How did the Indians solve philosophy before the Greeks even started?

they eat curry with their bare hands. not like, with injira, or whatever. they stick their hands right into the chicken malsala, mix it with rice, and shove it in their mouths. the first time i went over there and saw this, i felt like I was tripping on acid. its so fucked

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Venerable Advaitabro, can you please help direct a sapling to the fountain which you have nourished yourself from? Where do I get started with Advaita and Buddhism, in other words? I have a Buddhist chart from here, attached. Should I begin there, or with the pre-Buddhist Upanishads? What was your process through this path? Also would you ever visit India/physical centers of such philosophies?

Forgot chart, sorry.

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For Buddhism the chart is pretty good. Just read through the various discourses from the PC such as in Bodhi's et al translations. It has a Theravada bias but Walpola Rahula's 'What the Buddha Taught' is IMO the shortest and most accessible book which also does a good job of illustrating the basic principles of Buddhism and how they tie together, maybe begin there before reading the PC. There are a vast array of additional stuff not covered in the chart including many important Mahayana texts but you'd be better off getting the PC under your belt before reading into Yogachara, Chan etc anyway.

Advaita is best understood IMO through reading Shankara's works in particular through his commentaries where he extensively explains all his ideas, cites his sources for them and continually subjects them to and defends them from a self-critical dialectic. Simply reading books about Advaita in most cases won't convey a deep or accurate enough picture about a certain aspect of it because much of it can be very subtle and abstract and is best understood through the words of Shankara himself, many misconceptions about Advaita which appear online and in the secondary literature would be cleared up from a thorough reading of his works. So (with regard to your question) I personally see it as more of a 'which books set you up the best to read through Shankara's works?' One could begin by reading through several books on Hindu philosophy, some good ones are Hiriyanna's 'Essentials of Indian Philosophy' and Radnakrishnan's multiple books on it, both his 'sourcebook' and the one simply called 'Indian Philosophy'. Another option if you are okay with perennialism and anti-modern thought is Guenon's books, his two books 'Intro to Hindu Doctrines' and 'Man and His Becoming' together explains 90+% of the terms you'll need to understand Shankara's writings, although if you take this option it would be good to also supplement them with some additional non-Guenon reading on Hinduism.

Once you are ready to read him I'd recommend beginning with Shankara's commentary on 8 Upanishads and Gaudapada's Karika, Gambhiranada's translation has these across two volumes, an alternative starting point is his Gita commentary. The Brihadaranyaka and Chandogya are the two largest and oldest Upanishads and his commentaries on each are separate 700-800 page books. They are really important to his thought, but it may be best to read his shorter commentaries first so you get used to his writing before you attempt those. The Brahma Sutra commentary is also best read after you are already familiar with his writing. Whether you begin to read into Buddhism or Hinduism first doesn't really matter. I have not visited India or a center before but would be interested in doing so.

by being fucking BASED, that's how

Because Hinduism is the best-preserved remnant of the original Hyperborean wisdom tradition that manifested itself further west in the form of Zoroastrianism, the Greek mystery cults and early ascetics like Pythagoras et al.

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Yep, completely disgusting and uncivilized. You can recognize civilized races by their use of utensils. Eating with your hands is monkey-tier, might as well shove your head in the bowl like a fucking dog.

>The good guys are only the ones we know nothing about

the romans ate with their hands too

The Greeks ate with their hands btw

What do you think about menander/ghandhara/kushan empire/etc.?

>being a proper retard

wrongly added meant for this retard

> Samefag Indian cope
Romans and Greeks mainly used spoons (see pic related).

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>it don't real
>it be illusion
>but receiver of illusion don't real
>this be consistent

>It turns out the fork is a relatively new invention. Although the first forks were used in ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, the two-tined instruments were used only as cooking tools at the time. It wasn't until the Middle Ages that a smaller version was used for eating by wealthy families of the Middle East and Byzantine Empire.

smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/a-history-of-western-eating-utensils-from-the-scandalous-fork-to-the-incredible-spork-64593179/
leitesculinaria.com/1157/writings-origins-fork.html

If the subjective experience of multiplicity and the deluded world is wholly unreal how is it that we experience it?

