Mahayana Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta

Earlier in one of my posts "Freedom": I had said this:

From what I read, Mahayana Buddhism is very very similar./close to Advaita school of thought. In fact many vishishta advaita and dvaita school's of thought proponents have accused  AdiSankaracharya of having borrowed concepts from Mahayana Buddhism, which predates advaita by many centuries (may be even millenia), there are subtle differences though, we should read up further on both to understand. 
My understanding stands to be completely wrong. When I wrote the blog, i thought that the Advaita vedanta was an interpretation of the Vedas and the Upanishads provided to us by Adi Sankaracharya in the 6th-7th Century A.D.

 I couldn't have been more wrong.

 Tracking the lineage of Adi Sankaracarya, it goes back all the way to Brahma, the creator of the universe. There was never a time when Advaita wasn't a school of thought.

 Mahayana Buddhism, like other Buddhist schools are greatly influenced by the Upanishads. The concepts have been borrowed from the Upanishads and modified to fit the interpretation of the proponents. 

 Hence if any thing, Advaita, predates Mahayana Buddhism by an eternity in comparison.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

David Bohm and Advaita Vedanta

Found an extraordinary piece today on scientific American. Its an interview with Dr. Basil Hailey. The entire script can be found here . The following are the excerpts of the entire interview. Read it, and make your own call: GM :Tell me some of those ideas that you played with. BH: We were interested in undivided whole. How do you describe wholeness without breaking it up into pieces? Bohr said you can’t analyze any further: don’t make the division between the subject and the observing apparatus, because everything is a whole, and as soon as you break it into pieces, you’ve lost it; you’ve changed the phenomenon. I took a lot of insight from Bohr. If you read our book, we never say Bohr was wrong, whereas most other people say Copenhagen is nonsense. What we disagreed with Bohr about is that he couldn’t analyze it further. What we’ve been trying to do is analyze it further. Our idea was to say, yes, you can do it. You can talk about the individual, but it’s the qua
Read more

Brahma Satyam Jagan Mitya ---- A Scientific world view of the nature of Reality

Image
Brahma satyam jagat mithya, jivo brahmaiva naparah—"Brahman is the only truth, the world is unreal, and there is ultimately no difference between Brahman and individual self"[13] --- Adi Sancaracarya Now watch this debate/discussion at the world science festival. A Thin Sheet of Reality: The Universe as a Hologram (Full) Science slowly but steadily converging with Vedanta. if the video doesn' t load: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnETCBOlzJs
Read more

Entropy and the concept of Yuga in Sanatana Dharma

One of the most common ideas on time in the Sanatana Dharma is the concept of Yugas. As far as I know there are 4 Yugas (which also possibly repeat themselves), but in general the four of them are : Satya Yuga Treta Yuga: SreeRama Dwapara Yuga: Sree Krishna Kali Yuga And if you read about these yugas in any of our scriptures, be the Puranas, or the Bhagwath Geeta, the Bhagavatham, but there is a strong agreement in every school of thought regarding the yugas. Now, what does this have anything to do with the second law of Thermodynamics: Law of Entropy I just read through chapter six of the Fabric of the Cosmos by Dr. Brian Greene (obviously I watched the PBS Nova show as well, but I waited till I read the book to blog on this concept for better clarity). Chapter six talks about the conundrum of how classical physics and our common perception of time are related to entropy. A vastly complicated topic for the purposes of this blog. But here is the gist: The re
Read more