Buddhism vs Advaita Vedanta—What's the Difference?

I've received many requests to discuss the differences between Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta. So far, I've been reluctant to take up this topic because I don't want to make any negative comments about teachings that others find helpful. I'd rather encourage them to fully embrace any authentic spiritual path they feel drawn to follow.

Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta are both powerful, ancient traditions, full of important insights and guidance. But, I've been immersed in Advaita Vedanta for four decades now, and that has certainly shaped my personal perspective. As a result, my comments on this topic probably won't be helpful at all for those drawn to the path of Buddhism.

Yet, for those drawn to Advaita Vedanta, this topic can be extremely helpful. We can learn so much through comparison and contrast. For example, I understood American culture clearly and distinctly only after living in India for a while, because I knew no other culture at that time.

In the same way, the teachings of Advaita Vedanta can be understood much more clearly and distinctly by comparing them with Buddhism. What Buddha taught is similar in many ways to the teachings of the rishis, the ancient sages who composed the earliest Hindu scriptures. That's hardly surprising since Buddha himself was raised in a Hindu family and learned from Hindu teachers.

But, as the story goes, after years of intense spiritual practice, he failed to gain enlightenment. Then one day, he sat at the foot of a tree, resolved to meditate there until he became enlightened. Later, Buddha taught his disciples the profound insights he gained in meditation, and those teachings evolved into the tradition we now call Buddhism.

The relationship between Hinduism and Buddhism is a bit complicated. Many Hindus look upon Buddha as a religious reformer, a free-thinker who rejected Hinduism's excessive ritualism of that time, and reinvigorated it with new teachings. Some Hindu scriptures even accept Buddha as an avatara, as the ninth incarnation of Lord Vishnu.

On the other hand, scholars reject the view of Buddha as a Hindu reformer. Why? The great Christian reformer, Martin Luther, fully accepted the authority of the Bible, but Buddha completely rejected the authority of all Hindu scriptures.

For this reason, Buddha is generally considered to be the founder of a new religion, rooted in Hinduism, but distinct from it. Before going any further, for both these religions, we have to distinguish the beliefs they impart from the spiritual teachings they also contain. Like all religions, Hinduism and Buddhism impart various beliefs, beliefs about reincarnation, about heaven and hell, about how the universe was created, and so on.

But both religions also contain profound spiritual teachings, teachings that convey, not matters of belief, but a special kind of knowledge or wisdom that can help free you from all worldly suffering. In the Hindu tradition, those teachings are found in the Upanishads, the scriptures on which Advaita Vedanta is based. In the Buddhist tradition, those teachings are found in the sutras, texts that contain the discourses of Buddha and his disciples, and also in later texts based on those sutras.

The foundation of Buddha's teachings is his four noble truths. First is the truth of duhkha, suffering. Second is the truth that suffering has specific causes like craving, aversion, and ignorance.

Third is the truth that suffering can be removed by eliminating its specific causes. And fourth is the path and practices by which you can eliminate those causes and become free from suffering. These four noble truths are quite similar to Vedanta's central teaching that suffering is the result of craving and aversion, which are themselves the result of ignorance.

By removing that ignorance through the teachings of Vedanta, you can free yourself from suffering. It's impossible to get into the details of either tradition here, but one main issue they both address is the problem of false identification, which means, to wrongly identify yourself with your body and mind. Your body is a material object that's constantly decaying and subject to physical pain.

Your mind is a subtle or non-material object that has many defects and is subject to emotional pain and discomfort. As long as you have a body and mind, physical pain and emotional discomfort seem inescapable. Both Buddhist sutras and Vedantic scriptures teach that physical pain belongs to your body and emotional discomfort belongs to your mind.

Neither of these truly belongs to you. Why not? Because you're not a collection of bones, muscles, and organs with tiny tubes inside.

Nor are you a complicated tangle of fleeting thoughts and ever-changing emotions. The body sitting on your chair right now and the mind within it are objects; they're things. They're not you, because you are not a thing.

Yet, you totally identify yourself with those things. And as a result, you suffer, because the problems that truly belong to your body and mind mistakenly become your problems. Up to this point, the teachings of Buddha and the ancient rishis are very much alike.

Both help you eliminate false identification with your body and mind and free you from suffering. But going forward, their paths begin to diverge. Buddha taught that an individual person is nothing more than an aggregate of five factors - body, sensations, emotions, thoughts, and consciousness.

Buddha did not accept the existence of a conscious being or an inner self that's independent from the aggregate of five parts. He taught his distinctive doctrine of no-self, called anatta in his Pali language, or anatma in Sanskrit. Vedanta, on the other hand, accepts the existence of atma, the true, inner self.

Atma is the consciousness or awareness that's your essential nature, the consciousness by which you're aware of the world around you and by which you observe thoughts and emotions as they arise in your mind. When you fail to recognize your true nature as atma, you falsely identify yourself with your body and mind and become subject to suffering. That's why advaita Vedanta emphasizes the importance of self-knowledge, atma vidya.

Another big difference between Buddhism and Vedanta is how they conceive the ultimate goal of spiritual life. Buddhism calls this goal nirvana, and Vedanta calls it moksha. Nirvana literally means extinguished, like a candle flame that's blown out.

Nirvana is the extinguishing or cessation of suffering that takes place when craving, aversion, and ignorance are eliminated by following Buddha's teachings. Later Buddhist teachers explain nirvana as extinguishing the false sense of being an individual person. For them, nirvana is the complete cessation of selfness, a state of no-self.

Vedantic scriptures sometimes use the word nirvana, but more commonly, moksha is used. Moksha means liberation or freedom, freedom from suffering in this life, and freedom from being reborn into another life of suffering. But, scholarly commentaries define moksha, not only as freedom from suffering, but in a two-fold way - atyanta duhkha nivritti, which means complete cessation of suffering, and niratishaya sukha avapti, the attainment of supreme bliss.

The supreme bliss described here is not some kind of extraordinary spiritual experience; it's actually the true nature of your own consciousness. The ancient rishis discovered that consciousness is unborn and uncreated, therefore it's eternal. Consciousness is formless and limitless, therefore it's vast, all-pervasive.

Consciousness is perfect, complete, and utterly unaffected by worldly troubles, therefore it's divine. To discover the true, divine nature of your own consciousness is moksha. So, moksha is more than the complete cessation of suffering; it's also the direct, personal recognition of your own eternal, limitless, divine self.

With all this in mind, we can say that Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta both start out on the same foot, so to speak. They both identify the root cause of suffering to be false identification with your body and mind. And they both offer methods for removing or negating that false identification.

But, in addition to this negation, Vedanta takes an additional step by positively asserting your true nature to be eternal, limitless consciousness. Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta are in perfect agreement about the problem of suffering and its solution, but they have radically different views about the existence or non-existence of a true, inner self, atma. Yet the fact remains, they both solve the problem of suffering.

So, you can't really say that one is better than the other, because they both work; they both can free you from suffering. This is the twelfth video in a series that answers questions submitted by viewers. If you have a question that would serve as a good topic for a video like this one, please email me at this address, and be sure to indicate "video question" as the subject of the email.

I'll try to address your question in a future video.