The position of Advaita is that the receiver of the illusion viz pure awareness itself is real and as God is also the source of the unreal, but that everything else is unreal. This actually is consistent because if neither are real than there should be no reason why things are subjectively experienced, or in other words there has to be an existent dreamer for the subjective experience of a dream to occur.
not much, I have not read much about the history of the different dynasties and so on

how and why would something - the unreal - that is not existent have a source?

if there is no dream without a dreamer, isn't it also true that there is no dreamer without a dream?

857. —Why are you so harsh towards other cultures and races? Wouldn't you be more effective in attracting them to your cause by being more gentle with them?

—No. We already tried that and it failed, and the result is rabid anti-Westernism and belief in "equal cultures" and "equal races" — all the while they themselves are falling over each other to ditch their own cultures and adopt ours as fast as possible, and faster than their fellows.

—So doesn't that mean that our policy of gentleness, which includeds gentle lies like those about equal cultures and races, is working?

—In a limited sense perhaps, yes, as regards the adoption of our basest insights and practices, such as science's and technology's and so on. But as regards philosophy and politics, and the humanities in general (not to speak of biology and eugenics) the effect of our gentle lies has been disastrous, since you can't hope to grasp philosophy with a warped interpretation of history, and that's why even Westerners are more likely to regard Gandhi or Buddha as "spiritual leaders" today than Heraclitus or Nietzsche — even Westerners have come to prefer emasculated Eastern wretches to towering Western supermen! We bought our own lies to them to such an extent that today we even believe them! So fuck your politics of appeasement, and fuck you. The inferior cultures and races WILL KNEEL BEFORE MY THRONE AND THAT OF MY ANCESTORS, and only then will I and my descendants consider an alliance with them. Otherwise we will exterminate them, like all defeated species: I have spoken.

So they used spoons, like I said, not forks. Are you genuinely retarded or just bad at reading comprehension?

Lmao that sounds like the ramblings of a pothead. Is this what passes for philosophy in India?

no you can't you stupid racist piece of shit. its an old culture and its fucking bad ass and the indian girl i was on a date with is fucking hot. fuckin hell if id eat with my damn hands though i tried it and it was fucked

Relative levels, is the only way to coherently explain it.

Ego-consciousness, which something like psychedelics dissolve, hence the psychological phenomenon of "ego death". As for why the illusion even can exist in the first place, is a larger question still needing an answer. Not that I do drugs by the way, but I've researched into them and understand their logistics.

> tfw no hot poo date that makes me eat butter chicken with my hands

she insisted i eat with a fork and i said NO!! I CAN DO THIS. i lasted about 6 minutes before giving up and taking the fork. i still watched her cover herself with rice and curry and was legit grossed out. it made it kinda hard to eat. she's hot tho and india seriously rules

Stay away from our food bro, it's too damn unhealthy. Look at how fat some Indians are. You don't want to become that.

i eat curry every once in a while, but these guys eat the shit all day. do not fuckin eat curry all day

I'm Indian but always eat with cutlery. I find the Indian convention to be quite sickening for most foods, save something not messy like pizza or maybe fried chicken. But I use cutlery for those too, heh. Gotta keep them hands clean, breh.

Do you use toiler paper or wipe with your hands?

im the type of guy to pizza with a fork. i can't stand having my hands dirty and unavailable. greasy fucking sticky shitfuck. its been an issue for me since I was a little baby faggot. i'll do some seriously stupid shit for hot girls tho i don't give a fuck

Source? This was an interesting comment:

>rabid anti-Westernism and belief in "equal cultures" and "equal races" — all the while they themselves are falling over each other to ditch their own cultures and adopt ours as fast as possible, and faster than their fellows.

Particularly:

>adopt ours as fast as possible, and faster than their fellows.

I see this a lot, especially with women. They want all the newest gadgets and western fashion trends, they try to talk and act like White women, but at the same time claim that their own culture is also equal. So if its equal, then why are they obsessed with looking like westerners to their compatriots?

