From the time I have realized the inanity of the dogma of Vedanta, I have railed against it and condemned it in the strongest possible terms and epithets in my blog posts and articles and comment-trails.
But as much as it is celebrated, Vedanta is in dire need of the most stinging denunciation that humanity is capable of.
It is really hard to come by even a few intellectuals who have or had the wisdom and courage to call the nonsensical spade of Vedanta, a spade
In one of the my critiques of Vedanta, I commended the efforts of MN Roy and particularly VR Narla for his masterly excoriation of the Vedanta in his work "Essays on the Upanishads: A Critical Study"
Another addition to this noble objective is contributed by AE Gough in his work "THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE UPANISHADS AND ANCIENT INDIAN METAPHYSICS"
I am quoting below his epilogue to the above treatise on the Upanishads. I have highlighted some of his opinions about these works, which really expose the meanness and monstrosity of the Vedanta school of thought.
"There is little that is spiritual in all this.The primitive Indian philosophers teach that the individual self is to be annulled by being merged into highest self. Their teaching in this regard has been so often mistaken and misstated, that it is important to insist upon the difference between the ancient Indian mystic and the modern idealist. The difference must have made itself plain enough to the reader of these pages.
He will have seen for himself how the Indian sages,as the Upanishads picture them, seek for participation in the divine life, not by pure feeling, high thought,and strenuous endeavor, not by an unceasing effort to learn the true and do the right,but by the crushing out of every feeling and every thought, by vacuity, apathy, inertia, and ecstasy.
They do not for a moment mean that the purely individual feelings and volition are to be suppressed in order that the philosopher may live in free obedience to the monitions of its higher common nature. Their highest Self is little more than an empty name a 'Caput mortuum' of abstract understanding. Their pursuit is not a pursuit of perfect character, but of perfect characterlessness.
They place perfection in the pure in-determination of thought,the final residue of prolonged abstraction; not in the higher and higher types of life and thought successively intimated in the idealizing tendencies of the mind, as among the progressive portions of the human race. The epithets of the sole reality, the highest Self, are negative, or if positive they are unintelligible.
It is a uniformity of indifferent being, thought, and bliss. It is a mass of thought and bliss, as fire is a mass of heat and light. It is thought always the same and ever objectless, thought without a thinker or things to think of. It is bliss in which there is no soul to be glad, and no sense of gladness. It is a light which lightens itself, for there is nothing else for it to lighten.
This is (supposedly) the gain above all gains,a bliss above all other bliss, a knowledge above all other knowledge.
It is no part of the spirit of the Indian sages to seek to see things as they are, and to help to fashion them as they ought to be, to let the power at work in the world work freely through them; to become docile echoes of the eternal voice, and pliant organs of the infinite will."
This neither was nor could be the spirit of men of their race, their age,and their environment. the time, and the men for these things -had not yet appeared. This is the spirit in which many a man now works, to whom philosophy is a name, and who would smile to bear himself called an idealist. It is not the spirit of the ancient Indian sage, Brahmanical or Buddhist.
For in these there is no quest of verity and of an active law of righteousness,but only a yearning after resolution into the fontal unity of undifferentiated being; or, in the case of the Buddhist, a yearning after a lapse into the void, a return to the primeval nothingness of things. The effort is to shake off every mode of personal existence,and to be out of the world for ever, in the unbroken repose of absorption or annihilation.
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