causal sufficiency, and non-duality of the absolute are realized without remainder.

>>25103945
>he is speaking in his capacity as a translator who follows western critical academic methods, he isn't claiming that view it is the official Nyingma position
It is by virtue of being the correct meaning of the terms he's translating, what you think Is the "official" nyingma positión Is just a incorrect way to understand the termas by a lack of semantical context

>>25103899
>in such a way
This way Is never correctly established
>false beliefs
This false belifs aré part of maya, and since Brahman eternaly cast the illusion of maya, those belief will come back, the true Matrix of the problem still exist unchanged, so the problem by deffinition Is not solved, you only treated the symptom

>>25103837
>about cognition itself
Exactly, you can't prove that cognition itself without an experience can exist, and since it create a regress it can't exist, you still didn't refuted none of these points

>>25103871
>equivocating between the content of cognition (the car seen) and the act of cognition itself (the experiential
This duality Is forced, not self-evident and creates a regress, ifni have to establish a cognition of the car and the of the cognition itself, then another cognition of this act of "the cognition of cognition " Is needed ad infinitum, that's why cognition and the act of cognition of the car must be the same thing
>address the question of how awareness itself is known
Simple, awareness "itself" Is not know, awaenessbis always situational,you always know awareness as a thing in the world, awareness of something, the fact that different momets of awareness can be abstracted into an idea of awareness itself,outside the world,without an object, doesn't probé that this abstract awareness can exist beyond being an idea result of an abstraction, and since this idea would fall into a regress we can easily discard it as ilogical and empirically abscent

>>25103871
>if cognition or awareness is not self-manifest then every act of knowing would require another act to make it known,
That's movíng the goalpost, now you have to know this self-mamifest knowing and the object of knowing, who knows this relation? At the same Time if you wanna pretend thatbthis self-manifesttion Is just magically enough, then you can just put it on the object of knowing and establish the car as self-manifestating making the awareness obsolete and estaishing the act of awareness as self-sufficient, which Is what Heidegger did

>>25104153
>nor mediated
you say that as if it is a good thing and not retarded

>>25104153
>hierarchical emanation
IS the immanence of the absolute, because the principal power of the GOOD is truth and beauty and order. Hierarchy is the prerequisite for progress and values. Without it you destroy any coherence between things and is left with a complex atomism where everything is a solipsistic purpose rather than a cosmic symphony.

File: Screenshot_20260224-080850.png (1.4 MB)

1.4 MB PNG

>>25106259
downstream of SUPERIOR NEOPLATONISM

>>25104873
>This way Is never correctly established
Yes it is, it is taught by the scriptures and the tradition as what happens. The idea that maya is permanently trapping us or preventing us from enlightenment is a strawman fallacy and not what Advaita actually teaches, so you aren't engaging in any refutation by claiming that's a problem, you are just accusing them of having a view which they don't actually teach. A classic strawman fallacy.
>This false belifs aré part of maya, and since Brahman eternaly cast the illusion of maya, those belief will come back,
Incorrect, only jivas can have false beliefs since beliefs presupposes minds to inhere in which possess those beliefs, beliefs cannot just be present in a void with no connection to a mind. But Jivas can never "come back" once liberated since they are inherently beginningless and never created, so there is no mechanism by which a jiva can "come back" or be bound again since maya by default never creates news jivas.
>the true Matrix of the problem still exist unchanged
Maya is no problem for someone who has sublated ignorance. It only appears to be a problem for those who have not done so. Once someone has sublated ignorance and severed the cycle of transmigration, maya is not any sort of problem for them during their remaining bodily life, nor is it possible that maya can lead to them being bound again, since maya by default never binds jivas that were not already bound (ignorant) without beginning. If you think this is possible, you are accusing Advaita of accepting a view which they actually explicitly reject, which is a strawman fallacy.

>>25104867
>It is by virtue of being the correct meaning of the terms he's translating
Well, then he was refuted on that point by the masters of his own tradition.

Do people on this thread actually pursue enlightenment or is it just theory entertainment? I'm not even being cheeky because I think I neglect theory in favour of practice so I'm thinking I'm missing something

>>25104877
>Exactly, you can't prove that cognition itself without an experience can exist
This is a red herring reply, since that is an unrelated claim that is not the point of the argument. The argument is not trying to demonstrate that "cognition can exist without an experience", the argument is pointing out that if the cognition of the contents of the experience is not immediately self-manifest or self-revealed (which the memory argument has already shown is logically necessary) either in its very moment of occurrence or to something else which is itself self-revealed and self-manifesting, then a vicious infinite regress results that makes knowledge and experience impossible.

Every time you bump the thread with another red herring, non-sequitur or strawman response, you are simply humiliating yourself further and demonstrating to everyone reading through the thread that you are completely incapable of addressing the regress argument directly without committing some fallacy in your response because it BTFO's your position so hard.

I can call out the fallacies in your response all day until it hits the 300 post limit, its easy and I find it amusing. You aren't going to win by continuing to reply with fallacies lmao.

Try giving it another try that isn't a demonstrable fallacy. Surprise me. I know you have it in you.

>and since it create a regress it can't exist, you still didn't refuted none of these points
Your claim of regress is premised on a strawman fallacy that misconstrues reflexive awareness as two different mental acts or mental moments when this is explicitly denied. There is no regress since reflexive awareness or reflexive knowledge is not a second higher-order cognition in relation to the first one but it refers to awareness or knowledge have the quality of being immediately self-evident or self-revealed to itself through its very occurrence, and this self-disclosure is not a second entity or act but is a quality inhering in that awareness/knowledge.

The vicious regress arises precisely if this quality of immediate self-disclosure is denied, as you are doing. This is because our knowledge is obviously evident and manifest by nature, which is how we know and can describe it. Any coherent account of experience therefore has to explain how knowledge becomes evident or manifest.

This means that if knowledge or awareness is not immediately self-evident and self-revealed in its very occurrence (as it is in the reflexivity thesis where this occurs immediately without requiring anything else), then in order that we can know and experience it, it has to be connected with another mental state or awareness which is immediately self-revealed. If self-luminosity or reflexivity is denied as a general principle, then it never makes this connection and there would be a total absence of knowledge and sensation. Because this is not true, we can conclude that non-reflexive models are therefore incorrect.

QED

>>25106259
>This duality Is forced, not self-evident and creates a regress
This is wrong and can be refuted quite easily

1) If cognition and its content were identical, then error would be impossible, since to to misperceive is to have a cognition whose intentional content fails to match the object. But if cognition just is its content, there’s nothing for it to fail to match.

2) If there were no distinction between cognition and its contents, then the shifting of our attention from one of the objective contents in our experience to another would be impossible, since this shift redirects attentive cognizing from one content to another that is already present, like focusing one's attention on a sound one is already hearing in the background.

>ifni have to establish a cognition of the car and the of the cognition itself, then another cognition of this act of "the cognition of cognition " Is needed ad infinitum,
Incorrect, and for you to claim this shows that you either don't understand the fundamental premise of the reflexive awareness argument, or you have given up trying to reply to it and have decided the only option is to desperately misconstrue its central premise.

When awareness is reflexive, there is no need to establish anything because knowledge is immediately and automatically self-established in its very occurrence without needing anything else. It is those who reject reflexivity who face a vicious regress for reasons already laid out here >>25107087

>Simple, awareness "itself" Is not know, awaenessbis always situational
This has already been refuted by the memory argument for reflexive awareness which was posted here >>25103871 and which you have failed to address. Attempting to claim this without responding to the argument which has already been shown to refute your that claim is actually a tacit admission of the failure of your own position to withstand analysis.

>>25106269
>>if cognition or awareness is not self-manifest then every act of knowing would require another act to make it known,
>That's movíng the goalpost,
Wrong, that's not moving the goalpost but it's describing a basic feature of experience. Why? Because our own knowledge that occurs in our own experience is evident and manifest, i.e. our own mind and its contents are not hidden from us. Any coherent theory of knowledge therefore has to describe how knowledge becomes evident or manifest like it does in our own experience, simply categorizing the ingredients of experience in terms of causal relations without taking into account how knowledge is made evident or manifest fails to correctly describe what it is like to be conscious.

If you are denying this, then you are advocating the opposite view that our own mind and awareness and the knowledge in experience is not evident to us, that it's hidden from us. This is completely absurd and irrational and it fails to even slightly accord with how lived human experience actually occurs.

>now you have to know this self-mamifest knowing and the object of knowing, who knows this relation?
For you to even ask the question implies that you don't understand the first thing about the position you are replying to. The whole point of awareness inherently being self-evident to itself is that there is no necessity for this to be known by someone or something else, since its already known and evident or manifest to that very awareness, and when it's already known there is no need or reason for another knower. You are erroneously objectifying self-manifestation and then criticizing it for not behaving like an object, when the claim that it behaves like an action is actually denied by the thesis in question.

Luminous awareness simultaneously discloses both itself and its object through the mere fact of being present. There is no need for a second knower standing behind the luminous awareness, since through the fact of being self-luminous that awareness is already knowing itself.

In intentional models of luminous awareness, the luminous awareness knows itself and directly knows the object. In models where the luminosity is ultimately non-intentional like in Advaita and Dzogchen the knowing of the object occurs through the mind/intellect in dependence upon that luminosity, but it still remains true nonetheless that the luminosity is revealing or disclosing both itself and its object simultaneously.

>>25106269
>then you can just put it on the object of knowing and establish the car as self-manifestating making the awareness obsolete and estaishing the act of awareness as self-sufficient, which Is what Heidegger did
This is a blatant category error that confuses ontological manifestation (objects existing) with epistemic manifestation (being known). Self-manifestation explains why knowing occurs without infinite regress, not how objects appear independently. Objects do not distinguish appearing vs not appearing, they do not ground error vs truth, and they do not explain the difference between perception and hallucination. If the car were self-manifesting then it would appear even when unperceived and hallucinated cars would have to exist.

Heidegger did not say objects are self-manifesting instead of awareness or that awareness is obsolete. He rejected subject/object epistemology, not awareness itself.

>>25107170
*when the claim that it behaves like an OBJECT is actually denied by the thesis in question.

File: 3c1cba33-08b4-4242-ba58-df234017028a.png (2.6 MB)

2.6 MB PNG

>>25106321
>you say that as if it is a good thing and not retarded
Ontic gradation should not be confused for genuine explanatory depth. Shankara’s solution is more elegant precisely because it refuses to multiply levels of being in order to explain finitude. The Neoplatonic hierarchy attempts to safeguard the transcendence of the absolute by interposing hypostatic buffers, but this maneuver generates a structural tension it never fully resolves: the more ontological distance one inserts to protect infinitude, the more one must explain how that infinitude survives progressive attenuation without becoming merely maximal finitude. Shankara avoids this problem entirely by relocating difference from the level of being to the level of appearance and cognition. Infinitude is not “thinned out” across grades of reality; rather, limitation is epistemic, not ontological. This preserves absolute simplicity without sacrificing phenomenological richness, and it does so without invoking a metaphysical cascade whose necessity is asserted but never strictly demonstrated.

Shankara’s position is more logically and metaphysically coherent because it eliminates the asymptotic gap that haunts Plotinian emanationism. In Plotinus, the finite never quite reaches the One, and the One never fully arrives in the finite, relation is maintained only by metaphor (overflow, procession, return), not by strict intelligibility. Shankara’s non-dualism, by contrast, allows for a fully immanent absolute without collapse into pantheistic confusion, because dependence runs one way only: appearances borrow apparent being without fragmenting the source. This makes error, ignorance, and liberation intelligible without positing ontological secondaries that must somehow be both real enough to function and unreal enough not to compromise unity. The result is a metaphysics that is simultaneously simpler, stronger, and more parsimonious: fewer primitives, fewer unexplained transitions, and no need for a metaphysical middle-management to reconcile infinitude with the finite.

File: download.png (2.7 MB)

2.7 MB PNG

>>25106328
>Hierarchy is the prerequisite for progress and values. Without it you destroy any coherence between things and is left with a complex atomism where everything is a solipsistic purpose rather than a cosmic symphony.
Advaita does not deny hierarchy; it denies that hierarchy belongs to the Absolute itself and demotes it instead to the level of appearance, resulting in a more internally-consistent model of divine simplicity. And that demotion exactly what allows the Absolute to be truly infinite, fully immanent, and genuinely the source of truth, beauty, and order, rather than their distant apex existing in an unresolved tension with them. The Plotinian view that that the emanation mediated through the hypostases is the immanence of the Good is assuming that the Absolute is impotently incapable of being present at lower levels except through being *less* present through a kind of ontic dilution. The Advaitin model rejects this assumption by distinguishing degrees of manifestation from degrees of reality: Brahman is fully-present everywhere and is unconstrained and undiluted, while hierarchy belongs to the modes of appearance shaped by ignorance, not to the Absolute itself.

The Advaitin model still does the work of accounting for and explaining order but without the metaphysical liabilities that follow from the Neoplatonic approach. If hierarchy is of the same metaphysical status as the disparate distinctions and values it governs then it still can account for those progress, contrasts, values etc even when it doesn't exist as differentiation in the Absolute. There is no atomism in a doctrine that begins with unity and explains plurality as dependent appearance without ever positing any irreducible parts or plurality. The Plotinian hypostases create a real structural tension which is left unresolved and which is entirely avoided in the Advaitic model, namely, the hypostases cannot be fully independent because they are ontologically parasitic yet they are spoken of as ontologically distinct and “real”. The system never gives a strictly intelligible account of how the hypostases are both fully real and fully dependent but it relies on metaphors. Participation only redirects the focus without addressing the core underlying tension.

The Akbarian school of IbnʿArabī and Qūnawī has similar critiques and is similarly an improvement, They regard the Neoplatonic model as being structurally unstable due to its contrary doctrinal commitments, unable to reconcile the One's transcendence and unity with the distinction of the hypostasis. And just like Advaita, IbnʿArabī and Qūnawī avoid this tension entirely by relocating difference from the ontological to the phenomenal plane: the hypostases’ distinctness is understood as a mode of manifestation or disclosure rather than as an independent ontic stratification, and all multiplicity participates fully in the One without compromising its simplicity.

>>25106334

Plotinus has the right hunch there in calling the Intellect's (Nous) intellection self-evident and inclusive of itself even when intellecting other things, but he actually doesn't go far enough and his model therefore remains insufficient for a logically-adequate account of consciousness. Any foundational consciousness, awareness or knowledge must be immediately self-manifest due to the vicious regress if it isn't, Plotinus correctly anticipates this but his attempt to avoid this regress only goes half-way since since the Nous is still determinate, structured, and composed of Forms.

