While Hinduism and Buddhism are two different religions, the philosophies are very similar in many ways. Both of these philosophies together have greatly shaped India, and of course other countries wherein the two have been adopted. Buddhism was a formed as a reaction from Hinduism, in which many of the ideas were altered and new thoughts arose. It is very interesting to look at how Buddhist ideas arose from the original Indian religion on Hinduism. Here I will discuss some of the similarities and differences in the two philosophies, and state some of my personal opinions on the thoughts and ideas.
To understand the philosophy of Hinduism, one must first understand that there are considered to be two different worlds in the Hindu religion. These two worlds are called Purusha and Prakriti, or the spiritual world and the material world. Purusha, the divine world, is a completely different kind of world from Prakriti, or the world of nature. Purusha is the world in which our souls exist, as well as our pure consciousness and Brahman (God). Prakriti is where our bodies and ego exist. Prakriti contains the changing, finite, material world, and is bound by our senses and our mentality. Purusha on the other hand is infinite and goes beyond what we can conceive or sense.
The human soul in Hinduism, which is called Atman, exists forever. The human in the material world who contains this soul, however, has a beginning and an end. To understand that the soul is infinite but we ourselves are finite, the soul must be separated from the ego, body, and mind. This means that a human being contains a soul, but that soul is not a part of the person. The soul, Atman, is considered to be infinite because it has no beginning or end. The soul goes through Samsara, which is a cycle of reincarnation. It gets reborn over and over again until it reaches Moksha, which is liberation from Samsara and an end to suffering.
In the Buddhist philosophy, there is no permanent soul. Buddha never spoke about Purusha, Brahman, or anything in our bodies which is infinite and immutable. The no-self doctrine states that there is no fixed, permanent self or soul, because we are always changing. The self is more of an idea than a reality. An example which is commonly used as a sort of metaphor to explain this is a chariot. A chariot really is just a bunch of wood cut into different shapes and stuck together. Nevertheless, we call it a chariot. We call the wheel of the chariot a wheel, but it is really just made up of smaller pieces. We can call ourselves a self, but what are we really? We are actually just a combination of five aggregates, which are called the five skandhas. These five skandhas are form, feelings, perceptions, impulses, and consciousness. Everything exists only in relation to other things, because something in isolation is empty. For example, a wheel spoke is not a spoke by itself. It is nothing unless we see it in relation to the wheel.
Haha idk, I've been studying asian philosophy.
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