Interesting sentiment

how does someone get into indian religion/philosophy? the long, indistinguishable names scare me

water bucket + hands, or bidet sprayer, are both superior to smearing poop over your skin with paper. you are not clean when you use tp. once you go away from tp you will never be able to go back

read the mahabharata. its next on my list. i think many hindus will only read the bhagavad gita though. im also white as fuck and dumb

So first you put hand up your ass, then put hand in food? I’m not sure that’s sanitary user.

you clean everything properly with water and then wash your fuckin hands you dingus breath. it is a vastly superior level of clean. if you got shit on your arm, would you wipe it off with paper? no, you shitstain, you wouldn't. you would wrinse with water and then wash your dickhead hands

cont.

if you ever use poop paper and then want a girl to go down on you, you had better shower first.
>hey bb sorry i gotta shower because i pooped today and my culture makes no fucking sense

Why don’t you use wet wipes like civilized people or just splash water on the fucking paper? Why do you have to stick your hand in there lmao
I can barely imagine the amount of fecal matter you have under your nails.

>Why don’t you use wet wipes like civilized people
you're not normal
>the amount of fecal matter you have under your nails
that's not how it works. you don't really get anything on your hands, and certainly not under your nails. you just kinda splash and pat your butthole with water a few times. im an american expat btw

Neither. Both are gross. I wash with body wash in the shower. I always shower directly after the toilet. Cleanest method.

Based cutleryfren. When will the peasants learn?

I hope you weren't pretending to be me.

> you just kinda splash and pat your butthole with water a few times
... and emerge from the stall with water mixed with shit dripping down your pants and smelling like a sewer.
No wonder American girls didn’t want anything to do with you.

Because the ultimate reality itself is infinite awareness, and the unreality is predicated on this reality, the awareness of this infinite reality extending to and including within itself all unreality. That the unreality seems to be experienced is part of the fullness of God's existence, as a consequence of and as a mark of it, like water overflowing a basin or light streaming off of the sun.

> shiiiet nigga pass the blunt

I want to know more about this. The oldest religion is the one I want til I get sick of it then move onto the next.

But the oldest religion is not Hinduism, it’s animism i.e. worship of nature.

As a mystic myself I agree with the first parts, but I feel that the latter does not accurately explain the phenomena of ego-consciousness. I think the notion of Lila - a play that the Godhead enacts on itself - is a better formulation of it. That perhaps the Infinite desires to forget itself as such and experience finitude, enjoying the process of forgetting like it were some kind of adventure. Not saying this is accurate, but it's personally not an adequate account to me that such a strong illusion displays the "fullness of God's existence" because it seems like a strange consequence of such, while explaining it as deliberate allows it both this scope (because you're right, the fact that the infinite can fool its own self is definitely a marker of its complexity and power) and also a semblance of telos, namely, that the illusion is not accidental but designed to be so. Ego-death is not fun; it's much funner to pretend to be a limited, individual personality, a conscious actor in a cosmic play as it were. Just my own opinions though, not putting you or yours down.

It's from Nietzsche's will to power

Sounds familiar

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> thread about Indian philosophy
> devolves into discussion about bodily waste
Of course

What was it about Indian culture that caused so many of it's people to seek spiritual liberation? I thought people in ancient times would be focused more on the material but India is the home of the Samanas

Damn not sure which to study next...

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That's a very good question, and one I've wondered myself. What made cultures what they are? The racialists will always chalk it to something genetic, and positively so as it regards their own group, while denigrating the other groups by the same basis. But I don't believe in such concepts. I think cultures come into development by an innumerable set of factors, and then gain their momentum from theirs and go on to become cemented identities. This is the best way I'd explain India's history of spirituality, along with all of cultures of the world having their particular histories. I don't believe that Indians, of past or present, are intrinsically more spiritual than another group. I'm Indian myself, from . Call me cutleryanon.

Now you know how Europeans feel when they visit America

Details.

They made a bunch of vague claims that could mean anything. Greeks at least started to use reasoning to explain their claims.

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>Hasn't read the Shankara commentaries
He explains everything bro

Where does Maya have its locus? In Brahman or Jiva?