Reflexive, immediately-evident awareness cannot be instantiated in a determinate, composite entity, because the very quality of immediate self-disclosure is non-composite and constitutive; any entity composed of parts or structured content can therefore only mediate reflexivity and not instantiate it intrinsically. Awareness is the condition of experiential fact itself: a determinate content may exist, but without an immediately self-manifest presence, no experience occurs of that content. Plotinus situates this reflexivity in the determinate Nous, which is structured and contains Forms, and therefore its self-awareness is necessarily mediated by the relations and content it comprises. Consequently, reflexive awareness instantiated in the Intellect is mediated, not intrinsic, and cannot serve as a logically-sufficient ground for knowledge or experience.

Foundational, self-luminous awareness must be indeterminate, partless, and immediate, pervading any determinate intellect or its contents without itself being structured, in order to terminate regress and account for the manifestation of knowledge in experience. Plotinus’ insight anticipates this principle of self-luminosity in the abstract but conflates reflexivity with determinate cognition, failing to articulate the distinction between self-luminous awareness and the structured intellect through which it manifests.

>>25107477
>Plotinus’ insight anticipates this principle of self-luminosity in the abstract but conflates reflexivity with determinate cognition, failing to articulate the distinction between self-luminous awareness and the structured intellect through which it manifests.

Meanwhile, this key distinction was not lost upon eastern metaphysicians, who often make a rigorous distinction between luminous awareness as such and the determinate operations of intellect or mind, grounded simultaneously in phenomenological immediacy and logical non-derivability. In the Illuminationist (Ishrāqī) school, Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi, in Hikmat al-Ishraq, argues that all cognition presupposes a non-conceptual “knowledge by presence” (ʿilm ḥuḍūrī), wherein awareness is self-manifesting light (nūr) and not an intelligible form abstracted by the mind. His case is explicitly anti-representational: conceptual intellection is mediated, compositional, and dependent on quiddities, whereas awareness is immediate, partless, and reveals itself without epistemic distance. Classical Sāṅkhya articulates an analogous asymmetry: in the Sankhya Karika, Ishvarakrishna maintains that prakṛti and its evolutes, including buddhi and manas, are constituted by change, guṇic differentiation, and functional teleology, while puruṣa is contentless, immutable witnessing consciousness. The logical force of the argument lies in non-agency: cognition’s variability and intentional structure cannot coherently belong to that which merely illuminates them without alteration, just as motion cannot inhere in that which only reveals motion. This logic is radicalized in the Nyingma Dzogchen corpus, especially by Longchenpa in Treasury of the Dharmadhatu, where rigpa is characterized as self-luminous, spatially pervasive, and primordially indeterminate, in contrast to sems, the mind of discursive cognition structured by temporal succession and conceptual elaboration. Longchenpa’s phenomenological claim is that any act of knowing is already disclosed within rigpa, which neither arises nor ceases and therefore cannot be identified with epistemic acts that demonstrably do.

>>25107938

The school of Advaita Vedānta has articulated the same distinction with exceptional precision and rigor since the early medieval era. Sureśvara, one of the direct disciples of Śaṅkara, sharpens his position further by formulating a strictly transcendental and modal argument from epistemic invariance in the Naiṣkarmyasiddhi that concerns the conditions of possibility of cognition as such. The core claim is not that awareness is felt as invariant, but that the intelligibility of epistemic predication logically requires a non-derivative, non-episodic illuminative principle. Any intellective state, such as a belief, perception, inference, error, or absence thereof, is identifiable as that state only insofar as it is determinately characterizable. Determinacy, however, entails contrast, exclusion, and modal contingency: this rather than that, now rather than then, true rather than false. What is thus determinate cannot ground its own determinacy without circularity, since the act of determination already presupposes the very intelligibility it seeks to explain.

If awareness were itself an intellective act or property of an act, it would inherit this modal dependence and would therefore require a further condition to be identifiable as awareness rather than non-awareness. This generates an unavoidable regress unless one posits a principle whose being is identical with its intelligibility, in other words something that does not become manifest but is manifest by virtue of what it is. Crucially, this conclusion does not rest on phenomenology but on a minimal logical constraint: there must be at least one element in the epistemic economy whose disclosure is not mediated by form, contrast, or operation, otherwise no disclosure could occur at all. Such a principle must be immutable (since change presupposes contrastive apprehension), partless (since parts require unification), and indeterminate (since determination presupposes illumination). On this account, intellect is necessarily secondary and derivative, while luminous awareness is not an explanandum within the epistemic system but its transcendental condition, something that is denied only at the cost of rendering denial itself unintelligible.

>>25107477
Conveniently the Nous is not the Absolute...

>>25107983
Indeed, the gaps in his model could be resolved somewhat by saying that the One is self-luminously aware/conscious and thereby illuminates the Nous and thereby makes the determinations in the Nous intelligible, and this is indeed what I've seen one or two perennialist-leaning people try to claim online before, or when they are trying to read Plotinus as agreeing with Vedanta. However, as far as I've seen he doesn't actually claim this anywhere and he always speaks of consciousness/sentience as pertaining to the Nous, nor do any of his historical followers claim this about him. At best, one would have to argue it was an implicit hidden doctrine that all of his followers failed to realize, which doesn't seem very intellectually-serious, and even if he secretly thought the One were awareness but didn't say so, he would still be failing to articulate how this interacts with the intellect and makes its determinations intelligible.

>>25107943
>further condition to be identifiable as awareness
The problem Is that this identification never happens, you're always aware of something, thus awareness Is a quality, fornwareness to be establish as a thing, it should be present to Is as a thing ir essence and not a quality,it's like saying the color Red exist in a metaphysical redness because i can see things that aré red, it's a non-sequitur fallacy

>>25107170
>but it's describing a basic feature of experience
It's not a descriptión but a theory of knowledge, you can't use the results of your theory to defend the arguments of your theory, that's circular reasoning

>>25107170
>you are denying this, then you are advocating the opposite view that our own mind and awareness and the knowledge in experience is not evident to us, that it's hidden from us. This is completely absurd and irrational and it fails to even slightly accord with how lived human experience actually occurs.
No Is not, a lot of philosopher and thinkers defend that positión
https://youtu.be/pX7zryqAeq8?si=W97B-V9_JYMcRgzA
Here's an example of a contemporary philosopher that articulates a set of complex arguments defending that position

>>25107170
>Any coherent theory of knowledge therefore has to describe how knowledge becomes evident
Lol no, that's redundant, knowledge Is how things become evident, so making evident the making evident of things Is tautological nonesense

>>25107132
>If cognition and its content were identical, then error would be impossible,
It Is, you can't be awarenof something in a wrong way, you can think that something Is different from what really Is, but that's not awareness, that a mental formulation, i can "think" a Mirage Is really an oasis, but that's a problema of conceptualización not of my conciousness, the content, the phenomena that creates the Mirage nor my idea of ir being annoasis ,Is not a mistake of my act of awareness, so your point makes no sense, you're mixing mental formations with acts of awareness

>>25107175
>Heidegger did not say objects are self-manifesting
Yes he did, he called it Aletheia

>>25107048
>is taught by the scriptures and the tradition as what happens
That's an argument from authority, thus fallacious

>>25107052
Prove it, show a text from mipham that clearly refutes what Malcom Is saying

>>25107175
>. If the car were self-manifesting
Again, the experience of a car is self-manifested, you're trying to force a subject object dulity, but no one here believe un that so your arguments make no sense,you're lighting a strawnan without actually engaging with the real arguments and refutations here

>>25107170
>If you are denying this, then you are advocating the opposite view that our own mind and awareness and the knowledge in experience is not evident to us,
Not at all, i'm negating that knowledge the act are two different things, 1rst because that create two rules of knowledge turning the idea of knowledge useless, like saying a knife can cut a different way with using it's edge, or you can see with your eyes but without using them, it's forced, artificial and reify awareness making illumination impossible
2nd because it circular, it needs a awareness in itself that then can be aware of itself, the only way you can defend it's existence Is by talking for granted that exist, so Is philosophically lady
3rd creates a regress and no, you cant just say "but Is a different self manifest knowledge" because there's no empirical proof of its exisence, you're just question begging

The notion of a knower which knows itself is as absurd as a cause which causes itself. No cause causes itself, and no knower knows itself. A cause causes what's consequent and a knower knows what's consequent. Every effect is the effect of an antecedent cause and every known is known to it's antecedent knower. When you take this to it's logical conclusion there is an ultimate knower/causer which itself cannot be an effect nor can it be known. The ultimate knower =/= consciousness/awareness. Consciousnes/awareness = the state or quality of being conscious or aware. What does it mean to be conscious or aware? Those words are adjectives which describe the state of a subject, it's the subject who is aware or conscious, it's an attribute of the subject. When you add the -ness it turns into a noun, which makes it consciousness/awareness, but it's something which "belongs" to the subject. Let's take another word as an example, kind and kindness.
>Bob is kind to Billy
>Bob's kindness is really rubbing off on Billy
"Kind" describes Bob, it's an attribute of Bob, and in a crude way, "kindness" is what Bob "has", it's something that belongs to him. Likewise, to be conscious/aware implies a subject that is conscious/aware, and consciousness/awareness is something which the subject has, it's something which belongs to it.
>inb4 guenonfag responds that he and his school of thought simply disregards these definitions in favor of their own made up definitions with his slurry of AI posts, repeating the same tautological jargon of a self-evident, self-luminous awareness, and how anything else is incoherent

>>25108396
>The notion of a knower which knows itself is as absurd as a cause which causes itself
This

>>25107943
>awareness were itself an intellective act
Ifnthe intellective act Is different, then awareness Is a useless denomination, since all i need for intelection Is an intellect act in order to "intellect something" all i need to intellect this paragraph is the act of intellecting this paragrah, as said before, i don't need to know that i'm perceiving this paragraph,i just need to perceive this paragraph, the experience of the cognition of the paragraph Is self-sufficient, self-manifesting, a self-manifesting awareness in top of that is redundant

>>25108396
>No cause causes itself
>what is a self-mover/the necessary reality of free will for otherwise you must affirm quietism which defaults to nihilism and absolute meaninglessness because no matter what you happen to do that was the best thing to happen, your family dying in a horrible accident?, best possible world, you dying of a horrible wasting disease?, best possible world, "it is what it is"

>>25108452
If it has a cause, it is caused, if it is caused, the question arises, caused by what? That in itself implies a difference between the caused and it's cause. If the caused's cause were itself it, would not meaningfully tell you anything, it would be completely nonsensical and not congruent with the definition of the terms. If it were to be it's own cause, it might as well not have a cause at all, therefore, something that's self-caused would be effectively equivalent to something that does not have a cause, it's a distinction without a difference. If you say something is self-caused, it's tantamount to saying it just simply exists without any condition. Although they are effectively not different, one is semantically correct and the other isn't. Anything self-caused, self-known, self-luminous, is a contradiction in terms. A cause doesn't cause itself, it causes effects, the knower doesn't know themself, it knows objects of knowledge, light doesn't illuminate itself, it illuminates objects of illumination.

>>25108540
The effect of the absolute is freedom and purpose. Freedom is the power to will your purpose or deny it.
If causality is deterministic then causality makes no sense anyway, it reduces to monism where no causation actually occurs

>>25108540
Basically, if there is no difference between cause and effect, those terms become completely meaningless. A thing which causes itself is effectively causeless since the notion for a thing having a reason for it's existence arises precisely because there is a difference in the first place, that "this" is the reason for "that".
>>25108565
>reduces to monism where no causation actually occurs
That is the logical conclusion. The "cause" is the principle while the "effect" is it's attribute, the one appears as many like a snake appears as a rope or pixels appear as a movie. You can't really get around this logical conclusion if you say the ultimate cause is self-causing since it's not really different from saying it's causeless. It simply exists, and there is no becoming nor change, yet there is the appearance thereof. Because there is the appearance thereof, then there are degrees to reality, some levels are more or less real like how 2+2=5 is false yet it's closer to the truth than 2+2=7. That is to say that even though it ultimately doesn't exist it's still governed by order and logic insofar as it appears. Is it meaningless? To that I'd say that's a sentimental kind of question which isn't really relevant to what's true or not.

>>25108581
Then obviously determinism conclusion from a logic of causality is false since it negates the whole ordeal, and the axiom that lead to determinism is clearly false.

>>25108598
Tldr
Without free will nothing exists.

Determinism denies telos, no telos no better or worse, no better or worse no true or false, no true or false means all possible distinctions are equally real and equally unreal, therefore no distinctions truly exist, therefore nothing exists.

>>25108616
Could you elaborate on what your metaphysical view is?

File: Screenshot_20260225-143858~2.jpg (551.1 KB)

551.1 KB JPG

>>25108625
>>25106328

File: Screenshot_20260225-151212~2.jpg (354.1 KB)

354.1 KB JPG

>>25108123
On the Voluntary
and
on the Free Will of the One
>his awakening is <beyond being> and Intellect and | <intelligent life>, but these things are he himself. He is thus activity above intellect and thought and life.
Note: The term is ὑπερνόησις, a hapax in Greek literature prior to Plotinus. Cf. the related
term κατανόησις

>>25108355
>Prove it, show a text from mipham that clearly refutes what Malcom Is saying
In the end, it is beyond all expressions, such as: it is all and everything, it is not all, everything lies within it, or does not, and so on. It remains an individual experience of SELF-KNOWING AWARENESS

https://www.lotsawahouse.org/tibetan-masters/mipham/essence-of-mind

>>25108665
>ummm akually luminosity just refers to the purity of sunyat-ACK!!!

What we call “essence of mind” is the actual face of unconditioned pure awareness, which is recognized through receiving the guru's blessings and instructions. If you wonder what this is like, it is empty in essence, beyond conceptual reference; it is cognizant by nature, spontaneously present; and it is all-pervasive and unobstructed in its compassionate energy. This is the rigpa in which the three kāyas are inseparable.
https://www.lotsawahouse.org/tibetan-masters/mipham/essence-of-mind

Tbh it's no surprise that someone who has been described as an ideological libtard suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome would promote an interpretation of Dzogchen that's closer to materialism.

Maybe, if one were reading his comments charitably, one could perhaps say he is reacting against Shentong interpretations of Dzogchen and saying "Rigpa is not a determinate substantial awareness" which would still be correct. However, this is not how he frames the issue in the video that was posted.

>>25108288
>The problem Is that this identification never happens, you're always aware of something, thus awareness Is a quality
The core claim of the argument is that the intelligibility of epistemic predication logically requires a non-derivative principle. Simply asserting that awareness is a quality of something else is failing to respond to the argument and is failing to defend the position it refutes from the arguments refutation.

