There are many types of Vedanta namely Kewaladwaita or Nondualist, Visishtadwaita or Qualified Nondualist, Dwaitadwaita or Dual-nondualist and Dwaita or Dualist. Shankaracharya was the propounder of the Nondualist school and stated that the Brahman is the Ultimate Reality which in effect is formless, indeterminable and ineffable. In other words, he emphasized what is called the nirguna aspect of the Reality. He further maintained that Brahman alone is real and that the world is unreal or mithya. Shankara’s influence has been so overarching on the Indian system of thought that Vedanta is normally identified with him only, somewhat to the neglect of the other vedantic mystic-philosophers. He rejected the notion of Personal God or Ishvara and totally discounted the existence of the saguna aspect of Brahman.

Ramanuja, who was the exponent of Visishtadwaita, stressed the saguna aspect of the Brahman stating that the Ultimate Reality is an ‘all comprehensive spirit which is qualified by inconscient Nature and finite spirits which are adjectival to the former’(Chaudhuri, 1951, p. 204). He focussed on the world, self and God and they were all real for him. Ramanuja proposed his theory after four hundred years of Shankara, which has led to heated debates between the followers of the nirguna and the saguna facets of Brahman. To make the matters more complicated, Madhavacharya, while advocating Dwaitavada, put forth his contention that the all-encompassing Divine and individuals (jiva) are separate, and the Divine rules over the jiva. One comes to understand that the Kewaladwaita emphasized the transcendental aspect of the Divine, Visishtadwaita underlined the Cosmic aspect of the Divine whereas Dwaita stressed the separate individuals (jiva) in relation to the Divine. These major schools of the Vedanta have existed as jarring sects for quite some time in the history of humanity.

http://www.cejournal.org/GRD/Ramakrishna.htm

Turns out I actually agree with Aurobindo on this one. Who’d have thought.

“Dualistic and anthropomorphic as may be the philosophy of the Visishtadwaita, when compared with that of the Adwaita — the non-dualists, — it is yet supremely higher in logic and philosophy than the cosmogony accepted by either Christianity, or its great opponent, modern Science” (SD 1:522).

I’m not sure how accurate her statement is…

one school of Vedanta says this, not all. i happen to like “qualified” dualism.

Good, we agree to try to go beyond Kant and you propose to look into something you call “intuitive knowledge” based on “intuitive perception,” which is somehow derived from “buddhi-manas”. Of course I recognize that as quite TC (Theosophically Correct), but my quest is for those concept-originating experiences that comprise the basis to give terms like “intuition”, “buddhi” and “manas” some kind of experiential anchorage. I think your question of “how do we obtain an intuitive knowledge?” already assumes too much. Therefore, can you explicate, describe, interpret your own unique personal experiences of “intuitive perception” without using the metaphysical terms that we try to anchor? And if you can not, what kind of problem then do we have?

I’ll start with what’s for me the easiest question: how to determine who’s right? Well, Govert - this is one of those issues we won’t really know the answer to until we get ‘there’.

Personally I suspect that ultimately it’s largely semantics. That’s the position of the article on Mahayana Buddhism I linked to before. Theosophy is generally closer to Mahayana than to Theravada on issues such as this one.

Buddhists have at some point decided to deny ‘atman’, so if they want to talk about the something that experiences Nirvana, they have to call it something else than Atman.

Pablo: you’re right: atman actually does mean ’self’. Worse: it can be used as a pronoun in certain types of Sanskrit. It simply means I or ‘me’ then. As in ‘I walk in the rain’. Nothing high or mighty about it, which may well be why the Buddha denied ultimate nature to it. After all, if someone were to ask this crowd of devoted theosophists here:
Is there a permanent ‘I’? We would all hesitate (I suspect, correct me if I’m wrong) to say ‘yes, your self as you know it will last forever’. Instead we would answer something like this:
‘your personality is changing. The ‘I’ you know today is different from the one you had last year - and you’ve changed a lot since you were a child. You will continue to change, because change is in the nature of the universe.

And, like the Buddha, we might even hesitate to go that one step further to say that there is something divine in us that does last for a long time, goes from life to life and is ultimately One with every other being. Blavatsky went that one step further, probably in part because materialism has caused the doctrine of ‘Maya’ to be so very easy to understand. Also: it’s pretty hard to sell reincarnation and karma while denying Atman.