Is Shankara essentially the savior figure of Hinduism? That's pretty disappointing if all the formal explication was from a single person (especially if the earlier ideas were indeed valuable in themselves), though obviously quite based on Shankara's part. His attire also looks like peak /mysticcore/.

Because when then Aryans migrated into the Hindus Valley they saw a spiritually oriented people. Although in decay, they managed to adapt to their ideas and fuse it with their own, creating a basis for today's hinduism.

Now compare that to other peoples the IEs invaded, and you'll see the result of spirituality largely depending on the already settled people they came in contact with.

He’s a crypto Buddhist heretic

>Now compare that to other peoples the IEs invaded, and you'll see the result of spirituality largely depending on the already settled people they came in contact with.
What are you talking about? If anything the other places IEs invaded, they completely replaced the previous spirituality with Indo-European spirituality/religion.

He's only the central figure of advaita vedanta and revered in schools that base themselves on advaita. His commentaries are very logical, somewhat resembling western philosophy.

They did, and what resulted out of it? Close to nothing. Greeks are an exception because they had actual civilizations around them to learn from but didn't produce anything worthwhile after settling near the Aegean

Aryans on the other hand inherited the ideas and beliefs of the people they displaced and produced the Vedas.

i'm american and i eat everything, even pizza, with a fork and knife or spoon. chopsticks for asian cuisine. don't lump me in with the rest of those fucks

We don't know exactly what they produced because all of Europe got subverted by Christianity.

Hinduism was mostly an oral culture until basically Shankara, which lived 600 years after Christ so if India had been subverted by Christianity too, it is doubtful we would know much more about Hindu philosophy/metaphysics than we know about Celtic/Germanic/Slavic philosophy/metaphysics.

Also I think you're greatly exaggerating the pre-IE influence on the Vedic religion.

>Hinduism was mostly an oral culture until basically Shankara

What the fuck am i reading. Do you really hold this belief or are you really that uneducated?

>when you've lost the argument
Sure forget about all the other arguments that just bent over your previous post and made it into their little bitch.

But yes, please point out the pre-Shankara writers. ps: the exception is not an argument

But Buddhism is based as heck, user. What do you have against it?

>muh christianity
You sound like some sort of pagan larper.

I haven't even touched on your so-called arguments because it's some shit you read on wikipedia and it's clear as day you have no idea what you're talking about.

>Hinduism was mostly an oral culture until basically 600 AD

Christ...

>still no arguments

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I'm not him but the point is they didn't EAT with utensils. They just cooked with them.

Come back when you have some of your own.

The fact you guys are genuinely even arguing about whether MUH GRECO-ROMAN CULTURAL ANCESTORS ate with cutlery or not in order to distinguish them from MUH FOREIGN INFERIOR INDIAN CIVILIZATION is the great shame of this thread. This Western vs. Eastern warfare on here has devolved into a comical display.

In what way? I have yet to see any evidence for that view

what's your gripe with the based buddhists

So contemporary with the Greeks
This is like attributing the Republic to the Illiad.
Just stop bullshitting and equivocating 8th century philosophy with 10th century BC philosophy.
Shankara didn't have a time machine

why do people still fall for guenonfag bait?

>posts same shankara picture of him sitting with some pajeets
>topic is usually 'why is eastern philosophy so based?' or any variant similar to this

this isn't even literature, go to /his/ (mods please clean up)

>some pajeets
they are also shankara

there's actually a strict protocol on how to eat with your hands, it's not just shoving your hands in there any way possible
you're also supposed to use copper utensils

it's odd that icycalm said this lmao. he forgets about zarathustra too soon

He was extremely influential, and is considered to have consolidated and reestablished various major doctrines. At the same time though, a lot of his ideas were predicated on other earlier people and so it wasn't all just him (which he freely admits in his works). He mentions as many as 99 previous thinkers in his writings but almost all of these have been lost to time. The movement he solidified existed long before him and it would have solidified regardless but he just happened to do the job exceptionally well. The reason why he is seen as more special than other founders of different schools is that he was the first great consolidator or synthesizer. Before him there was not really any widespread doctrinal/philosophical tradition (that we know of) which had wide-ranging and coherent explanations for how everything in the Vedas, Upanishads, Gita, Brahma Sutras, Puranas, the Itihasas etc were true and consistent with each other and then Shankara came along and did just that, which then spread all over India. Later Vedantists often followed in his footsteps even while critiquing him and other Vedanta school founders like Ramanuja and Madhva both studied under Advaita teachers early in their lives.