>fornwareness to be establish as a thing, it should be present to Is as a thing ir essence and not a quality
1) This is question-begging by smuggling in a representationalist criterion of existence, i.e. X exists only if X can be presented as an object of awareness.

2) The argument is pointing out that it is precisely that this criterion cannot be universally applied, because object-presentation itself presupposes something non-objectual.

3) If everything had to be objectified to exist, then objectification itself would be impossible, because the act of objectifying would require an already-intelligible field.

4) Therefore, that is failing to even respond to the actual point of the argument, much less challenge its reasoning which refutes your position.

You seem to be pathologically incapable of replying to the actual logical arguments people make without trying to bring up all sorts of red herrings which don't actually address the argument.

>>25108291
>It's not a descriptión but a theory of knowledge, you can't use the results of your theory to defend the arguments of your theory, that's circular reasoning
No, its a description of the basic features or experience.

1)Knowledge is only known to the extent that it is made manifest, there is no knowledge or sensation which is not manifest in some way.

2) This is why any theory which only classifies knowledge and sensation as casual factors interacting fails to plausibly account for experience, because causal relations are not sufficient to explain the fact of knowledge being manifest.

3) This is why is necessary to determine who or what knowledge is manifest for, because to connect this theory with our own experience, which is obviously and self-evidently manifest, it has to be explained how knowledge is manifest or you are missing one of the most essential elements.

4). If knowledge/awareness is not immediately self-manifest or self-disclosed in its very occurrence, and there is no other knowledge or awareness that is itself self-manifested, then there accordingly is a vicious regress that makes the manifestation (and hence the experience or knowing of) of any knowledge or sensation impossible.

>>25108293
>No Is not, a lot of philosopher and thinkers defend that positión
No, its inherently unserious, and even in that video he has to conjure up absurd scenarios to defend the skeptics thesis like thinking that when you are seeing a tomato its actually a demon fooling you that you are seeing a tomato, thereby you cant be sure or something. It's basically just a special kind of learned foolishness that certain people identify with for primarily ideological reasons, but its indefensible on the basis of experience.

>>25108335
>>Any coherent theory of knowledge therefore has to describe how knowledge becomes evident
>Lol no, that's redundant, knowledge Is how things become evident, so making evident the making evident of things Is tautological nonesense
This reply is premised on several confusions that make it logically invalid. The confusion is so deep that I'm leaning towards the conclusion that its deliberate sophism and not an honest mistake.

The first confusion is a category error, the argument is making a meta-epistemic claim about the conditions under which knowledge counts as knowledge, the argument is not about repeating the content of knowing. Your response that “Knowledge is how things become evident” identifies the act of knowing with the condition that makes the act intelligible, but these are not the same thing.

Your second confusion is conflating the explanandum with the explanatory ground. In calling a meta-epistemic claim about the conditions under which knowledge counts as knowledge "tautological” you are thereby assuming that to explain how knowledge becomes evident is equivalent to restating that knowledge is evident, But that’s demonstrably false because acknowledging that knowledge is evident by itself doesn't tell us anything about why or how this is possible.

Your response there is equivalent to saying that since things already move (knowledge is already evident), that therefore physics that explains how motion occurs (how knowledge is evident) is tautological, and this is equally wrong with the example of physics as it is with explaining the manifestation of knowledge.

>>25108346
>It Is, you can't be awarenof something in a wrong way, you can think that something Is different from what really Is, but that's not awareness, that a mental formulation, i can "think" a Mirage Is really an oasis, but that's a problema of conceptualización not of my conciousness, the content, the phenomena that creates the Mirage nor my idea of ir being annoasis ,Is not a mistake of my act of awareness, so your point makes no sense, you're mixing mental formations with acts of awareness

This response fails because it attempts to redefines the terms in order to evade the force of the original argument, thereby fallaciously begging the very question at issue in a classic petitio-principii fallacy. The claim being answered: “If cognition and its content were identical, then error would be impossible” is not a phenomenological report about how experience feels, nor a claim about psychological episodes, but a logical point about identity conditions, i.e. If a cognitive act just is its content, then there is no conceptual space for misrepresentation, because nothing could stand in contrast to what is cognized.

Replying to this by saying "awareness is intrinsically infallible and that all error belongs exclusively to mental formulations" is assuming the conclusion you are trying to prove without justifying it. Moreover, your explanation of error actually relies on the very distinction whose necessity you are denying and is therefore self-refuting.

When you say that one can “think a mirage is an oasis,” while awareness itself is not mistaken, you are implicitly appealing to a separation between (a) what appears, (b) how it is cognitively taken, and (c) the judgment that identifies it. That tripartite structure of appearance, cognition, and content is precisely what the original claim is pointing to: error is possible only if cognition is not identical with what appears or with what is judged. If cognition and content were identical, the mirage would simply be what it is taken to be, and misidentification would be unintelligible. Thus, the mirage example does not undermine the argument; it actually confirms it. Your response is therefore explanatorily parasitic: it uses the distinction between cognition and content to explain error while denying that such a distinction needs to be argued for, this is completely logically-incoherent.

>>25108349
>>Heidegger did not say objects are self-manifesting
>Yes he did, he called it Aletheia
That's not equivalent to saying that objects are self-manifesting because Aletheia is not a property, nature or ability of the objects themselves but is an event of disclosure that happens between Being, world, and Dasein, objects participate in it without possessing it themselves.

>>25108354
>>is taught by the scriptures and the tradition as what happens
>That's an argument from authority, thus fallacious
Incorrect because it's not an argument, it's just stating what their doctrine is and what the source of their doctrine is. You clearly don't understand the first thing about how fallacies work as you commit them constantly.

In order to disprove your false strawman claim about what their metaphysics teaches, it suffices to simply point out what their actual position is, there is no argument needed. They don't need to "prove" this doctrine is true in order to refute your false claim that they espouse a position which they don't in fact actually espouse, because merely stating they teach disproves your original false contention.

What you are doing is the exact same as if I tried to argue "Buddha said that 2+2 = 5, therefore he is wrong and a retard", and you tried to say "No, in the Buddhist scriptures he doesn't actually claim that and he claims the opposite", and I replied with "thats an argument from authority", only someone who completely misunderstands how fallacies work would say that.

>>25108356
>Again, the experience of a car is self-manifested,
We know that the car is not self-manifesting because when they do appear or become manifest, their appearing depends on lighting, perspective, sensory organs, interpretive frameworks, and background intelligibility, something that is self-manifesting does not require an external condition of disclosure at all.
>you're lighting a strawnan without actually engaging with the real arguments and refutations here
That's what you've been doing the entire thread, you have not provided a single logically-valid argument that doesn't involve a fallacy or a category error.
> you're trying to force a subject object dulity
another red herring, none of the arguments I've raised presuppose subject-object duality but all of them are centered around the logical necessity of various things in relation to awareness but without taking any stance on subject vs object.

>>25108360
>Not at all, i'm negating that knowledge the act are two different things, 1rst because that create two rules of knowledge turning the idea of knowledge useless, like saying a knife can cut a different way with using it's edge, or you can see with your eyes but without using them, it's forced, artificial and reify awareness making illumination impossible
>2nd because it circular, it needs a awareness in itself that then can be aware of itself, the only way you can defend it's existence Is by talking for granted that exist, so Is philosophically lady
>3rd creates a regress and no, you cant just say "but Is a different self manifest knowledge" because there's no empirical proof of its exisence, you're just question begging
This reply is premised on multiple logical errors.

First, you are mischaracterizing the claim you rejecting, which results in a straw-man. I was never positing two kinds of knowledge in the sense of two competing epistemic rules or faculties. The distinction being made is between an epistemic act/content and the condition by virtue of which such acts are evident at all. That is a difference in explanatory level, not a duplication of knowledge. The knife+eyes analogies therefore fail, because they assume the distinction is between two alternative ways of performing the same function, when in fact the distinction is between function and condition of intelligibility of that function. Saying “vision requires illumination” does not posit a second way of seeing; it explains how seeing is possible. So your objection collapses due to false analogy and category confusion, (informal logical fallacies).

Second, the accusation of circularity rests on misidentifying the structure of the argument. By treating self-manifestation as a second-order act, you reintroduces the very structure the view is designed to avoid and refute. This is a category mistake, not a refutation. Once the erroneous second-order act model is rejected there is no regress.

Third, the appeal to “lack of empirical proof” is a category error, the claim under discussion is not an empirical hypothesis about a detectable object or process; it is a transcendental claim about conditions of possibility. Demanding empirical proof here is like demanding sensory evidence for logical validity or temporal ordering. The argument does not infer self-manifest awareness from observation; it argues that denying it renders observation and knowledge unintelligible. Rejecting such an argument because it is “not empirical” is simply irrelevant.

Your argument begs the question while accusing me of doing so. You assumes from the outset that awareness must be an act among acts and that anything non-derivative is a reification. But that assumption is exactly what is under dispute, and your response implicitly relies on awareness already being evident in order to deny that manifestness needs explanation, which means your position presupposes what I pointed out.

>>25108396
>The notion of a knower which knows itself is as absurd as a cause which causes itself. No cause causes itself, and no knower knows itself. A cause causes what's consequent and a knower knows what's consequent. Every effect is the effect of an antecedent cause and every known is known to it's antecedent knower.
This argument illegitimately imports causal principles from physics into ontology/epistemology. This is a category mistake, a well-documented philosophical error.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/category-mistakes/

>When you take this to it's logical conclusion there is an ultimate knower/causer which itself cannot be an effect nor can it be known.
Category errors are fallacious and have no "logical conclusion" that is not fallacious lol

>The ultimate knower =/= consciousness/awareness. Consciousnes/awareness = the state or quality of being conscious or aware. What does it mean to be conscious or aware? Those words are adjectives which describe the state of a subject, it's the subject who is aware or conscious, it's an attribute of the subject.
All of this is a blatant question-begging fallacy (petitio princpii), its begging the question by presuming from the start the subject-attribute model of awareness and uses that circular presumption to argue that awareness cannot exist independently simply because it appears as an attribute. It denies the possibility of self-manifesting awareness by assuming the framework in which awareness can only be a property, but this is fallacious for obvious reasons.

>What does it mean to be conscious or aware? Those words are adjectives which describe the state of a subject, it's the subject who is aware or conscious, it's an attribute of the subject. When you add the -ness it turns into a noun, which makes it consciousness/awareness, but it's something which "belongs" to the subject. Let's take another word as an example, kind and kindness.
Setting aside that the nature of consciousness is not downstream of and determined by grammatical conventions (which this argument bizarrely and irrationally presumes), this can equally be plausibly explained instead as resulting from the distinction between consciousness-as-attribute and consciousness-as-subject being purely nominal and for the sake of convention and easier speech.

Lastly, your NPC view was already refuted here >>25098969:

"A subject that is not already itself conscious prior to any relation would be fundamentally incapable of knowing anything, because an insentient unconscious thing does not magically become conscious when another unconscious thing (the object) comes into a relation with it, from the perspective of a subject that lacks intrinsic awareness there is no difference between the presence and absence of objects, so the mere addition of an object cannot generate consciousness for the subject if the subject isn't already intrinsically conscious."

>>25108436
>Ifnthe intellective act Is different, then awareness Is a useless denomination
Its not useless because it is the condition of intelligibility of any epistemic event
> since all i need for intelection Is an intellect act in order to "intellect something"
All intellection that occurs in experience is evidently manifest in our knowledge as determinate content. Claiming that these contents are automatically made manifest through their very occurrence is tantamount to saying cognition is immediately self-manifest or self-evident through the very fact of merely occurring which is exactly what you've spent the whole thread arguing against using various fallacies
>i don't need to know that i'm perceiving this paragraph
1) Then you wouldn't perceive it at all
2) If you would be unable to remember it
>i just need to perceive this paragraph, the experience of the cognition of the paragraph Is self-sufficient, self-manifesting, a self-manifesting awareness in top of that is redundant
Saying that the experience of the cognition of the paragraph is self-manifesting is admitting that the reflexive awareness thesis is true. You played yourself.

>>25108565
>Freedom is the power to will your purpose or deny it.
This is a specifically modern conception of freedom that conceives of it as a menu of arbitrary choices among alternatives, the classic metaphysical and theological conception of freedom in western thought pre-modernity is the ability to accomplish one's end to which one is directed or oriented in accordance with the divine nature or ultimate telos without any obstacle blocking that. The classic conception of freedom would still apply to Neoplatonist emanationist models of the One and Vedantic conceptions of a non-dual Absolute that is not a willing person who decides things.

>>25108616
>Tldr
>Without free will nothing exists.
>Determinism denies telos
False, determinism in classic western theology is compatible with teleology; in fact, it ensures that the telos is realized. Determinism denies telos when it endorses deterministic strict causal reductionism and says "everything is explained only by prior causes and chance", however this is explicitly rejected by practically all religious models of determinism both western and eastern where causality is typically teleologically oriented toward God’s purposes.
>no telos no better or worse
False, normative or epistemic distinctions can exist without things have an inherent telos. But even in acosmic non-dualist eastern doctrines there is an overall telos where all the universe is directed towards a spiritual end.
>no better or worse no true or false
False, even if the normative distinctions mentioned above fail, it does not entail the collapse of all truth distinctions. This is because logical or metaphysical truths do not depend solely on human notions of telos.
>no true or false means all possible distinctions are equally real and equally unreal, therefore no distinctions truly exist, therefore nothing exists.
This conflates normative/epistemic distinctions (better/worse, true/false) with ontological existence, which is a category error. The claim “no true or false” is about propositional or epistemic status, not about whether entities exist in the world. Saying “if no truth exists, nothing exists” commits a category error because existence is not contingent on our ability to evaluate or judge truth.

Your chain of reasoning is logically invalid because it 1) relies on several steps which are non-sequiturs (presents conclusions which don't actually follow from their premise) and 2) relies on category errors.

>>25108658
Nowhere there does Plotinus describe or affirm the One as aware, sentient, conscious or a conscious subject.

The "free will" is not literal, the One has no alternatives to choose from and neither does it have a mechanism or a faculty by which it would choose. That emanation is voluntary signifies that emanation is self-originating from the One and not coerced from outside it. "Self-love" and "communion with itself" is using metaphorical language to describe the metaphysical necessity and self-sufficiency of the One, not any human-like emotion or relational experience.

Inferring that he secretly thought the One was sentient because he figuratively refers to it as having self-love is a really strained reading that isn't supported by the context.

The final bosses of religious metaphysic: Advaita, Buddhism & Neoplatonism. Kino

>>25108876
distinctions presupposes a sense of priorities and 'sense' that imply a value system—aka telos
It is not given that anything is self-evidently demarcated from anything, like electron is an anthropocentric concept.