As for my scholarly teachers - Pablo - you’ve summed up the position of my one Buddhism teacher quite well there - as was implied in my previous comments on this post.

Why limit the field to two options? What’s the operative assumption guiding you here?

Me thinks your guiding assumption is an a priori critical materialist position on perception and experience along the lines of Immanuel Kant with his dichotomy between the thing-as-experienced (phenomenon) and the thing-in-itself (noumenon), and the alleged impossibility of the senses to go beyond the material, for the senses themselves are bound to that realm.

Or will you develop a new position going beyond this one and your Kantian position is just a straw man to be tossed?

Mind you, what I’m asking for is an experiential philosophy of experience that can provide an inter-subjective grounding for the relevant inter-related experiences upon which we could base a more experience-oriented discussion about so-called metaphysical issues. I’m not looking for a scientific or metaphysical theory from which to deduce explanations. I want to break open our interpretation of the nature of experience itself with the possibility to re-integrate theosophy experientially into our lives in a possibly whole new way. For this to occur we will first have to understand and suspend the myriad scientific-materialist and speculative-metaphysical (including theosophical) assumptions regarding the nature of perception, experience, language and evidence, including the very sophisticated Kantian position.

What are the tools, if any, that we have to settle these metaphysical points about the nature of the (not-)self, consciousness, skandas, etc.?

Even if we extract, in a correct comparitive theosophical way, the congruence between Vedanta, HPB and Trikaya Buddhism (if that’s its proper name), how do we verify these statements for ourselves?

What is our criterion of truth?

Do we fall back on authority (HPB/Buddha says so)? If so, why? Or is it a question of adhering to the most plausible hypothesis? If so, what do we mean by that? Or is it a question of having slipped into a paradigmatic, interpretative framework that somehow seems satisfactory, but can not be tested, because one can not step outside of the framework (or only by converting to another framework)? Or is this speculative metaphysical chatter a reflection of a ‘false’ consciousness that has to be deconstructed through a so-named ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ in the mold of a Marx, Freud or Nietzsche? Or is it an exercise in evading the depravity of the ego, which we are, as per Krishnamurti?

So, in short, the question is about the possibility and nature of an experiential radical zero-point on which we can meet. It’s an old philosophical question with answers galore, but every so now and then we just have to allow ourself to be seized by the question to work out a new answer appropriate to the unique situation we find ourselves in.

I never would have thought of it like that. i had always thought of the buddha nature to be something universal, not personal. so, i googled it and found the wikipidiea entry. turns out there are many ideas as to what buddha nature is- maybe more than what atman is. i think all of this points to a simple fact, that intellect will never know some things on its own.

below is a quote from the wiki page that sums up my previous (and current) view.

“Unlike the Western concept of Soul or some interpretations of the Indian Atman, Buddha-nature is not presented in the primary Buddha-nature sutras as an isolated essence of a particular individual, but rather as a single unified essence shared by all beings with the Buddha himself.”

Generally Theravada Buddhism is more consistent on this point. They did believe in reincarnation of something back when Blavatsky and Olcott went to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), but now they generally defend the no-soul (anatta) doctrine. See this great article on the Theravada position on Anatta. Still, as I tried to say earlier: the Buddha really wasn’t all that clear in the Pali Sutras - probably because the doctrine about Atman wasn’t that well developed yet when he denied it. The theosophical solution to this is often: The Buddha denied that Atman as a personal principle was eternal. Everything I learned about Hindu and Buddhist philosophy supports that position.
See also this other article on Atma in Buddhism: a Mahayana perspective which unites Advaita and Sunnyata

The Mahayana position is a bit more difficult, as it generally stresses that we have a ‘Buddha Nature’. This is where the distinction with Advaita Vedanta becomes really difficult to find. Both ‘Buddha Nature’ and ‘Brahman=Atman’ are about something very impersonal in us being identical to something which is basically divine.

Of all Mahayana Buddhism, Tantric Buddhism comes closest to Hinduism (specifically: Hindu Tantra, obviously). The ’subtle drop’ is clearly what in other Mahayana Traditions is called ‘Buddha Nature’. You’ve probably heard of that in a Zen context. Conceptually I don’t think there’s much difference, though obviously Tantric imagery is more vivid and specific.