> So first you put hand up in your ass, then you put hand in food?
Kek, I lost it.

anti-guenonfags are unironically worse than guenonfag himself. They're always the ones shitting up the threads with their schizophrenia

t. guenonfag

>This is like attributing the Republic to the Illiad. Just stop bullshitting and equivocating 8th century philosophy with 10th century BC philosophy.

No, that is not an accurate comparision at all. The Iliad is an epic poem that one can at most read some symbolism into, the Upanishads are just straight metaphysics/philosophy. Most of Shankara's ideas come from them and a lot of his writing is just quoting and juxtaposing various Upanishad verses, letting them speak for themselves. The word Advaita appears in them, as well as all the verses about there being only the One, who is infinite, unborn and the inner Self of all beings. Shankara's works and Vedanta writ large is an extended exegesis on things already explicitly stated in the early Upanishads from the 9th-7th centuries BC. The ideas which preempt Plato, Parmenides etc are already stated in the earliest Upanishads, although they received the most commentary and exegesis later on with the emergence of Vedanta. Nobody really cares about being 'first' though, life and history are not races or games to be won. OP was just using the normal half-joking Yea Forums lingo that everyone uses to talk about their preferred thinkers (case in point being Deleuzefag who spams the same threads every day about Deleuze calling him the greatest thinker)

>maybe if I mention Guenon incessantly than I can derail the thread and stop anonymous strangers on the internet from talking about a separate topic that I don't want them to talk about on a temporary page that will disappear in a day anyways!
imagine having this as a priority

>a lot of his writing is just quoting and juxtaposing various Upanishad verses
why did it take nearly a millennia for someone to come into the spotlight and say 'hey lads this upanishad stuff is actually great' when the upanishads were readily available to most ascetics and commoners who seek them prior to Shankara? Why did it only take off after the success (and decline) of Buddhism in the subcontinent? Were 'commentaries' really that convincing that they had to use it to revitalize puranic hinduism (shankara was a shaivist)? It doesn't help that Gaudapada straight up ripped madhyamaka buddhism in some of his writings and the whole aesthetic of advaita is reminiscent of buddhist monasticism. These accusations didn't come up out of thin air or spite from competing schools of thought.

>maybe if I repost the same thread over and over again and samefag replies who call me out I can finally revive traditionalism in this board
lmao you are so easy to trigger even to this day

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>why did it take nearly a millennia for someone to come into the spotlight and say 'hey lads this upanishad stuff is actually great' when the upanishads were readily available to most ascetics and commoners who seek them prior to Shankara?
It didn't, Upanishadic ideas are replete in the Hindu literature that emerged between the first Upanishads and Shankara, which includes the Mahabharata, Bhagavad-Gita, Puranas, Brahma Sutras and various Dharma-sastras; all of these texts mention Upanishadic teachings about Brahman, Atman, Moksha etc. Also primary and lesser Upanishads talking about the same stuff continued to be composed every century since the first ones all along while all this was going on. The Bhagavad-Gita (generally seen from around >200 BC) already represents a late-stage and sophisticated understanding of Upanishadic ideas. The Brahma Sutras is another major milestone in the 200 BC - 200 AD range, Gaudapada being a major figure in Advaita by 500 AD, Shankara a few hundred years later. The Upanishads were originally considered to be something of a secret doctrine and the millennium between them and Shankara represent a gradual spreading of them to more and more people and them becoming more prominent and eventually central in Hindu religious literature, he was a major episode of this and not the beginning of it.