>>25108887
Literally says he (the One—God) is hypernoesis

>>25109628
Ergo to point to anything exposes your preferences, it does not say anything about there being something there in and of itself.
Literally the whole point of Kant.

File: allegory-of-the-cave.jpg (160.3 KB)

160.3 KB JPG

>>25109637
(Or the Cave)
Don't be a positivist caveman.

File: Screenshot_20260226-030529~2.jpg (454.8 KB)

454.8 KB JPG

>>25108849
This in fact an anachronism perpetuated by monists or crypto pantheists who feel icky when God is referred to as Father because "uhm achylusky ITS genderless and impersonal"
Plenty ancient accounts attributing a choosing between options to God and Souls.
Yes freedom is also 'freedom from' but in no way is that exclusive from freedom as the Will to act or not to act, aka literally what self-motion implies. Nothing but the soul can move the soul unless she wills.

>>25092400
Nah, he actually just rebranded Madhyamaka Buddhism for pearl-clutching brahmins. His critics accused him of being a secret buddhist anyways.

Buddhism got out of India because of the Bhakti movement (whose proponents were more likely to follow Dvaita Vedanta, and not Advaita), which is basically the hindu version of evangelical christianity, a religious movement for dumb hysterical masses.

>>25096108
Trika/Kashmir Shaivism is way more interesting and explains monism in a more complete way than Advaita. But Advaita is admittedly more elegant and cohesive in its simplicity.

Abhinavagupta was a way better philosopher than Shankara, though

>>25109133
Imo, the top 6 would be:
1. Trika (a.k.a. Kashmir Shaivism)
2. Neoplatonism
3. Advaita Vedanta
4. Wahdat al-Wujud
5. Madhyamaka
6. Eckhartian Mysticism
Nothing else can beat those schools of religious metaphysics. Every other theological thought sounds like dumb cargo cult shit in comparison

>>25108876
cringe sophist.

File: Screenshot_20260226-152204~2.jpg (594.4 KB)

594.4 KB JPG

Imagining being anything when you can the best of both worlds and gave your cake and eat it too (aka Trika/Eastern Neoplatonism).

>>25109628
> distinctions presupposes a sense of priorities and 'sense' that imply a value system—aka telos
I believe in the universe having some degree of telos, as do most eastern doctrines, but this is not a reliable inference because distinctions can plausibly be explained alternatively as humans imposing their concepts onto the world without those arising from telos. As stated, I’m not opposed to telos and agree with it, but I disagree that determinism is opposed to telos, and I oppose any sloppy reasoning even if that sloppy reasoning is used to infer views that I agree with.

> It is not given that anything is self-evidently demarcated from anything, like electron is an anthropocentric concept.
Demarcations don’t need to be conceptually impose by humans to distinguish things from each other, the very fact of having different properties already demarcates two things as different even before someone comes along and thinks about it.

>>25109633
> Literally says he (the One—God) is hypernoesis
Yes, but that doesnt mean “super-knowing”, he is just saying the One is beyond the Nous, however that is not making any explicit statement about whether its aware, sentient, conscious etc. Every time he mentions being conscious etc he connects that with Nous or lower levels.

>>25109783
Pretty good list, but vanilla barebones Indian Madhyamaka is kinda cringe without additional supplementary stuff like Mahāmadhyamaka (like Dzogchen) that completes it.

>>25109715
> Nah, he actually just rebranded Madhyamaka Buddhism for pearl-clutching brahmins
His exposition of classic Advaita has nothing to do with Madhyamaka.

Classic Indian Madhyamaka claims to have no viewpoint and it rejects both a self and an existing Absolute and it says the two truths are just an epistemic meta-statement about reality. It attacks having any view.

Advaita is the opposite of all this and affirms a non-dual Self that is identical with the Absolute, and their two truths is not merely an epistemic meta-statement but an ontological distinction between the Absolute as it truly exists and its false mode-of-appearance. They affirm that you can have views about ultimate reality that are correct insofar as expressing particular truths about it so long as these are carefully clarified and tempered by the understanding that concepts cannot fully grasp and objectify ultimate reality but only indicate things about it.

Gaudapada and Shankara only agree with the Madhyamaka dialectical refutation of real arising because that agrees with the thesis of change and production being ultimately unreal that is already laid out in the pre-Buddhist Chandogya Upanishad, they regard the underlying logic of the argument as right even when advocated by people with a wrong worldview from
their perspective, they dont accept anything else from Madhyamaka and they reject all of its metaphysical stances in particular.

Gaudapada and Shankara are not the first historical Hindu authors to write about a two truths either, the 4th century Hindu philosopher Bhartrihari in his metaphysics teaches an ontological two truths equivalent to the Advaita version where his monist Shabda-Brahman falsely appears as multiplicity while remaining one and undivided. Bhartrihari is basically a proto-Advaitin and articulates many of the views of Gaudapada and Shankara but entirely in dialogue with Brahminical schools like Nyaya and Mimamsa and without any connection to Buddhism. Gaudapada and Shankara accept many of Bhratrari’s positions as correct (or as correct expositions of Upanishadic teachings) and integrate them into their metaphysics as well as his model of self-luminosity and they only critique his linguistic theories, just like Abhinavagupta who also accepts many of Bhartrihari’s positions but who accepts his linguistic theories to a greater degree instead of flat-out rejection.

>>25110298
>Imagining being anything when you can the best of both worlds and gave your cake and eat it too
Tantric schools like Trika and others are more suitable for laypeople with jobs and families and those of stronger rajasic and tamasic leanings while people of a very high sattvic disposition are often more suited for monasticism. Advaita admits this itself which is why some of the Advaitin temples teach Sri Vidya Tantra to its laypeople followers as a valid path more suitable for them.

With that said, a lot of the Trika criticisms of Advaita are highly misleading or flat-out wrong and it has the tone of something that one’s immature younger brother might say to his older brother. In that picture for example, the notes is complaining that the Advaitin doctrine of jagad-mithya is vikalpa and not saksatkara, but this is criticism is silly because saksatkara is non-conceptual and so the only true saksatkara in Trika is self-recognition or pratyabhijna which is immediate and non-conceptual; however in Advaita self-realization or the dawning of correct self-knowledge that is simultaneous with the sublation of ignorance is itself also immediate and non-conceptual. So, both doctrines actually agree that only Self-realization or Self-recognition is true saksatkara and that everything else about either’s doctrine that is grasped conceptually is not true saksatkara. Since both schools actually have the same stance on this, any criticism of one school by the other on this point is entirely misplaced.

>>25110322
>he doesn't know

>>25110314
>the very fact of having different properties already demarcates two things as different even before someone comes along and thinks about it.
Begging the question

>>25110432
>Begging the question
Wrong my small-brained friend. It would only be begging the question if I was trying to prove anything, which I wasn’t. I was merely disputing another anon’s assertion that distinctions in the world prove telos by highlighting another way those distinctions can be plausibly explained without telos, thereby showing that his conclusion does not follow necessarily from his premise.

For me to demonstrate that his conclusion does not follow necessarily from his premise I don’t have to prove anything true but merely have to highlight another plausible example, as I did. Highlighting this alternative example is not itself begging the question, because its not presuming anything and then concluding anything on that basis, as I’m not concluding “therefore telos isnt real” and I actually agree that things have telos but I simply think he is using sloppy reasoning that boils down to non-sequiturs to arrive there.

>>25110467
Any claim about anything is cosmic claim, to say anything about one thing is to imply something about everything. There are no independent fields.

>>25110467
>distinctions
There are no distinctions unless you have a reason to recognize them.
There are infinite possible divisions of phenomena, none of them are objectively real independent of your beliefs.
In other words, there is no IS without OUGHT

>>25110424
I'm not an specialist on any of them, but from what I know, I think the biggest edge of Trika over Advaita isn't the ethos of self-realization or its approach to lifestyle, but the actual theology, in which Trika gives a better explanation about true omnipotence and omnipresence.

While Advaita uses a lot of arguments closer to a "theology of negation", Trika dismisses that by assuming that, if we can conceive any idea about God/Brahman, it must be true somehow, otherwise we couldn't be conceiving it and neither God would be actually everything that He can possibly be. So God both IS and IS NOT everything you could think of, so monism and pluralism and everything in-between (including dualism) are all paradoxically true.
Which also means that the Self is Brahman and also it's own thing simultaneously, by the fact the Brahman (called Shiva) is so universally encompassing that is ceases to be Itself in order to experience reality in all of its possible forms.

It proposes a paradox to solve all the other "paradoxes of omnipotence".
I think it's that what makes Trika a better metaphysical school than Advaita.

I do admit, however, that the Tantric and Shaktist stuff is mostly filler and kinda silly sometimes.

>>25111513
>I'm not an specialist on any of them, but from what I know, I think the biggest edge of Trika over Advaita isn't the ethos of self-realization or its approach to lifestyle, but the actual theology, in which Trika gives a better explanation about true omnipotence and omnipresence.
This

>>25108841
>ts not useless because it is the condition of intelligibility of any epistemic event
Nope, because it can't justify itself, the conditions of intelligibility Is in the evento itself, there's no need ir reason to create a second conditions

>>25108841
>1) Then you wouldn't perceive it at all
Not really, there's not need for a second order awareness for perception to occur
>2) If you would be unable to remember it
Again, there's no need for a second order awareness for memories to occur, awareness can't storage data, and being aware of the memory of a event isn't the same thing of being aware of an event

>>25108841
>Saying that the experience of the cognition of the paragraph is self-manifesting is admitting that the reflexive awareness thesis is true. You played yourself.
On the contrary, Is saying that reflexive awareness Is useless and redundant, also destroys the atman thesis, since there's no need for a unchanging awareness that castnlight into things, events aré their own light

>>25108665
That doesn't refute any of malcoms takes on emptiness and luminosity

>>25108814
>The distinction being made is between an epistemic act/content and the condition by virtue of which such acts are evident at all
The conditions of possibility of knowledge Is not a form of knowledge,i don't knows thanks to a reflective awareness, i know thanks to the act of knowing,the conditions of possibility of knowledge is established in the event of knowledge not in an abstract "knowledge itself" that has no actual epistemic input,knowledge, so this idea that the conditions of possibility of knowledge can be in any way different than the act of knowledge Is ridículous, that's why the analogy of the knife works, cos it shows how useless this idea of conciousness Is
>Saying “vision requires illumination”
The eyes AND the light are two completly different things, so your analogy doesn't work, if awareness Is the light then the eyes are something different from this awareness, Is the light "seeing" the eyes?why there's eyes ir the light can see? Who's seeing with the eyes then?it doesn't make any sense, and you can see the problem there, if you divide the act and its conditions of possibility but at the same Time want to be the same, knifes can cut themselves and light Is the one seeing the eyes, you want to have the cake and eat it too almost literally
>the accusation of circularity rests on misidentifying the structure of the argument
No, the circularity happens because the argument already established awareness as a thing in itself, so you can prové that awareness is a thing in itself with an argument that takes this awareness in itself as axiomatic
The reflexiveness Is predicated upon the idea that awareness must know itself to avoid a regress, this already establish an awareness in itself that "must exist" and be aware of itself
Well that awareness Is not self-evident, Is not needed and logically would fall into a regress anyways since if its the same awareness needed for a object it would fall into a regress and if it's not then it's not needed since i only need to be aware of objects for an experience to be established
>, the appeal to “lack of empirical proof” is a category error,
Lol no, Is exausting all possibilities, since logically the reflexive awareness makes no sense, the only option Is finding it as self-evident or empirically true, and since that's not the case we can discard it, good thing that you at least admit that reflexiveness Is not self-evident

>>25108753
>a) what appears, (b) how it is cognitively taken, and (c) the judgment that identifies it.
No, it's between what appears andnthe judgement, there's no need for B,you see something and you think its something else, so cognition and it's content arebidentical, the problem Is how you judge that content
>the mirage would simply be what it is taken to be
Lol no, because it's the content of the mirage the thing that makes me think Is an oasis, the problem Is not in the content but in my conceptualisation of the content

>>25108665
>>25108671
Kek you knew what you just posted proves absolutely nothing and end up triggering yourself into a magtard meltdown

>>25108691
>The core claim of the argument is that the intelligibility of epistemic predication logically requires a non-derivative principle
1a prínciple Is not a thing, saying that all things share a quality of awareness, which Is already a pinciple, doesn't articulates into awareness can exist as a thing itself because all experiences have awareness as partnof its relational aspect
2Wanting to servir a sustantially awareness from thatbis a no -sequitor
3saying that it must be delivered into a sustantial first principle Is question begging, presupouse the necessity of an essence, but other types of non-sustantialist ontologies aré possible
>This is question-begging by smuggling in a representationalist criterion of existence
No Is not, Is an empirical observations, you're free to prove that an empirical act of awareness without an object Is possible, but on this matter the burden of proof Is on you, i don't need to prove that you're aware of objects, the fact that you're reading this makes it self-evident
>because the act of objectifying would require an already-intelligible field.
Question begging, the only way that's possible ir you already take for granted that a soetnofnplato ic system ofnideas Is necessary for intellection

>incapable of replying to the actual logical arguments
You seen to be unable to realize that most of your arguments aré circular and need an already established worldview to confirm that same worldview, you need a self-sufficient and self-manifest awareness to prove that awareness exist, but i can jua deny that Said awareness Is self-evident and your whole system crumbles, that why you keep repeating yourself trying again and again without never adding anything new to the conversatión, you need to rely on ad hominem because you can't actually engage on the arguments in question, because that would imply abandoning even for a second your dogmátic worldview, even when that worldview didn't heló you in any way

>>25111838
>but i can jua deny that Said awareness Is self-evident
This is true of any claim. But just because you verbally disbelieve something doesn't mean it is false or even that you yourself truly don't know that it is true. Anyone can claim to deny what they definitely do know.

>>25111902
(You can deny the earth physically goes around the sun if you don't know better, but you can still claim to deny this even once you know better—then you can claim, by introducing a new framework (sophistry), that actually the Earth and sun goes around a common point off centre; but yet the Earth goes around the sun and you know it.)

>>25104153
Nta, but this sounds interesting. Forgive me, but this sounds alot like panentheism or am I mistaken?

File: 1748424631710055.gif (2 MB)

2 MB GIF

>>25092400
If by BTFO you mean he created a strawman that Buddhists already rejected 600 years prior then beat the shit out of said strawman and pretended he won, sure I guess. But hes usually pretty memed on by Buddhists especially those from traditions that arose out of Nalanda.

