Comparing Hinduism And Buddhism

Hinduism and Buddhism are two collections of beliefs came form India, that are mostly about philosophy and metaphysics. They both try to offer a theory of why people would suffer from temptation, drudgery and pain and how to attain enlightenment and self-awakening in order to obtain freedom form the tempting and arduous world. As the theories of thoughts developed, Hinduism and Buddhism produced different views from each other.
The fundamental core of Hindu metaphysics is that Atman is Brahman. Atman refers to the conscious core of one’s being, as well as other sentient beings, and it is eternal, pure spirit (Bresnan, p.54). Brahman is “the ultimate inner essence of all things that exist”, which means that Brahman is the ultimate reality,

Moksha is the ultimate objective of lives, living in perfect peace and being released from the cycling of birth, death, and rebirth, which is called samsara (Bresnan, p.59). This means once one achieves moksha, the one would live in peace and understand all things, that is Brahman. The only path to achieve moksha is practicing yoga, and generally, yoga refers to the path leading from ignorance, struggling in maya, to awakening, moksha (Bresnan, p.74). Karma refers to the repercussions of one’s actions, and it could influence circumstances of one’s life, which has to be through the process of rebirth (Bresnan, p.64-77). For instance, one would be born into a low-rank caste and be in poverty instead of upper-caste and wealth if the one performed bad deeds in one’s former life. “The ultimate perfection of yoga lies in the act of devotion, loving surrender to a Supreme Deity,” and fundamentally, practicing yoga could lead to universal compassion toward all beings (Bresnan, p.65). Overall, Hinduism requires individuals to perform good deeds in order to achieve awakening and liberation from desires and

Anatman means “no atman”, which is also means “no Self”, compared to Hinduism. As concerning the nature of reality, Buddha concluded that “there can be no self-fulfillment because there is no self to be fulfilled,” and shortly, no self can be discovered because there is no Atman (Bresnan, p.187). Reality, time changing and movements, according to Buddha, is “a constant flow of patterns of energy,” and it is just “the process itself”. This means there is no subject doing all the changes, therefore, there is no need for Brahman, a pointless name. Since everything is a matter of energy changing, all “substanding things” and all conscious experiences are “illusions of the imagination” (Bresnan, p.188). Because Atman is conscious core of all beings and conscious experiences are illusions, Atman is “a fantastic error” (Bresnan, p.187). All of these imply that “everything lacks substantial reality,” that contains two principles, “impermanence is a characteristic of all existence” and “intelligibility of anything is dependent on a variety of causes and conditioned outside itself” (Bresnan, p.188). In other words, nothing can exist independently and nothing can explain itself. When individuals are concentrating on the consciousness of one’s self and all desires and feelings around the self, “the attachment to ego becomes the cause of human suffering” (Bresnan,