The distinction between Sage Sankara’s Advaita and Vijnanavadins Buddhism is that the former is mentalism i.e. mind is the real, whereas the latter is idealism, i.e. ideas are real. We follow the former.
Buddhism did not graduate its teaching to suit people of varying grades; hence its failure to affect society in Asia.
Buddha's teachings: ~ All life is misery belongs to the relative standpoint only. For you cannot form any idea of misery without contrasting it with its opposite, happiness. The two will always go together.
Buddha taught the goal of cessation of misery, i.e. peace, but took care not to discuss the ultimate standpoint, for then he would have had to go above the heads of the people and tell them that misery itself was only an idea, that peace even was an idea (for it contrasted with peacelessness). That the doctrine he gave out was a limited one, is evident because he inculcated compassion. Why should a Buddhist sage practice pity? There is no reason for it.
Advaita is the next step higher than Buddhism because it gives the missing reason, viz. unity, non-difference from others, and because it explains that it used the concept of removing the sufferings of others, of lifting them up to happiness, only as we use one thorn to pick out another, afterwards throw both away. Similarly, Advaita discards both concepts of misery and happiness in the ultimate standpoint of non-duality, which is indescribable.
Buddhists say that a thing exists only for a moment, and if that thing has still got some of the substance from which it was produced, how then can they deny that its cause is continuing in the effect; hence its existence is more than a moment. Vedanta is concerned with whether it is one and the same thing which has come into being, or has it come out of nothing. : Ssntthosh Kumaar

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