I don't even have any say in this fight, because its irrelevant to me personally, but all of his problems with say Madhyamaka were all explicitly rejected by Nagarjuna hundreds of years earlier. From my non-Buddhist, non-Hindu/advaita/whatever perspective, he looks a bit retarded.

A lot of scholars I've seen discuss the topic don't think he was as educated as he needed to be to refute Mahayana logic accurately. If you can't argue against what a tradition is actually saying and are reliant on your own interpretation of said tradition, is your argument at all worthwhile? Probably not.

>>25111686
>Nope, because it can't justify itself, the conditions of intelligibility Is in the evento itself,
1) A thing's logical precondition is by definition only identical with itself in the case of things which are eternal, independently-existing, uncaused and unconditioned, I actually agree that all these things are true of awareness although you yourself are not willing to grant that true.
2) Saying that awareness of mental states is immediately self-manifested in their very occurrence (they form their own condition of intelligibility) without depending on subsequent mental states is exactly the view which is endorsed by the reflexive awareness thesis.

>>25111691
>>1) Then you wouldn't perceive it at all
>Not really, there's not need for a second order awareness for perception to occur
Our perceptions and sensations are clearly evident to us in our experience. Until you explain how these perceptions and sensations become evident in experience and what they are evident for and how then you have not actually given an account of how experience and awareness takes place. You are contradicting yourself and flip-flopping in very other post when you say a) the knowledge just occurs and is evident through the mental event itself and then you say b) "I don't need to know that I know the table", those are affirming two completely different things, to "know that you know X" is precisely for that knowledge to be immediately evident in your experience through its occurrence.

As already explained, reflexive awareness is not a second-order awareness, for you to repeat again that is a strawman fallacy.

Any sort of memory also presupposes reflexive awareness of you experiencing the object when the memory-event occurred, because in memory you are not merely remembering the object but you are remembering yourself being present and consciously experiencing the object, this would be impossible if you had no reflexive awareness of yourself or your awareness as being present when the object was perceived.

>>25111692
>>Saying that the experience of the cognition of the paragraph is self-manifesting is admitting that the reflexive awareness thesis is true.
Reflexivity *is* self-manifestation you fool. You are just attributing the self-manifestation to the cognitive act itself instead of to awareness itself, after you previously spend most of the thread denying self-manifestation. This is essentially the approach that Dharmakirti and Dinnaga take, but both Shankara and Mipham completely BTFO it and show why it doesn't work and why you logically and phenomenally need an abiding luminous awareness that remains present while revealing the mental events. Literally the central polymath and central systematic thinker of the entire Nyingma Dzogchen tradition painstakingly explains in detail why your exact viewpoint is wrong.

Mental events are momentary, content-laden, and variable, whereas awareness is that which is invariant across their arising and ceasing and functions as the non-derivative condition for their manifestness. The fact that a changing event is given without mediation presupposes a constant, non-occurrent luminosity in virtue of which “occurrence” is manifest as such. If awareness were strictly identical with any particular event or with the stream of events, awareness would inherit their temporality and variability and thus could not account for the uniform fact of disclosure across distinct contents and times; conversely, the variability of contents would become unintelligible without a stable revealing principle. Awareness is not another mental event (like a second-order awareness) alongside other events, but the self-revealing condition that makes their immediate givenness possible without being exhausted by them.

Both Shankara and Mipham make the exact point expressed in the above paragraph and endorses that same logic, even though both follow a different epistemological model.

>>25111775
>i know thanks to the act of knowing,the conditions of possibility of knowledge is established in the event of knowledge
Saying the logical pre-condition of the act of knowing inheres in the act of knowing means that its unconditioned, uncaused, eternal and free from all causal as well as other dependencies. You are too confused to even understand the implications of what you are arguing. Secondly, that's effectively saying that mental events are self-manifesting without any abiding awareness involved, but Shankara and Mipham already refuted that. It would be impossible to even perceive change or motion if there was no revealing awareness remaining present in order that the contrast be distinctly perceived. Determinate content cannot reveal itself because determination already presupposes illumination, only an indeterminate awareness can reveal determinate mental content.

>The eyes AND the light are two completly different things, so your analogy doesn't work
It works perfectly, because mental events and their logical pre-conditions (namely the condition of awareness) are two different things.
>if awareness Is the light then the eyes are something different from this awareness, Is the light "seeing" the eyes?
All of that is irrelevant and not the purpose of the analogy, which is merely the highlight the instance of one thing and another thing that the first thing is dependent upon to perform its function, which it does.

>No, the circularity happens because the argument already established awareness as a thing in itself
Wrong, this is just a lie. The argument doesn't make any claims about whether awareness is a discrete entity or not and the underlying logic remains the same either way. Mipham uses the exact same regress argument to argue that its logically necessary that there is an abiding awareness (that is rigpa) that is distinct from the changing mental events (even though they are appearances of rigpa and not ontologically separate). even though he doesn't consider rigpa to be a discrete entity, and that proves that the underlying logic of the argument works the same independently of whether you considered awareness as discrete or having svabhava or not, since Mipham employs the argument in an identical way to Shankara.

>Lol no, Is exausting all possibilities, since logically the reflexive awareness makes no sense
Appealing to a lack of empirical proof for something that is being asserted on the basis of a logical demonstration not premised on empirical proofs is a category error by definition.

>>25111786
>No, it's between what appears andnthe judgement, there's no need for B,you see something and you think its something else, so cognition and it's content arebidentical, the problem Is how you judge that content
This is not an argument but is just a restatement of your position, which has already been shown to be incoherent.

>the mirage would simply be what it is taken to be
>Lol no, because it's the content of the mirage the thing that makes me think Is an oasis, the problem Is not in the content but in my conceptualisation of the content
This is simply re-introducing (b) under another name because “What makes me think it’s an oasis” is precisely a mode of cognitive taking and is not the bare appearance as such.

In denying a mediating cognitive factor (b), you are trying to explain error by circularly appealing to error, but just relabeled as 'the content is misleading'. In doing this you are fallaciously equivocating between the two separate meanings of 1) mere appearance and 2) appearance-as-presenting-X which are actually two distinct and separate things.

If cognition just is its content and there is no difference, how can conceptualization be about that content without already being a distinct act? If cognition = content and judgment misidentifies content then judgment must be distinct from cognition, which contradicts your original claim of identity.

You want to claim the identity of cognition and content to deny any mediating layer (b)
But saying judgement misidentifies the content presupposes the judgement is distinct from cognition
You can’t have both without contradiction.

If you want to resolve this logical contradiction by saying that content and cognition are the same, but that judgment is a different mental faculty than the cognition-that-is-content, and that this is how judgement is able to judge the cognition, then that is simply admitting (b) under a different name.

Why?

Because in saying "judgment interacts with perceptual content and judges it that way" that necessarily introducing an epistemic mode of access or a cognitive-taking which is just (b)

Remember, the original distinction was A) the given or object, (B) its mode of availability, and (C) the judgment.

In saying "there is no need for B, because judgement (C) interacts with and judges the given (A)", that is just preserving B as the interaction that occurs between the given and the judging faculty, while at the same time claiming wrongly to jettison B.

You played yourself again

>>25111838
>1a prínciple Is not a thing, saying that all things share a quality of awareness, which Is already a pinciple, doesn't articulates into awareness can exist as a thing itself because all experiences have awareness as partnof its relational aspect
>2Wanting to servir a sustantially awareness from thatbis a no -sequitor
>3saying that it must be delivered into a sustantial first principle Is question begging, presupouse the necessity of an essence, but other types of non-sustantialist ontologies aré possible
All 3 of these responses are red herrings which don't actually address the point of the argument, which is about the logical necessity of a non-objective indeterminate luminous awareness being present in order for determinate mental events to be experienced or made manifest. The argument is just calling it a 'principle' as a placeholder term and the argument is purely logical and has no connection to any metaphysical or ontological affirmations of substantial existence, svabhava, permanence etc. All of your responses misinterpreted the argument (or deliberately committed a red herring fallacy) as a point about inferring a substance, when that has nothing to do with the argument.

>No Is not, Is an empirical observations,
Wrong, it's a textbook question-begging fallacy for you to assert that anything evident or present it needs to be so as an object. That is precisely what is under dispute, so citing that as an assertion lacks any logical validity as an argument.
>you're free to prove that an empirical act of awareness without an object Is possible,
This isn't what is being claimed, reflexive awareness is not a discrete empirical act of awareness directed at nothing but is an abiding and self-knowing presence that remains invariably present and through which objects are revealed, it doesn't depend on objects like how directed epistemtic acts do. Rigpa is not an act and neither is Atman.

>>because the act of objectifying would require an already-intelligible field.
>Question begging,
False, it isn’t question-begging because it does not assume the conclusion; it derives a necessary condition from the opponent’s premise and shows that the premise undermines itself.

>You seen to be unable to realize that most of your arguments aré circular and need an already established worldview to confirm that same worldview
Incorrect, I've already provided multiple logically-valid arguments that refute your position, such as 1) the classic regress argument, 2) the memory argument and 3) Suresvara's transcendental modal argument.

All of your replies to these have consisted of nothing but strawmen, red-herrings, category errors and other fallacies of similar type. Therefore, you have demonstrably been refuted because you have been completely incapable of providing logically-valid responses to anything I've said.

>>25110949
>Any claim about anything is cosmic claim, to say anything about one thing is to imply something about everything
Wrong, a fallacy like question-begging is a very specific thing that is only true under certain conditions, which I did not fulfill. You are simply using the term incorrectly like an amateur.

Their argument was:
P: Distinctions exist
C: Therefore, telos is real (because of X connection)

I replied with, “That’s a non-sequitur because there are other plausible explanations besides X, so telos does not automatically follow from P.”
Me saying that was not attempting to falsify C (¬C), but was showing P does not entail C.
It only meets the definition of question-begging if I was using an argument that presupposed ¬C in order to reject C.

>>25110980
>There are no distinctions unless you have a reason to recognize them.
So water and fire aren't different unless something thinks about it? Sounds like a schizo worldview

>>25111693
>That doesn't refute any of malcoms takes on emptiness and luminosity
Malcom said that luminosity refers to refers to the absence of contamination in emptiness and seemed to deny that luminosity has any intended connection meaning with awareness or that there is an abiding awareness within things that is denoted by rigpa, ground etc.

I have no idea why he would say this, and its possibly just a context-dependent quote talking about historical interpretations, but what Malcolm say there, if taken at face-value, contradicts all the masters of the Nyingma tradition from Longchenpa and Mipham which refer to Ground as being inherently aware, cognizant, a self-knowing presence, and not just "absence of svabhava which is pure".

Many of the arguments Mipham makes about epistemology are explicitly predicated on Dharmakaya/Ground/Ripga being a genuinely conscious awareness and don't work otherwise, for example when he says that the epistemology of Dharmakirti/Dinnaga is incomplete and doesn't work because you need an abiding luminous awareness like the Ground that remains present even when those mental states change in order to explain error, judgement etc; this argument presupposes that the awareness of Ground is non-figurative.

Claiming that Ground/Dharmakaya isn't actually aware/sentient/conscious whatsoever is a much more radical claim than saying that Ground isn't regarded as reflexively self-aware, which is already itself a questionable claim.

>In the Natural Great Perfection, all the virtues of the nature are present spontaneously as uncompounded clarity in the Mind, which transcends the mind and is the Intrinsic Awareness and spontaneously present wisdom
-Gyurmed Tshewang Chogdrub


You can even find teaching materials with Malcom's named attached to them where he disagrees with what is stated in that video (if its taken at face value)

for example:

5. Lesson 5: Pristine Consciousness (ye shes)
IN THIS LESSON, Ācārya Malcolm Smith explores pristine consciousness (tib. ye shes). Malcolm identifies two
types of pristine consciousness: the self-originated “ultimate” pristine consciousness that has always known its own
state and a “relative” pristine consciousness that operates on the basis of the cognition of objects.
https://wisdomexperience.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/lesson-5.pdf

If there is no special ground-awareness but only ordinary awareness and "luminosity merely denotes the purity of emptiness" then Malcom is contradicting that by teaching that there is a special pristine consciousness that always knows its own state vs a relative consciousness operating on the basis of object-cognition.

>>25112204
>Nta, but this sounds interesting. Forgive me, but this sounds alot like panentheism or am I mistaken?
His stanford encyclopedia of philosophy article is a good place to begin if you want to learn more

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/shankara/

At the end of his day, none of the western terms like 'monism', 'pantheism' or 'panentheism' apply neatly to Shankara's classic non-dualism, all of those terms in the normal interpretation of them imply something that isn't true in Advaita. It could be called panentheist in a certain qualified sense that the visible universe is pervaded through and through by Brahman and has a 1-way non-reciprocal ontological dependence upon Brahman. Brahman is not reducible to this universe and does not 'blur' into a confusion with its objects, but at the same time the universe is ultimately just an appearance of Brahman and is not a second truly-existing thing.

>>25112288
>I don't even have any say in this fight, because its irrelevant to me personally, but all of his problems with say Madhyamaka were all explicitly rejected by Nagarjuna hundreds of years earlier.
He doesn't even try to refute Madhyamaka but he explicitly says its not deserving of a serious response, all of his actual logical arguments are explicitly directed at Abhidharma and Yogachara, and they are serious arguments and have been treated seriously by scholars. The Buddhists never even attempted to provide a rebuttal to them.

He was under the impression Madhyamaka taught a general nihilistic non-existence of everything and he therefore considered it not a serious view worth responding to and he says this explicitly, a common misunderstanding also shared by many other prominent Vedantic and Nyaya authors of his day. A more correct understanding of it did not emerge for another 200-300 years among Hindu authors, and even then they still weren't impressed with it even after correctly understanding it.

When people claim there are issues with his arguments against Madhyamaka it's just a give-away that they don't actually know what they are talking about, since he doesn't explicitly argue against Madhyamaka.

>>25111513
>While Advaita uses a lot of arguments closer to a "theology of negation", Trika dismisses that by assuming that, if we can conceive any idea about God/Brahman, it must be true somehow, otherwise we couldn't be conceiving it and neither God would be actually everything that He can possibly be.
I don't follow the logical connection there. Why would humans being able to imagine God as X or Y mean that must be true somehow? Why not just assume that humans can imagine fictional scenarios or superimpose any 1 idea onto another idea without them being necessarily connected metaphysically?

I agree that it's more poetically extravagant and showy but I don't see how it adds metaphysical or philosophical coherence or even explanatory-value in any way. It also departs heavily from classical logic. I don't think classical logic is automatically infallible always, but if one is going to depart from it there should be a clear and unambiguous justification of why which also shows that one's move is not thereby contradictory/illogical IMO.

