Namaste Enkidu,
thank you for the post and the good question.
Enkidu said:
What is the difference between the Buddhist view and the Hindu view?
the most direct answer to this question is the term Atman vs. Anatman. Sanatana Dharma posits an Atman, an unchanging self or soul whereas Buddha Dharma posits AnAtman, no unchanging self or soul.
I've seen it explained as -
in Hinduism, there is an unchanging mover that transmigrates
in Buddhism, there is no such mover, and aspects of consciousness are reborn
What exactly does this mean, particularly the Buddhist view?
what this really means is an that what we normally imagine as "ourselves" isn't how we imagine it to be. generally speaking, especially for theists, there is an a priori concept of a soul or self, which is the "essence" if you will, of the being. in the Buddhist view, this is a misconception since analysis will reveal that there is nothing which we can rightly call the self. when we analyze our self, we find that the self is not an independenly existing, self sufficient entity, we find, instead, that the self exists due to causes and conditions being right, in dependence on things, not independent of things. we can discuss this further, if there is interest.
It almost seems like semantics, and I'm sure there is something very fundamental that I'm missing here.
it is a bit of semantics, to be sure, especially in English where some of the terms used aren't understood in the same way. suffice it to say that the essential difference between the two is the concept of a permentant self (Hindu) vs. a non-permenant self (Buddhism).
As a secondary point, I've seen it said that the Buddhist view of nirvana is sort of like a negation of one essence, where Hindu thought might be that there is one essence that all things are.
Nibbana/Nirvana is one of the most misunderstood concepts in the Buddha Dharma, in my view. a lot of this has to do with the various cultural understandings that different beings have. we have to try to put ourselves in the time of the Buddha to really get a grasp of what he is trying to teach with this idea. the Bramahical notion of fire and what happens to fire is really the essence of the teaching of Nirvana. this may help illustrate what i mean:
We all know what happens when a fire goes out. The flames die down and the fire is gone for good. So when we first learn that the name for the goal of Buddhist practice, nibbana (nirvana), literally means the extinguishing of a fire, it's hard to imagine a deadlier image for a spiritual goal: utter annihilation. It turns out, though, that this reading of the concept is a mistake in translation, not so much of a word as of an image. What did an extinguished fire represent to the Indians of the Buddha's day? Anything but annihilation.
According to the ancient Brahmans, when a fire was extinguished it went into a state of latency. Rather than ceasing to exist, it became dormant and in that state -- unbound from any particular fuel -- it became diffused throughout the cosmos. When the Buddha used the image to explain nibbana to the Indian Brahmans of his day, he bypassed the question of whether an extinguished fire continues to exist or not, and focused instead on the impossibility of defining a fire that doesn't burn: thus his statement that the person who has gone totally "out" can't be described.
However, when teaching his own disciples, the Buddha used nibbana more as an image of freedom. Apparently, all Indians at the time saw burning fire as agitated, dependent, and trapped, both clinging and being stuck to its fuel as it burned. To ignite a fire, one had to "seize" it. When fire let go of its fuel, it was "freed," released from its agitation, dependence, and entrapment -- calm and unconfined. This is why Pali poetry repeatedly uses the image of extinguished fire as a metaphor for freedom. In fact, this metaphor is part of a pattern of fire imagery that involves two other related terms as well.
Upadana, or clinging, also refers to the sustenance a fire takes from its fuel.
Khandha means not only one of the five "heaps" (form, feeling, perception, thought processes, and consciousness) that define all conditioned experience, but also the trunk of a tree. Just as fire goes out when it stops clinging and taking sustenance from wood, so the mind is freed when it stops clinging to the khandhas.
Thus the image underlying nibbana is one of freedom. The Pali commentaries support this point by tracing the word nibbana to its verbal root, which means "unbinding." What kind of unbinding? The texts describe two levels. One is the unbinding in this lifetime, symbolized by a fire that has gone out but whose embers are still warm. This stands for the enlightened arahant, who is conscious of sights and sounds, sensitive to pleasure and pain, but freed from passion, aversion, and delusion. The second level of unbinding, symbolized by a fire so totally out that its embers have grown cold, is what the arahant experiences after this life. All input from the senses cools away and he/she is totally freed from even the subtlest stresses and limitations of existence in space and time.
