I started replying to his mail, but discarded it for various reasons. Good that you have summaried with good points.
As soon as I started reading this article, I started laughing and had good fun for the first few paras...then didnt the patience to go through. This is similar to the Rajini's Endhiran effect jokes circulating in the internet...
'When Rajini does pushups..he is not lifting his body. but pushing the earth down'...kind of stuff.. :)
Obvious that a Anti-Hindu person and not a neutral person has written this article. Its not even worth wasting our time responding to such things...
The major issue is - such articles are witten w.o reading either Bhudhist texts or Advaita texts.
People who have read both have recorded
1. In Tamilnadu - Dravida Sisu ensured the revival of Hinduism - approx 100 years before Adisankara
2. Adisankara had to argue ,ore with the Meemamsakas ( the article writer had written about the arguments Sankara had with A WOMAM is related to that) likeMmandanmishra amd Kumarilla bhatta.
Since those people already won over the other faiths and establihed a Larma Memasaka religion which propagated only rituals and not the spritual.
Adisankara establihed that the essence of ritual is that it is a preparatory to go for spritual.
He is a Vedantin.
TheMajor non vedic he confronted was - The jain Amaresa who wrote the Sanskrit dictionary Amarakosam.
Adisankara's fight was with people like Kapalikas, Meemamsakas.
Adisankara did not propagate violence and rather converted many temples whih turned to violent to non violent. Our own Kachippoli Kamakkodi of sambandar became a mrugabali temple and Adisankara had to re establish it as a sadvik temple,
Adisankara's Advaita - the theory of Relative.
His famous question - If there is nobody to see- will the sky still be blue? is the essence of relative perception.
But today is the day of propaganda. The more you form a group and shout, that becomes truth. Cho ramaswamy often quotes asaying - you can answer a person who knows every thing. You canconvince a person who knows nothing. But you cant talk to a person who knows a little and thinks that he knows everything.