Abhinavagupta plays fast and loose with classical logic in his metaphysics but then he still relies on it when trying to engage dialectically with the position of other schools that he disagrees with.

Sirs…

>>25112713
>Its not worth arguing because I believe its XYZ
>"No not XYZ, its ABC this has already been stated"
>lalalala I don't care, I DON'T CARE
Lol
Also all of his pissyness towards Yogacara weren't actual arguments if you want to go down this route too, and end up just being his own reclassifications rather than any real refutation.

This is not a game you want to play with Shankaras bs my friend. Also the Buddhists didn't provide a rebuttal because most of this had already been denied before. All of his concerns had been addressed, it was nothing new to Buddhists, so they just shrugged and moved on.
The funniest result of all this is that Shankaras reclassifcations of already existing Buddhist work were so unconvincing that other Hindu flavors and vedic philosophers ended up accusing him of being a crypto buddhist. Prachanna Bauddha.

Basically all this boils down to him is trying to pull of a marketing W rather than any actual intellectual debate, as proven by his avoidance of topics he didn't understand, and the weak reclassifications of Yogacara that neither the Hindus, Vedic philosophers, or the Buddhists of the time were impressed by.

>>25112732
>Lol
Seethe and cope all you want, but calling his supposed arguments against something faulty is very different from the truth that he had some misconceptions about it but never tried to mount a logical refutation of it to begin with, an argument cannot be faulty if one never made that argument, The actual arguments he makes are very sound.

>Also all of his pissyness towards Yogacara weren't actual arguments
Wrong, they are all logically-valid arguments.

His arguments regarding the relative existence of external objects *as* external function as a logically-valid reductio argument that uses transcendental or presuppositional reasoning, it argues for the necessity of external objects by showing that perception and cognition presuppose their existence, while Yogachara's denial of their externality conversely leads to logical and epistemic incoherence.

His arguments criticizing their epistemology (some of which Mipham would repeat centuries later) are also valid and simply take the Yogachara account of mind and experience and shows how it fails to match up with experience or isn't logically coherent by noting various faults like:

1) the alaya-vijnana cannot ground the tendencies and memory if its momentary like Dharmakirti says because a momentary thing cannot abide long enough to transmit that information or receive prior transmitted information.
2) the individual mental events would be unable to combine to produce our smooth united experience because their self-manifestation or self-knowing of themselves would only take place for the moment they occur before vanishing, and there is nothing that would connect this with the self-knowing of the next mental event, much less allow the simultaneous disclosure of different types of sensations and knowledge all at once in the same moment of experience where all of them like sound, thought, sight all flash at once in the same moment of awareness.

I will admit that he was wrong to think Yogachara denies a difference between cognition and content, since they dont actually do this. His arguments against this position as a view are valid though.

>This is not a game you want to play with Shankaras bs
There is no bs, his arguments are sound and the Buddhists have no arguments refuting his position. All of the few Madhyamaka critiques that mention Vedanta are predicated on strawman fallacies and western academics have noted this in books and articles.

>didn't provide a rebuttal because most of this had already been denied before.
In a few cases they anticipated his arguments and tried to provide solutions, but those solutions are incoherent and typically already refuted by Shankara. For example, in response to the argument that without an abiding revealing awareness there is no unity of experience, Yogacharins claim the momentary vijnanas impart casual efficiency to each other, and are linked in a chain, however this is already refuted by Shankara's arguments against momentariness.

>>25112561
>If cognition just is its content and there is no difference
No major school of Buddhism or historical Buddhist philosopher actually denies that there is a difference between cognition and content btw, so I'm not sure why the other guy is denying their difference while claiming to argue from a Buddhist perspective, it seems like he doesn't even understand Buddhism and is just trying to play the devils advocate by arguing for the most NPC-tier theory of mind possible, or maybe he misunderstood Buddhist epistemology as denying conscious experience.

Even when Yogachara says both cognition and content are mind-only they still admit its necessary to make a logical distinction between the revealing subjective aspect of awareness (Vijñāna/ātmaka) and the grasped or given content-aspect (vishaya/ākāra/Snang yul) and these two are further distinguished from conceptual imputation. Similarly, all the Tibetan schools and other schools who employ formal or analytic Indian-style reasoning all admit the distinction between cognition and content as necessary.

>>25112914

No formal school of Buddhism in either classical Indian or Tibetan contexts denies the distinction between cognition and its content, because maintaining this distinction is a necessary precondition for any coherent epistemology. Indian Buddhist schools such as Yogācāra and the pramāṇa-based traditions of Dignāga and Dharmakīrti explicitly differentiate between the subject-aspect of awareness (ātmaka), the content-aspect of cognition (ākāra or vishaya), and the conceptual imputation (kalpanā or prajñapti). This tripartite distinction allows them to explain error, misperception, and memory while preserving the reflexive self-awareness of cognition (svasaṃvedana). Collapse of cognition into its content would render veridicality and falsity unintelligible, undermine causal explanations of mental tendencies, and make normative claims about knowledge impossible. Even Yogācāra, often misread as equating mind and object, relies upon the logical differentiation between the knowing act, the object-aspect, and the conceptual overlay to account for the diversity of experience and the continuity of cognitive events.

Tibetan scholars, most notably Tsongkhapa in the Gelug tradition, likewise affirm the distinction between cognition and content, framing it in terms of shes pa (the substantive act of knowing) and snang yul (the appearing content) while emphasizing the epistemic necessity of this differentiation. Tsongkhapa critiques any reading of Yogācāra or Madhyamaka that would collapse subject and object, arguing that conventional truth, valid cognition, and the possibility of error all presuppose that a cognitive act is not identical with its object. Similarly, the distinction underpins the explanation of memory, recognition, and conceptual classification in Tibetan epistemology. Across both Indian and Tibetan contexts, the formal philosophical treatment of cognition consistently recognizes that the differentiation between the act of knowing and the object known is indispensable; any suggestion that Buddhism denies this distinction arises from misinterpretation of soteriological or phenomenological rhetoric, not from the positions of canonical philosophical schools.

>>25112696
I see. Thanks for the info. You got any recs?

File: shankara chart.jpg (2 MB)

2 MB JPG

>>25112966
>You got any recs?
Yes, if you want to understand the school or doctrine at a deep level where you can grasp the entire metaphysics as a comprehensive system then the best way is to read through the works of the main philosopher of that school Adi Shankara where he systematizes the classical understanding of it, what is referred to as 'classical Advaita'. This is a big undertaking like reading through all of Plato but is similarly extremely rewarding. This chart in pic related has the English translations and the right order of reading. Only the major authentic commentaries and Upadesasahasri are mandatory and everything else is optional, that includes all the known authentic works anyways. It's also necessary to read some of the listed secondary sources or other academic books on Indian philosophy first before Shankara so you have the proper vocab and background info, otherwise it will be unintelligible I promise you.

There are also other shorter texts you can read which present the teachings in a more direct way as an immediate mystical or experiential insight, this can help make the doctrine clear but they don't explain the underlying logic or the subtleties of their positions in a clear way, which is mostly found in the prose works like Shankara's writings.

Some of these shorter texts like the following are short enough to read on your computer or phone without any background info. Reading through the full Stanford article first at least would help.

Ashtavakra Gita (298 verses)
https://realization.org/p/ashtavakra-gita/richards.ashtavakra-gita/richards.ashtavakra-gita.html

Avadhuta Gita (289 verses)
https://thestillnessbeforetime.com/avadhutagitasongoftheeverfree.pdf

Atma-Bodha (68 verses)
https://www.stillnessspeaks.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/ShankaraAtmaBodha.pdf

His cope about Madhyamaka and unwillingness / inability to touch it with a 10 foot pole, and instead majorly focusing on Yogacara tells me all I need to know lmao. Interdependence really broke his brain.

>>25113083
>His cope about Madhyamaka and unwillingness / inability to touch it with a 10 foot pole
There isn't even anything to engage with to begin with, since according to Madhyamaka themselves they don't assert any thesis, and none of their arguments present any issue for Advaita and can all be easily answered. There isn't a single argument in all of Nagarjuna's, Chandrakirti's etc which are not easy to debunk when applied to the Advaitic position as a supposed refutation (usually because they aren't designed to critique a non-realist non-dual model like Advaita at all).

When they assert nothing and have no real argument against Advaita, what is there left to engage with? vibes?

>Interdependence really broke his brain.
Funny cope, Shankara actually shows in the Abhidharma-critique section of his Brahma Sutra Bhashya that pratityasamutpada results in a vicious infinite regress if its taken as being responsible for the origination of the world or one's mind/experience. The only way there isn't a vicious regress is if pratityasamutpada is interpretated solely as a phenomenological description of how mental events impact one another and not as denoting anything metaphysical or ontological or casual about how the universe and external objects behave.

>>25113113
Nah, this is cope based on a colossal misunderstanding of the Prasangika Madhyamaka position.

Its reducto ad absurdum.
If Brahman is "One" and "Unchanging" how does it relate to the "Many" and "Changing" world? If it’s independent, it can’t have a relationship with anything else. If it has a relationship, it’s no longer independent.

Point is you don't need a thesis to prove another thesis as self-contradicting. Also the implication that Madhyamaka can't touch Advaita because Advaita is non-realist is truly the ultimate cope of all time. If Shankara claims Brahman is the Paramartha, he is making a metaphysical claim. Nagarjuna’s arguments against "Substance" apply to Brahman just as much as they apply to a physical table. Calling it "non-dual" doesn't magically exempt it from the laws of logic.

He avoided Madhyamaka because Madhyamaka doesn't say "it’s all mind", it says that everything INCLUDING mind AND brahman is dependently originated.

Its a systemic eradication of of the concept of inherent existence, its not "all vibes" and hand-waving it away like Shankara is just intellectual dishonesty.
You may or may not be aware, but claiming Madhyamaka is all vibes when Shankara's entire defense of Brahman can be boiled down to "uhh well shruti I guess" and retreating into basic scriptural dogmatism is peak vibes.

>>25113128
>Nah, this is cope based on a colossal misunderstanding of the Prasangika Madhyamaka position.
No, everything I said was correct

>Its reducto ad absurdum.
Exactly, but all of their reducto ad absurdem arguments only apply to realist models of the world, and even then it depends on how one defines ones realism and a careful realist can answer their objections. This is why I said their arguments dont actually apply to Advaita.

>If Brahman is "One" and "Unchanging" how does it relate to the "Many" and "Changing" world?
Like I already stated, this argument is only a problem for certain kinds of realist ontologies and presents zero issue for Advaita,

Relations as a category, like everything comprised of name-and-form, are only a false epistemic mode-of-appearance of the non-dual reality of Brahman which is the One without a second. Absolute reality is partless, undifferentiated, indeterminate, relationless and completely non-dual. There is nothing else which can enter into a relationship with Brahman because Brahman is the only existent and relations themselves aren't real.

Brahman doesn't need to relate to anything because there is nothing else, what appears as the universe of relations and objects is nothing but the infinite Brahman itself appearing as name-and-form through its power of maya/avidya. This power effortlessly and automatically manifests the appearance of the entire false phenomenal universe in an ordered manner in a a way that proceeds from Brahman's own nature. So, there is not an independent unchanging reality that is interacting with multiple discrete things, there is just one non-dual reality that is falsely appearing as the many through Brahman's ability or power to appear as such.

>If it’s independent, it can’t have a relationship with anything else. If it has a relationship, it’s no longer independent.
There isn't anything else, there is only Brahman and its mode-of-appearance which is not a second thing or second reality. Asking about how relations exist in reality is already presupposing that they are ultimately real, which Advaita says is wrong. Asking about relations in ultimate reality where there are no real relations is a category error, like asking “What is the real distance between the dream characters and the dreamer?” (there is no 'real distance' in dreams)

>>25113128
>Point is you don't need a thesis to prove another thesis as self-contradicting.
Indeed, but none of the Madhyamaka arguments are capable of demonstrating any self-contradiction in Advaita. People who claim otherwise are immensely ignorant of what they are talking about.
>If Shankara claims Brahman is the Paramartha, he is making a metaphysical claim.
Of course, but he is saying ultimate reality is not a discrete object existing on the same causal plane as other objects but is the infinite unconditioned reality of which all objects are appearances of, an absolute ground, all of the Madhyamaka arguments against svabhava are directed against things imagined as existing on the same plane and existing in the same way as other objects. A critique of entities that are independent parts in a mereological system cannot straightforwardly be applied to a metaphysical ground that is declared to be non‑mereological, non‑dependent, and beyond conceptual predication.

>Nagarjuna’s arguments against "Substance" apply to Brahman just as much as they apply to a physical table. Calling it "non-dual" doesn't magically exempt it from the laws of logic.
Wrong, since all of his arguments presuppose that substance undergoing a real change or a real causal interaction with a second existing thing, none of which are applicable to the model of Advaita. You are welcome to highlight any argument you want and I can explain what I mean.

Let's take one for example:

Example 1: The “Self-Causation” Argument
1) If a thing had intrinsic existence (svabhāva), it would have to exist independently and could either cause itself or not cause itself.
2) If it causes itself, it would have to exist prior to itself, which is impossible.
3) If it does not cause itself, then it depends on something else, contradicting the claim that it exists independently.
4) Conclusion: No entity can exist inherently; all things are empty of svabhāva.

Advaita response:

1) Advaita does not claim that Brahman is a “thing” among other things that could or could not cause itself. Brahman is the immutable, partless and completely self-sufficient ultimate reality of non-dual Awareness in which causation and all change manifests as a false appearance
2) Because causation, birth and death, origination and all changes are only conventionally-real appearances and don't exist as real changes in absolute reality, there is no question of how does the the non-dual reality cause itself, it simply abides as a self-sufficient unconditioned pure Reality without any question of change, dependence or causation ever entering into the equation. When something is metaphysically self-sufficient it doesn't need to cause itself since it has never not-existed. Only something that doesn't already exist need to be caused.
3) Therefore, the apparent problem of self-causation does not arise, applying questions of causation/change to ultimate reality which is changeless is itself a category error.

>>25113128
Even setting aside that this one doesn't apply to Advaita, this is an especially weak and arguably-fallacious argument by Nagarjuna since it presupposes the reality in question wouldn't simply just already-exist eternally, which is what every kind of classical western metaphysics would say.

If you render Nagarjuna's argument on self-production into formal logical term it becomes demonstrably fallacious.

You can pull up any other argument of Nagarjuna, or Chandrakityi, or another Madhyamakin, even one that isnt clearly fallacious on its face, and I can still easily explain why that presents no issue and is easily answerable by the Advaitin.

