Sankara Meets Mipham: Reconstructing Classical Buddhist Responses to Advaita Vedanta

Sankara’s critique of Buddhism, developed most fully in his Brahmasutra-bhasya, remains one of the sharpest philosophical challenges ever mounted against the Buddhist denial of a permanent self. This paper reconstructs that critique argument by argument, then asks how a modern philosopher working within the Nyingma tradition, drawing especially on the nineteenth-century scholar Mipham Rinpoche, might respond. The paper does not claim that Mipham literally answered Sankara; the two never engaged each other directly, and Mipham wrote centuries after Sankara and in a different intellectual context. Rather, it reconstructs the strongest available Buddhist replies from Nagarjuna, Candrakirti, Santideva, Santaraksita, Kamalasila, Mipham, and Longchenpa, and asks where those replies succeed, where they fall short, and where contemporary philosophy of mind sheds new light on an old dispute. Particular attention is paid to two distinctions that are frequently collapsed in comparative literature: the difference between the Nyingma concept of rigpa and the Vedantic Brahman, and the difference between advaita (“one”) and advaya (“not-two”). The paper argues that treating these as synonyms flattens a substantive philosophical disagreement, and that recovering the distinction changes how several of Sankara’s arguments should be evaluated. Unlike the previous draft of this paper, this version also states explicitly what counts as a legitimate philosophical reconstruction across traditions that never historically met, expands the treatment of causation and dream-based skepticism, gives Mipham’s own reasoning a larger share of the argument, and closes with a section stating candidly where Sankara’s critique continues to press Buddhist philosophy rather than ending on a purely favorable note.