Comparing Hinduism And Buddhism

Aside from social order, the Brahmanical and the Buddhists perspectives about “the self” is different. The Brahmanical texts, specifically the Upanishads, used the word atman to define ‘self.’ According to the Upanishads, “the self in its ultimate nature is mysterious, ungraspable entity...it is what is immortal in [a person]” (Gethin, 134). This means that everyone has an unchanging and eternal spirit within one’s self. On the contrary, the Buddhists disregard the idea of atman because they believe that there is nothing permanent in the lives of human. Instead, they stressed the ideology of “no self”or anatta, in which there is no permanent and unchanging spirit in human’s body (Gethin, 138). For the Buddhist, people faced different experiences

According to the Brahmanical perspective, the Dharma “is the truth about things, the truth about the world …[and] the way [people] should act” (Gethin, 35). Therefore, the Dharma is similar to a universal law, where people must fulfill different responsibilities depending on their position in the society. This shows that the Dharma from the Brahmanical tradition states how one must function in the society. On the contrary, the Buddhist sees the Dharma as a collection of Buddhist teachings that tells how the world and nature functions. For Buddhism, the Dharma is not a dogma, but rather an explanation of the reality of the world. Additionally, for the Buddhist, one cannot acquired the information of the Dharma just by listening to it, rather one must be trained and put them into practice in order to fully understand the Dharma (Gethin, 37). Therefore, the Dharma is more complicated for the Buddhists than the Brahmans. For the Brahmanical tradition, the Dharma is almost similar to a simple list of duties that one must follow, while the Buddhist perspective of Dharma is much more complicated because one is subjected to training before understanding the Dharma. Therefore, even though both groups accepted the notion of the Dharma, they both have different of way of using