>He avoided Madhyamaka because Madhyamaka doesn't say "it’s all mind", it says that everything INCLUDING mind AND brahman is dependently originated.
They don't have any arguments capable of demonstrating or proving this, its just a dogmatic assertion.
>Its a systemic eradication of of the concept of inherent existence, its not "all vibes" and hand-waving it away like Shankara is just intellectual dishonesty.
That has just become a dogmatic narrative that is completely removed from the actual facts of the matter that Buddhists cling to as a kind of comforting blanket. All of the Madhyamaka arguments only apply to certain realist conceptions of svabhava, they literally have nothing that can challenge the Advaitic position.

>You may or may not be aware, but claiming Madhyamaka is all vibes when Shankara's entire defense of Brahman can be boiled down to "uhh well shruti I guess" and retreating into basic scriptural dogmatism is peak vibes.
That's simply untrue, he engages with the viewpoints of other schools and answers their arguments and he shows that explanations for the universe which involve a vicious regress of dependency-relations are incoherent. Trying to prove Brahman from the ground-up with syllogistic reasoning would contradict his own philosophical view so he doesn't engage in it, but he otherwise shows how Brahman as taught by the Shruti is perfectly logically-consistent, doesn't contradict our experience and is superior to the other schools in various ways both logically and in its analysis of mind, experience, liberation etc.

>>25113274
This is just the generic dreamer defense coupled with category errors.

1. You claim Brahman is relationless yet you attribute to it a power to manifest Maya. If this power is real, you have Dualism. If it’s unreal, it can’t produce an effect (the appearance). You’re trying to have your cake (Non-dualism) and eat it too (Brahman as the Cause).

2. Your dream analogy fails completely because a dream requires a process of change in the dreamer. If Brahman appears as the many, that appearing is an action/event. An unchanging reality cannot do or appear as anything without undergoing a modification.

3. You say relations aren't real, yet you're completely relying on the relation of Substratum (Brahman) and Superimposition (World) to explain your entire path to liberation. If the relation between the ignorant me and the real brahman is a false epistemic mode, then your entire Vedic path is also a false epistemic mode with zero bridge to the Absolute.

>>25113281
Now you're missing the entire point of the self-causation argument. Its not simply about how things start, its primarily about ontological independence.

You claim Brahman is self-sufficient. In Madhyamaka, self-sufficient is a logical impossibility. To exist is to be part of a web of relations. An independent, partless reality could never produce, manifest, or even falsely appear as a world of parts. If it's partless, it can't have a side that appears as Maya and a side that stays Absolute. This is utterly contradictory.

Also you keep utilizing appearance or appearances as a get out of jail free card, but you must remember that an appearance is an event. If a pure reality has undergone the event of appearing, it has undergone a modification. If it hasn't modified, it doesn't appear. You trap yourself in a blatant contradiction, where you're implying Brahman is both the cause and supporting factor of the illusion, and simultaneously untouched by the illusion.

Strongly want to point out that saying Madhyamaka only applies to the same plane is THE biggest cope in this entire thread. Nagarjuna specifically dismantled the Unconditioned (Asamskrta). He showed that Unconditioned and Conditioned are dependent pairs. You can't have one without the other. By asserting an Absolute Ground that is beyond these relations, you aren't answering the argument you're just retreating into a dogmatic definition (which I already knew you would) that you've exempted from critique.

cont

File: 1650867346380.png (52.3 KB)

52.3 KB PNG

>Nagarjuna’s self-production argument can be seen as fallacious when applied to eternal entities like Brahman because it involves both a formal and an informal misstep. Formally, the argument rests on the conditional premise that if something is self-produced, it must arise from itself, and that anything that already exists fully cannot arise. While this structure is valid for contingent, temporal phenomena, it breaks down when applied to an eternal, non-arising entity, since the notion of “arising” simply does not apply, making the conditional premise misapplied. Informally, the argument also commits a category error by treating eternal, uncaused existence as if it were of the same ontological type as contingent, produced things, thereby assuming that the rules of temporal causation hold universally. Thus, although Nagarjuna’s critique is coherent within the domain of impermanent phenomena, it becomes both formally and categorically fallacious when misapplied to the non-dual, eternal reality of Brahman.


NOOOOOOOOOOOOooo.. Lord Nāgārjuna did a f-fallacy!!! It can't be?!!?!??!??

>>25113294
And here, you've given in completely to circular reasoning. You're essentially admitting that Advaita/Shankara is immune to logic because Advaita finds itself logically consistent. Basically, because Shankara doesn't use syllogistic reasoning (because it would obviously be contradictory) he is somehow winning the logical debate.

You claim that Nagarjunas arguments are fallacious because it ignores things that already exists, this is obviously false. Its actually a complete failure of understanding of Svabhava. Nagarjuna isn't simply referring to temporal origin, hes specifically referencing ontological dependencies. You can't have a giver of reality without something to receive reality. They are a dependent pair. Eternity doesn't fix this it just makes the dependency eternal.

You then point out Shankara "shows that dependency-relations are incoherent."
This is exactly what Nagarjuna does. Nagarjuna agrees that dependency-relations are ultimately incoherent/empty. But while Nagarjuna concludes that therefore, nothing has inherent existence, Shankara makes the HUGE, illogical leap to say "therefore there MUST be a non-dependent ground". This is a non-sequitur.

You straight up admit that Shankara doesn't or can't prove Brahman via reasoning because it would be contradictory to his view. If you start with the conclusion that the Veda is true and then only accept logic that supports that conclusion, you aren't doing philosophy; you're doing apologetics, which is exactly what you're engaging in now.

I have to step away now but something for you to think about: If Brahman is One without a second and relationless then by what logical mechanism does the first seed of Ignorance (avidya) arise? Don't say it's an appearance,because an appearance is a relation.

>>25113330
Oh one last thing, you called dependent origination a dogmatic narrative, and yet this entire time your/Shankaras whole argument depends on Maya which is just about the most retarded fucking thing I've ever seen since you're punching at Nagarjuna from a literal bunker of dogmatism.

>>25113308
>This is just the generic dreamer defense coupled with category errors.
No it's not, it's not positing anything false as being the epistemic mistake of any one individual mind or dreamer but rather says it is the mode-of-appearance of the infinite Absolute Reality, it's not advocating any kind of subjective idealism.

>1. You claim Brahman is relationless yet you attribute to it a power to manifest Maya. If this power is real, you have Dualism. If it’s unreal, it can’t produce an effect (the appearance). You’re trying to have your cake (Non-dualism) and eat it too (Brahman as the Cause).
The nature of Brahman that makes it have maya as its beginningless false appearance is non-different from Brahman. Maya does not have absolutely-real (paramarthika) existence like Brahman does (which = truly real in advaita), but is only a false appearance. Maya doesn't need to be real to produce things because there is no genuine production of existing things being involved, only a virtual false manifestation of appearance. Your argument here is committing a question-begging fallacy by equating metaphysical reality with phenomenal manifestation, whereas Advaita explicitly rejects that assumption as invalid and strictly distinguishes the idea. Because phenomenal manifestation is completely different from ontological existence, paramarthika-existence is not required for a false appearance since this is strictly the domain of phenomenal manifestation. In order for your argument to not be structurally-fallacious you would have to first logically prove that ontological existence is equal to phenomenal manifestation, which you never did (and which is impossible anyway).

Argument 1 - refuted (question-begging fallacy i.e. petitio principii)

>2. Your dream analogy fails completely because a dream requires a process of change in the dreamer. If Brahman appears as the many, that appearing is an action/event. An unchanging reality cannot do or appear as anything without undergoing a modification.
The dream analogy was merely cited as an example of a similar kind of category error that you committed, it was never cited as or claimed to be an exact model of what Advaita says is occurring. To answer your point head-on though, when change itself belongs solely to the unreal appearance then there is no logical requirement that the Ground of that appearance change in any way, because all that is needed is the appearance simply has to be contingent on that Ground as its false mode-of-appearance, and then everything else is included within the display of the appearance while its Ground remains unchanged. Because the appearance is false and does not have real existence like the Ground its apparent properties don't have to transfer to the Ground, and the idea that they do is a category error.

>>25113308

>3. You say relations aren't real, yet you're completely relying on the relation of Substratum (Brahman) and Superimposition (World) to explain your entire path to liberation. If the relation between the ignorant me and the real brahman is a false epistemic mode, then your entire Vedic path is also a false epistemic mode with zero bridge to the Absolute.
This is just confusing many different distinctions and frames of reference. Yes, relations aren't ultimately real, all phenomena within samsara are conventionally-real, which is metaphysically false (mithya) in comparision to the absolute (paramarthika) reality of Brahman.

1) There is no "ignorant you" in a relation with Brahman, you are at root the already-free Brahman, and only the non-Self prakritic body-mind apparatus is subject to ignornace.
2) What Vedanta teaches about how this process of bondage and liberation occurs is mithya in a metaphysical sense, but that doesn't mean it's not descriptively-true of what is actually occurring at the conventional level, it just means these are not absolutely-real entities with paramarthika existence.
3) Therefore, it's not true that "your entire Vedic path is also a false epistemic mode with zero bridge to the Absolute", since the path in question genuinely and truthfully explains how the Absolute can be realized and awakened to, its just that their description of how this occurs operates on the level of the vyavahara conventional experience. Again, a description being metaphysically mithya does not mean its not descriptively-true of phenomena, because phenomenal manifestation is not identical with ontological existence, if you keep this Advaitic distinction in mind it makes perfect sense.

>You claim Brahman is self-sufficient. In Madhyamaka, self-sufficient is a logical impossibility.
That supposed "logical impossibility" is asserted on the basis of demonstrable fallacies like question begging, category errors and others.
>To exist is to be part of a web of relations.
This is already a classic petitio principii question-begging fallacy, you aren't off to a great start my man, lets see how the rest goes haha.

>>25113308
>An independent, partless reality could never produce, manifest, or even falsely appear as a world of parts.
That would only be true if you were talking about a real production involving real change, not an immutable reality appearing as a false display through its natural power or nature of doing so. There is no valid a priori reason why the latter is impossible or contradictory unless you are begging the question or falsely re-defining it as being mereological.
>If it's partless, it can't have a side that appears as Maya and a side that stays Absolute. This is utterly contradictory.
This is a strawman fallacy. Advaita does not say that maya is a real part of Brahman, maya is a contingent mode-of-appearance, its an epistemic distinction and not a metaphysical object. Brahman as it truly exists is one, partless, undivided, undifferentiation. Its false contingent mode of appearance which is enabled by its own nature is not a real mereological part but how the absolute reality falsely appears epistemically or phenomenally, trying to apply a mereological analysis at the level of ultimate reality is a category error.

>Also you keep utilizing appearance or appearances as a get out of jail free card, but you must remember that an appearance is an event.
Yes, but appearances are epistemic events, not ontological or metaphysical events.
>If a pure reality has undergone the event of appearing, it has undergone a modification.
Another classic question-begging petitio principii fallacy. If that appearance itself is unreal and not a mereological 'part' of said reality then that claim isn't actually true, since as already mentioned the apparent properties of what is false dont transfer to the Ground that is real.
>If it hasn't modified, it doesn't appear.
this is part of the same fallacy you committed as above
>You trap yourself in a blatant contradiction, where you're implying Brahman is both the cause and supporting factor of the illusion, and simultaneously untouched by the illusion.
That isn't a contradiction. The false apparent properties of the appearance don't transfer to their ground. An unconditioned reality being the substratum of a false appearance which does not affect that unconditioned reality in any way does not "touch" or modify or condition or comprise that unconditioned reality in any way. And its only from the view of the illusion that Brahman appears to be related to maya or the universe at all in the first place.

"If from the mere fact of proximity, and without any reference to the intrinsic nature of things, a causal relation with some effect is postulated, then space, for instance, can as well become burnt, (it being connected with fire)", - Shankara, Brahma Sutra Bhashya 1.2.8

File: the_gadfly.png (7.2 KB)

7.2 KB PNG

>equally wrong buddhists and advaitins arguing
hilarious

>>25113308
>Strongly want to point out that saying Madhyamaka only applies to the same plane is THE biggest cope in this entire thread.
Wrong, it's just objectively true, even now I've demonstrated why all your arguments have relies on mistakes or fallacies.
>Nagarjuna specifically dismantled the Unconditioned (Asamskrta).
This is hilarious dogmatic cope. If you really think this then name the argument then, every single one you've raised has demonstrably failed
>He showed that Unconditioned and Conditioned are dependent pairs. You can't have one without the other.
Simply because they are conceptually-linked in the human mind demonstrates nothing whatsoever about whether the Unconditioned is metaphysically self-sufficient or not
>By asserting an Absolute Ground that is beyond these relations, you aren't answering the argument
Demonstrably false, I answered every single one of your arguments head-one. Name one (1) argument I didn't answer lmao
>you're just retreating into a dogmatic definition (which I already knew you would) that you've exempted from critique.
Pointing our your fallacies is not "retreating into a dogmatic definition" lmao

File: 1694197125570389.png (787.6 KB)

787.6 KB PNG

Reading the Buddhists and Vedantins argue in this thread is making me realize Vedantins want the aesthetic of logic, without the consequence. Both sides are totally retarded, but when it comes to Madhyamaka specifically, the Vedanta argument doesn't look much better than a simple no u.
Its obvious why Shankara dismissed it.
I will now go beat my shit while you fags argue

>>25113330
>And here, you've given in completely to circular reasoning. You're essentially admitting that Advaita/Shankara is immune to logic because Advaita finds itself logically consistent.
That's completely false. I'm simply pointing out that any critique which attempts to refute Advaita with either (1) a strawman or (2) a category error are logically invalid. They are not logically-valid arguments and involve either formal or informal fallacies.

Portraying the Advaitist view of Brahman as being mereological and then attacking the ensuing results is a logically-invalid strawman fallacy
Leveling a critique that presupposes that there has to be some realist/pluralist commitment which is true at the paramarthika level is a logically-invalid question-begging fallacy

>Basically, because Shankara doesn't use syllogistic reasoning (because it would obviously be contradictory) he is somehow winning the logical debate.
No, he has plenty of great refutations of other schools view that involve both logic and analysis of experience.
>You claim that Nagarjunas arguments are fallacious because it ignores things that already exists, this is obviously false. Its actually a complete failure of understanding of Svabhava. Nagarjuna isn't simply referring to temporal origin, hes specifically referencing ontological dependencies. You can't have a giver of reality without something to receive reality. They are a dependent pair.
This doesn't make it any less of a question-begging fallacy lol.

You say "You can't have a giver of reality without something to receive reality"

This does nothing to logically establish that an independent self-sufficient reality needs to be given reality/existence instead of naturally having it without cause or beginning. It's just making an assertion without any logical justification. Moreover, merely demonstrating that two things are conceptually linked in the human mind demonstrates nothing about their ontological status.