It only looks as though Shankara was the only one to come into the spotlight because he is the earliest major Hindu commentator/thinker to have had massive amounts of his writings survive to the present day. There is truth to the idea of his eminence though because for among other reasons that the reason his writings survived to today in the first place is because how popular and widespread they had become insured them from being lost to history. Despite no similar writings being passed down from earlier thinkers, there is all the evidence to think they existed though and this is generally what the scholars say. A large intellectual tradition began in his wake, but at the same time he was at the crest of another previous millennia-long tradition where many people said much of the same stuff, this is why Shankara was able to cite sources for his ideas in everything from the Upanishads to the Dharma-sastras, Puranas, Gita and even in some cases pre-Upanishad layers of the Vedas.

>Why did it only take off after the success (and decline) of Buddhism in the subcontinent?
I don't know, that's just how history happened. His thought is so heavily based on Hindu sources though in particular pre-Buddhist ones that it becomes very absurd him to try to link him to Buddhism. Most of the ingredients and sources for it to be popular earlier on already long existed but evidently it just took the right person to come along and kick things into overdrive.
>Were 'commentaries' really that convincing that they had to use it to revitalize puranic hinduism (shankara was a shaivist)?
I'm not sure what you are trying to say here, first off Shankara was not really a Shaivist but he regarded the supreme being as nirguna (distinctionless) Brahman that in the highest sense is beyond distinctions like Vishnu or Shiva, but he wrote in the intro to his Gita commentary that his favorite personal deity was Narayana who corresponds to Vishnu. I'm not sure what this has to do with the Puranas, which are not just Shaivist.
>It doesn't help that Gaudapada straight up ripped madhyamaka buddhism in some of his writings
He didn't though, that's a misconception which seems to be repeated by people who havn't read the writings in question. In every instance of where people say Gaudapada took something from Buddhism it's all stuff that appears in the pre-Buddhist Upanishads, he agrees with some of their arguments on the unreality of the waking state but he does so because the early Upanishads say it's unreal because of Maya etc. He spends much of his writings critiquing Buddhism openly, the idea that he is trying to coopt them is wrong. The major things that people usually accuse him of taking from Madhyamaka are doctrine of non-origination/unborn and the idea of absolute truth/conditional truth. Gaudapada did not have to take these from Buddhism because the earliest Upanishads say that Brahman is unborn and that the phenomenal world is unreal, and the idea of a higher/absolute truth to be realized as ultimately true and a conditional truth to be realized as false is explicitly talked about in the early Upanishads also. I see this claim repeated on occasion by people who maybe have skimmed the wiki page but when pressed nobody is ever able to name something specific that Gaudapada allegedly took that isn't in the earliest Upanishads.

>the whole aesthetic of advaita is reminiscent of buddhist monasticism.
Which they predicate on and justify with verses in the earliest pre-Buddhist Upanishads extolling monastic life as for example in ~800 BC Brihadaranyaka Upanishad which includes "Wishing for this World (i.e. the Self) alone, monks renounce their homes" - 4.4.22 and "Maitreyi, my dear, I am going to renounce this life to become a monk" -4.5.2., these ideas also appear in various early non-Upanishad Hindu texts.
>These accusations didn't come up out of thin air or spite from competing schools of thought.
Yes, they came from other Vedantists who had specific theological or philosophical disputes with him who sought to use that allegation to bolster their own interpretation of the Upanishads, in all the areas where they criticize him though he sources those ideas from the Upanishads. Bhaskara called him that to attack his promotion of monasticism (which undermined Bhaskara who taught conjunction of knowledge with works) despite the Upanishads promoting monasticism and criticizing rituals/karmic work. Ramanuja called him that because he wanted to promote his own idea of a qualified Brahman over Shankara's unqualified Brahman despite many Upanishads saying that Brahman is homogeneous, undifferentiated, transcendental, formless, invisible to the eye, infinite, motionless etc.

my nigga. this is some good weed

I had this same thought after finishing Maitri's Upanishad.

The soviets were interested in western interest for their philosophy. "don't worry about worldly issues"... and so on. If they could imply that the West shouldn't be actively trying to solve the worlds issues, they could associate with doctrine with a group who would gladly practice activism on their behalf. Based on populations temperament they knew dividing the population into an active group and subdued group meant a consistent ideology would no longer persist in the west. In reality when you do not act, others will. Opportunity is not democratic, and you will lose your chance by letting go of worldly desires and other meditation practices.

stfu boomer