I am not an eastern philosopher but I do practice a form of animism. One of the basic beliefs is that everything has a soul. This even includes inanimate objects. There is no need to feel guilty about using said object though because they were put here for some form of divine purpose. That purpose could be for you to build things with or simply to break. Who can tell the will of the divine.
That said, I believe that everything has a consciousness as well but with inanimate things the consciousness is so foreign that we could never truly understand it.
In Buddhism, Enlightenment (Nibbana, Pali; Nirvana, Sanskrit) is not a place that is entered by an entity. The Buddha was quite vague in his descriptions of what Enlightenment was like, presumably because it transcends our mundane consciousness and, therefore, language. He generally spoke in terms of what it is not, rather than what it was.
His most concrete description of Enlightenment compared it to a fire that had gone out. This was in answer to a question about what happened to enlightened people after they died. The Buddha’s response was something like “Where does a fire go when it goes out?”
The idea of a soul is the antithesis of Buddhist philosophy. The three characteristics of existence in Buddhist thought are dukkha (suffering, unsatisfactoriness), anicca (impermanence), and anatta (selflessness, emptiness). The idea of a soul contradicts the last two of these three, since souls are said to be eternal and to have existence apart from external conditions. So jovan is accurate in saying that souls do not exist in Buddhism, as foreign as that idea is to Western sensibilities.
I think many practicing Buddhists and Hindoos believe in Karma and reincarnation (It may very well be that these concepts were metaphorical in nature ultimately urging humans to live righteously). But, isn’t the idea of reincarnation closely linked to the idea of permanence, i.e., of souls maybe?