>>25113330
>Eternity doesn't fix this it just makes the dependency eternal.
What 'dependency' are you talking about? What exactly does an eternal unconditioned reality depend on? try to answer without question-begging challenge (impossible)
>You then point out Shankara "shows that dependency-relations are incoherent."
Shankara specifically says a vicious-regress of dependency-relations are incoherent as an explanation for anything, not that dependency-relations are incoherent as provisionally-real phenomena.
>Nagarjuna agrees that dependency-relations are ultimately incoherent/empty. But while Nagarjuna concludes that therefore, nothing has inherent existence,
This is a logically invalid non-sequitur leap for him to make which occurs for ideological (religous) reasons and not because of any logical connection, simply because dependence-realites are not an ultimate reality does not by itself rule out the existence of an unconditioned Ultimate Reality which is not itself a dependence relation. Trying to derive the latter from the former is a complete non-sequitur.
>Shankara makes the HUGE, illogical leap to say "therefore there MUST be a non-dependent ground". This is a non-sequitur.
Wrong, as explained its Nagarjuna who makes the obvious non-sequitur. Dependence-relations cannot account for themselves precisely because of the vicious-regress involved, they logically presuppose a non-dependent ground in order to terminate the vicious regress or rather prevents it's existence in the first place.

>>25113330
>You straight up admit that Shankara doesn't or can't prove Brahman via reasoning because it would be contradictory to his view
Madhyamaka also cannot prove sunyata true by its own standard, and its doesnt have any single one master argument which is supposed to demonstrate that its true, so why do you find that so objectionable?
>If you start with the conclusion that the Veda is true and then only accept logic that supports that conclusion, you aren't doing philosophy; you're doing apologetics
That isn't what Shankara does, he follows classical logic and standard Nyaya methods of debate, he accepts the Vedas as a Hindu, just like Buddhists accepts Buddha's magic super-dooper insight as a Buddhist religious commitment, but he doesn't selectively pick special logic but he rather employs normal standards of classic logic and defends Vedantic views on the basis of that logic and experience. His arguments don't presuppose things but they show they views of his opponents are contradictory in some way, or they dont agree with experience, or their account of liberation is irrational or some other similar reason.

>I have to step away now but something for you to think about: If Brahman is One without a second and relationless then by what logical mechanism does the first seed of Ignorance (avidya) arise? Don't say it's an appearance,because an appearance is a relation.
Time is unreal and so there is no first temporal moment. Asking about the first moment "outside" of maya is a category error. Brahman has always been appearing as maya because its natural for Brahman to do so, this doesn't require a first point of 'activation' but has always been ongoing. Any discussion of relations or temporarily beyond or outside maya is already presupposing the ultimate validity of terms that only have validity within the illusion/appearance. Primordial maya-avidya is directly contingent upon Brahman without any mediating principle required, mediating principles themselves being a figment of the illusion and not something that exists outside it.

File: 500.jpg (37.1 KB)

37.1 KB JPG

>>25113353
>Oh one last thing, you called dependent origination a dogmatic narrative
That's demonstrably untrue, I never said dependent origination itself is a dogmatic narrative, I said that Buddhists invent dogmatic narratives in connection with dependent origination, such as asserting without valid justification that everything has to necessarily be subject to dependent origination. This is a dogmatic narrative that is not predicated on genuine facts, its designed to uphold a dogmatic tribalistic belief in the correctness of one's own view without actually engaging with what other's viewpoints area.

>and yet this entire time your/Shankaras whole argument depends on Maya which is just about the most retarded fucking thing
Unlike Buddhists, Advaita don't invent retarded dogmatic narratives in connection with maya and says stuff like 'our maya actually refuted everyone' like how Buddhists claim this about dependent origination but then they can never back it up without melting down into a big mess of fallacies mixed with spluttered indignation at being challenged.

THAT's the key difference!

>>25113014
Thank you very much. Although I heard someone once mention to me that I should read the nikayas, go through the nyaya school of thought and read up on someone called panini.

>>25113440
>This is a dogmatic narrative that is not predicated on genuine facts
There's no thing that's Is not originaled as dependent, no one ever could refute that, every attempt always rely in a dogma and not on an empiric fact

>>25113433
>and its doesnt have any single one master argument w
Lol máster arguments are the thing madhyamaka Is against,madhyamakas point Is that suuh arguments aré impossible, no theory ever developed a máster arguments,also that mode of argument was a crazy idea from Berkeley that never amount to anything, asking madhyamaka to elaborate a máster argument Is like trying to ask vedanta to prove absolute materialism

>>25113386
>not an immutable reality appearing as a false display through its natural power or nature of doing
If it has that power, that imply a power to multiplicity and becoming, which Is a contradictory quality with Brahman, like a fire that can create ice, or a song that Is a color, such power Is contradictory, and such emanation proves that you can find freedom in Brahman since he can manifest this becoming again and cast you into maya one More time, the causes and conditions of maya(Brahman and His power) aré still active

>>25113383
>relations aren't ultimately real
If relations aré real then the relation established between Brahman and maya Is not real, and can't never happens, notice i'm not saying maya Is real, but the relationship must be in order to establish any effect of conditions between the parts, maya can't exist if relations (and their effectivity)aren't real

>>25113325
>. Informally, the argument also commits a category error by treating eternal, uncaused existence as if it were of the same ontological type as contingent, produced things
This creates a second order ontology, thus fallacious

>>25113843
Any claims about anything is transcendental second order from the things it binds

>>25113325
There's no fallacy there, the point Is that you can't establish a category of an eternaly non-arising entity because all possibilities end up in contradictions, you're the one doing a petitio principii fallacy, already establishing the possibility of such category

>>25113440
>Advaita don't invent retarded dogmatic narratives in connection with maya
>>25113386
>appearing as a false display through its natural power or nature of doing so.

Saying that maya can exist even when it's contradictory with the nature of Brahman, just because "there's a power to do so" Is the deffinition of dogmatic

>>25113386
>its an epistemic distinction and not a metaphysical object
Any epistemic distinción must be fundes on a metaphysical object, you can't justify it's existence without it, but Brahman can't be that object, because he can't provide it's essential changing and múltiple nature, you're trying to love the goalpoast, but you end up castrating your philosophy in the process, you end up unable to explain or justify maya and by extention Brahman, you end up explaining nothing me advaita becomes a useless thing

>>25113383
>There is no "ignorant you" in
Then salvatión Is impossible/unnessecary and the whole doctrine Is useless

>>25102898
I'm tired of this gay ass wignat 'we wuzz jeets n sheeeet!1!' cope. Even IF we assume you're right about the Saaaryan shit, The Buddha was born well after the invasion. You even said ''probably'' not indian. No definitive ''he was white''.

>>25092400
No. The Mughals just murdered and burned everything Buddhist they came across and since it was still a relatively new religion it was easier to uproot than what we know today as Hinduism.

>>25109133
christianity is superior to all of those you nihilistic redditor faggot.

Ramanuja and Madhvacharya were superior and had less sloppy metaphysics than either of these non-dualist pseuds.

fpbp

>>25114242
NORDIC STOCK!
RETVRN!!

I was on the vedantin interpretation until this thread. Multiple vedantins calling shit like dependent origination dogmatic, but then having an absolute melty when people point out that shankara is entirely relying on dogmatic stuff to construct his arguments from the ground up.

Like what?

>>25113836
>If it has that power, that imply a power to multiplicity and
becoming, which Is a contradictory quality with Brahman,
It's not a contradiction because Brahman has the nature of being the ground of maya-appearances, and this nature is identical with Brahman's existence and is not something separate or that is somehow opposed to itself.

>>25113841
>If relations aré real then the relation established between Brahman and maya Is not real
Correct, the nominal relation between Brahman and maya is unreal, like all relations as a general category. There is no relation between Brahman and maya for the reason that there ultimately are no real relations. Maya is the epistemic mode-of-appearance of Brahman and not a second ontological object. What anchors, secures or provides for maya's phenomenological manifestation is the fact of Brahman having the nature of being the ground of mayas manifestation and for whom maya operates as a sakti, power or controlled display. Relations don't need to be real as a metaphysical category for Brahman to operate maya, since this operation is not a second ontological object that has to be related to Brahman as a separate entity but is that very self-same non-relational Reality of Brahman making itself appear under various epistemic modes through its ability to do so. At no point does any of this logically necessitate that 'relations' be ultimately-real as a category.

>>25113843
>This creates a second order ontology, thus fallacious
1) That quote is simply pointing out the holes in Nagarjuna argument and isn't making any claims about metaphysics
2) Advaita explicitly isn't teaching a a "second-order ontology" since they teach only one single metaphysical reality and its epistemically-distinguished manifestations, these epistemic manifestations are not a second ontological principle or reality
3) Setting aside that Advaita isn't teaching a "second-order ontology" and in fact decisively rejects that, the mere fact of someone positing multiple related distinct ontological realities is not fallacious in any way, its not a formal fallacy of reasoning nor is it an informal fallacy of reasoning.

You should never accuse someone or something of being fallacious unless you can correctly identify the fallacy involved, which you never did.

>>25114102
>There's no fallacy there,
Wrong, that post lays out in simple easy-to-follow and objectively-true statements why Nagarjuna's argument from self-production is fallacious.

>, the point Is that you can't establish a category of an eternaly non-arising entity because all possibilities end up in contradictions,
This is premises on fallacious arguments like the argument from self-production and other similarly fallacious arguments, it can therefore be dismissed as an inherently unserious claim which is moreover impossible to demonstrate.

>>25114105
>Saying that maya can exist even when it's contradictory with the nature of Brahman, just because "there's a power to do so" Is the deffinition of dogmatic
False, this is just a weak and childish attempt at strawmanning. Advaita doesn't say that "maya exists", they say it manifests as an epistemic appearance, this does not contradict Brahman's existence in any way whatsoever, indeed Brahman's nature is explicitly defined in a way that allows for false epistemic appearances to manifest.

>>25114109
>Any epistemic distinción must be fundes on a metaphysical object,
Yes, Advaita agrees with this and says any sort of epistemic distinction has to logically be associated in some way with a metaphysical ground of that epistemic event. However, when the underlying metaphysical "object" that the epistemic distinction is founded on, or is contingent upon, is the relationless, non-dual Absolute Brahman itself, then this epistemic distinctions does not logically presuppose anything metaphysical or ontological besides Brahman itself.

>you can't justify it's existence without it, but Brahman can't be that object
Why not? Advaita explicitly says that Brahman is the sole ontological reality and has the natural ability to manifest itself under epistemic distinctions or epistemic events. This explicitly situates Brahman as being the ground or object of the epistemic event, you never provided a logical argument for why this cannot be so,

>because he can't provide it's essential changing and múltiple nature
Maya's nature as inclusive of plurality and change is inherent to maya and is not something which needs to be "provided" as though it were absent.

File: 1623668761330.jpg (59.5 KB)

59.5 KB JPG

>>25114112
>>There is no "ignorant you"
>Then salvatión Is impossible/unnessecary and the whole doctrine Is useless
This was already answered and retroactively refuted by Sri Shankaracharya (pbuh) himself in this very thread >>25097114

Objection: If liberation makes no difference from the present state, it is unreasonable to make a particular effort for it, and the scriptures too become useless.

Reply: No, for both are necessary to remove the delusion created by ignorance. Really there is no such distinction as liberation and bondage in the self, for it is eternally the same; but the ignorance regarding it is removed by the knowledge arising from the teachings of the scriptures, and prior to the receiving of these teachings, the effort to attain liberation is perfectly reasonable.

(Bṛhadāraṇyakopaniṣadbhāṣya 4.4.6)

File: 1747830563485997.jpg (157.9 KB)

157.9 KB JPG

>this thread
Very complex...
Where do I even start with Hindu metaphysics?

File: 1739115579872298.jpg (1.7 MB)

1.7 MB JPG

>>25114817
>Where do I even start with Hindu metaphysics?
Well, you could begin with the school that is the final red-pill of all metaphysics: Advaita Vedānta.

There is a reading guide chart for Advaita Vedānta and the works of its major philosopher Adi Shankara, that was posted here >>25113014

Pic related is a wider guide to the English translations of the writings of all the major schools of Hindu philosophy.

Reading a book that provides an overview of the various schools can help you figure out which school in particular you want to focus upon.

>>25114817
I'd start with the Upanishads or /lit/'s guide to Shankara.

Although not a Buddhist, strictly logically speaking, I'm way more partial to Madhyamaka myself, I started with Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka: A Philosophical Introduction by Jan Westerhoff. This is kind of like a map/guide to Madhyamaka in general, what it is and isn't. Then I'd read The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā translated by Jay Garfield. After that you can get into stuff like Ratnavali, Suhṛllekha and Vigrahavyāvartanī (my favorite). Just tossing this out there because I don't think theres a /lit/ chart for Nagarjuna and most people here haven't even read the MMK.

It really just depends on what you're interested in or makes more sense to you. Be prepared this is like a multi-year rabbithole if you explore both sides.

>>25114321
>Ramanuja and Madhvacharya were superior
They are both like little babies compared to Śaṅkara, Abhinavagupta, Jñānadeva or even some of the better Buddhist philosophers like Longchenpa and Mipham.

>>25114804
>This was already answered and retroactively refuted by Sri Shankaracharya (pbuh) himself
many such cases!

File: download.jpg (822 KB)

822 KB JPG

Śaṅkara.

The name itself seems to rise in three clean movements of thought, each syllable a precise articulation, each pause a clarification. The tongue learns discipline in pronouncing it; the mind, austerity. Śaṅ— the severing stroke; ka— the sudden stillness; ra— the quiet radiance that follows. A name not merely spoken, but understood.

I have known many teachers, many disputants, many voices crowded with doctrine and ornament, but he was always Śaṅkara to me, never merely an author of verses or a commentator among others, but a presence of razor-like lucidity. His dialectic cuts without violence; his negation illumines rather than destroys. With a few spare distinctions, he dissolves entire cosmologies, not with triumph, but with an almost playful inevitability.

What astonishes is not only the precision of his reasoning, but its transparency: the way the most vertiginous metaphysical inquiries: self, appearance, causation, freedom, are rendered suddenly weightless, as though they had never been burdens at all. One reads him and feels the intellect straighten its spine, the mind learning, perhaps for the first time, what it means to see without grasping.

Others explain. He clarifies.
Others argue. He reveals where the argument was never needed.

Śaṅkara—always that, to me—the rare thinker whose brilliance does not dazzle but awakens, whose insights do not accumulate but liberate, leaving behind not a system to inhabit, but a silence that finally makes sense.