Core Difference between Hinduism and Buddhism
Is there anything permanent in reality?
Key Hindu terms
"Atman" is the word for soul or essence in Hinduism.
“Brahman” is Sanskrit for "ultimate reality."
Transcription
The whole of Hinduism is really about learning to identify Atman with Brahman. Now, this creates for Hinduism an ontological structure or a structure of ultimate being, a ground of being that is substantive in Hindu thought. I mean, Hindus do believe at the end of the day, if you boil everything down, there is this eternal essence that undergirds the whole universe, Brahman, and they believe that your essence is the same as the essence that pervades the whole universe. That means there is a permanent reality in Hinduism, there is a core, there's an ontology, which can then produce the world that we have.
But Buddhism is going to deny Atman and Brahman. It is going to say that there's no such thing as either of these, but instead they're going to replace it with what is known as the Five Aggregates. The five aggregates represent what is the makeup of what we call "self." They don't believe that there's any irreducible essence that lies at the ground of our being. Instead, Buddhists believe is that all that we call life and existence, human existence, really boils down to these five aggregates, all of which are impermanent and have no first cause.
The first is the body, the material form that we all live in. The second is our bodily sensations or our feelings, the sensations of the body. The third is our perceptions where we learn to recognize certain physical objects, where we have certain mental structures in our brains. These are all part of our perceptions. Fourthly is our mental life. We have certain mental states that we can enter into. We have attitudes, dispositions, and so forth. And finally, there is consciousness. This is the sense of being aware of oneself and being able to discriminate between myself and another person, I and thou.
Buddha believed that each of these five aggregates that make up human existence are all impermanent. None of them has a first cause. So there is no self that is migrating through from existence to existence as the Hindus taught. But instead, all you have is a heap of what they believe they call "karmic constituents." In other words, this is a heap of illusions that come together to form human existence. And as soon as we realize that there is no substantive core, the better.