The Buddha insists that this level is indescribable, even in terms of existence or nonexistence, because words work only for things that have limits. All he really says about it -- apart from images and metaphors -- is that one can have foretastes of the experience in this lifetime, and that it's the ultimate happiness, something truly worth knowing. So the next time you watch a fire going out, see it not as a case of annihilation, but as a lesson in how freedom is to be found in letting go.
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/modern/thanissaro/nibbana.html
My understanding of this (insofar as this is possible or even meaningful) is that both teachings are essentially wordplay, and the underlying reality is the same*. Is this the wrong way of looking at the differences? I.e. is there a practical difference between the two traditions?
i would say that, given a proper understand of the teachings, that the two traditions have a marked difference.
now, concerning the essence, this is also a difference between the traditions. as you know, the Sanatana Dharma essentially posits that MahaBrahma is All and that MahaBrahma is our fundamental essence and is, in fact, the fundamental nature of all phenomena. this view is specifically refuted in the Buddhist teachings wherein the Buddha proclaims that no beginning can be found when searched for and no unchanging essence can be found.
alot of this, of course, is predicated on a proper cognition of the cultural millieu in which the Buddha arose which can make it a bit difficult to penetrate.
I guess where I'm coming from on this (and where my misunderstandings are probably arising) is that I have always thought of Buddhist thought as being a refinement/clarification of the essence of the Vedas, which removes many of the 'theological' aspects of Vedic teaching and instead concentrates on human psychology. Again, what am I fundamentally missing here?
this is often how Buddhism is viewed, especially by adherent of the Sanatana Dharma traditions.
Vedanta and Buddhism are the highlights of Indian philosophical thought. Since both have grown in the same spiritual soil, they share many basic ideas: both of them assert that the universe shows a periodical succession of arising, existing and vanishing, and that this process is without beginning and end. They believe in the causality which binds the result of an action to its cause (karma), and in rebirth conditioned by that nexus. Both are convinced of the transitory, and therefore sorrowful character, of individual existence in the world; they hope to attain gradually to a redeeming knowledge through renunciation and meditation and they assume the possibility of a blissful and serene state, in which all worldly imperfections have vanished for ever. The original form of these two doctrines shows however strong contrast. The early Vedanta, formulated in most of the older and middle Upanishads, in some passages of the Mahabharata and the Puranas, and still alive today (though greatly changed) as the basis of several Hinduistic systems, teaches an
ens realissimum (an entity of highest reality) as the primordial cause of all existence, from which everything has arisen and with which it again merges, either temporarily or for ever.
With the monistic metaphysics of the Vedanta contrasts the pluralistic Philosophy of Flux of the early Buddhism of the Pali texts. It teaches that in the whole empirical reality there is nowhere anything that persists; neither material nor mental substances exist independently by themselves; there is no original entity or primordial Being in whatsoever form it may be imagined, from which these substances might have developed. On the contrary, the manifold world of mental and material elements arises solely through the causal co-operation of the transitory factors of existence (dharma) which depend functionally upon each other, that is, the material and mental universe arises through the concurrence of forces that, according to the Buddhists, are not reducible to something else. It is therefore obvious that deliverance from the Samsara, i.e., the sorrow-laden round of existence, cannot consist in the re-absorption into an eternal Absolute which is at the root of all manifoldness, but can only be achieved by a complete extinguishing of all factors which condition the processes constituting life and world. The Buddhist Nirvana is, therefore, not the primordial ground, the eternal essence, which is at the basis of everything and form which the whole world has arisen (the Brahman of the Upanishads) but the reverse of all that we know, something altogether different which must be characterized as a nothing in relation to the world, but which is experienced as highest bliss by those who have attained to it (Anguttara Nikaya, Navaka-nipata 34).
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/bps/wheels/wheel002.html
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