She’s still struggling with the concept of “there is no spoon”.
I think they are two ways of saying the same thing.
Anyway, I think Hinduism and Buddhism overlap in certain ways. Non-duality appears in both, but isn’t something you find much if anything about in Western religions. Ideas about the self or Self, suffering and liberation appear in both. And both have a habit of being specific about which philosophical concept they are discussing, while other religions may never ‘break character’ to that degree.
To me the biggest differences are cultural, but I’m just some guy on the internet and not an expert.
Yes, but I think it’s still valid to say that such principles are embedded somewhat differently in Hinduism from the way they are in the “heterodoxies” (Buddhism/Jainism/Ajivikism).
The Vedic religion of sacrificial rituals evolved from a shared Indo-European tradition centered on the Indo-European pantheon, with deity figures clearly corresponding to those in other Indo-European groups: e.g., Indra/Jupiter/Zeus/Thor, Mitra/Mithra, etc. The existence of these deities was the most fundamental concept of Vedic religious practice, in which concepts like karma and cyclic rebirth had no place.
As “Vedism” evolved into what we now know as “Hinduism” it expanded to embrace such concepts, but the “pre-karma” Vedic scriptures themselves are still nominally the most sacred texts in Hinduism and the ultimate source of all that it regards as truth. And those scriptures are fundamentally about the existence of deities and the relationships between humans and deities. Which is why I think it’s fair to describe Hinduism as in some way more “polytheistic” than the heterodoxies like Buddhism, which take as their fundamental sacred texts teachings about principles such as karma and liberation rather than invocations of deities.
As for “who had it [i.e., the principle of karma and similar not-necessarily-theistic religious concepts] first”, it’s a tricky question because of the largely obscure chronology. Johannes Bronkhorst argues for the existence of a pre-Late-Vedic spiritual tradition in the “Greater Magadha” region in what’s now northeastern India, separate from Indo-European-derived Vedic ritual and perhaps pre-dating it, whose ideas evolved into the “heterodoxies” of Buddhism, Jainism and Ajivikism and were also absorbed into the modified “Vedism” that became Hinduism.
This is incorrect - the general “scriptural language” for Buddhism is, and always has been AFAIK, Pali, not Sanskrit. Sanskrit was used in some Buddhist works, but it’s often not the same language as Vedic Sanskrit and is definitely not “the” scriptural language of Buddhism.
I’m not trying to imply that Hinduism is the same as Buddhism. Nor am I trying to imply that Hinduism is entirely atheistic(although I am saying that significant parts are). I’m saying there’s a lot of overlap between many aspects of Hinduism and Buddhism. And while the Vedas may be confined to rituals and sacrifices, many other very influential works are not. The Upanishads for instance lay out the Brahman and Atman concepts and propose that they are both the same, the Gita refers specifically to Moksha, and Karma and both probably predate Buddha. The vedas do indeed lay out the procedure for rituals and their importance, and they thus serve as an instruction manual for priests, but IMO, they have little philosophical impact on Hinduism.
ETA: Do you think someone can be Hindu and Buddhist at the same time?
I think the contradiction is in the quotes in your OP. I’m not very familiar with what we call Hinduism but if that belief system requires an eternal, unchanging soul, it should be incompatible with Buddhism. A major aspect of the Buddhist belief system is impermanence, including atman, which is the lack of a permanent or unchanging ‘self’. To cling to the notion of permanence is a source of craving and that causes suffering (2nd Noble Truth).
However, some Buddhists suggest that there is something permanent that is reborn. It’s a huge source of debate in which those Buddhists describe rebirth in a way that suggests a Hindu-like reincarnation. They will point to texts originating throughout Asia that describe being reborn as another person or animal. Other Buddhists will say that this kind of rebirth requires a permanent soul and point to other texts to insist that a permanent soul does not exist; those rebirth stories are simply religious metaphors. Then you see fights in which the words “fundamentalism” and “Hinduism” gets thrown around as insults.
I guess what I’m saying is that, in many circles, it is rare for someone who would call himself/herself a Buddhist to say he/she is also a Hindu. The reason is that they, themselves, insist that there are distinctions even if they may believe something that overlaps with Hinduism. Of course, that’s disregarding the people who built their own belief system in a piecemeal fashion.
It’s quite plain to anyone who examines the situation from a neutral point of view (rather than going in trying to prove that one’s own religion is right or wrong or that Buddhism is the magical new-age religion-without-god that we should all jam into our existing belief systems) that Buddhism is and always has been a subset of Hinduism in terms of the mythology it subscribes to, which emphasizes areas of ethics and practice that are not the same ones mainstream Hinduism does; the relationship is much the same as that of Christianity to Judaism.
Hinduism doesn’t require much of anything, which as some people have pointed out, may lead to confusion in trying to answer this. However, those parts of Hinduism that deal with the “eternal unchanging soul”, also go on to say that ultimate knowledge of this eternal unchanging soul(atman) will lead it to realise that it is one with the universe(brahman). Which to me looks pretty similar to the Buddhist concept.
I don’t want to be one of those people who argue on the internet but I’ve never read this to be the case. I’d say it’s more like non-Vedic religions that were opposition to priests and castes started split off from Vedic religions in the region around the 6th century BCE. These gave rise to various ascetic traditions which coalesced into Buddhism, Jainism and some other yogic traditions. Although they may have retained some cultural identity, along with similar terminology, their core beliefs involve a rejection many of the traditions before them. The key features of Buddhism are a rejection of cultural baggage as being a requirement. This is how it was able to spread worldwide so easily much in the same way Christianity did. That’s not to say that various Buddhist sects don’t have staunch traditions. It’s just that those traditions are not required for all Buddhism. Many of the modern ‘Hindu’ traditions also espouse some of the ascetism of that time. I think the problem is with the word Hinduism itself and how “everything looks the same” to foreigners.
So saying Buddhism is a subset of Hinduism is like saying Man is a subset of chimpanzees. Hinduism and Buddhism more likely have a common ancestor.
I don’t want to be one of those people who argue on the internet but I’ve never read this to be the case. I’d say it’s more like non-Vedic religions that were opposition to priests and castes started split off from Vedic religions in the region around the 6th century BCE. These gave rise to various ascetic traditions which coalesced into Buddhism, Jainism and some other yogic traditions. Although they may have retained some cultural identity, along with similar terminology, their core beliefs involve a rejection many of the traditions before them. The key features of Buddhism are a rejection of cultural baggage as being a requirement. This is how it was able to spread worldwide so easily much in the same way Christianity did. That’s not to say that various Buddhist sects don’t have staunch traditions. It’s just that those traditions are not required for all Buddhism. Many of the modern ‘Hindu’ traditions also espouse some of the ascetism of that time. I think the problem is with the word Hinduism itself and how “everything looks the same” to foreigners.
So saying Buddhism is a subset of Hinduism is like saying Man is a subset of chimpanzees. Hinduism and Buddhism more likely have a common ancestor.
This is inaccurate. In the first place, no, it’s by no means “plain” or indisputable that Buddhism originated as a “subset” or internal reform movement within Vedic Brahmanistic (not “Hindu”) religion. (it’s not really correct to speak of “Hinduism” during the Late-Vedic period when Buddhism and Jainism became established, since “Hinduism” conventionally designates a later stage in the evolution of Vedism/Brahmanism, after the almost universal abandonment of the srauta rituals.)
As I noted above, Bronkhorst, for example, argues that the “impersonal principles” of karma and so forth, which appear both in later Hinduism and Buddhism/Jainism/Ajivikism, were derived separately from a pre-existing non-Vedic “Greater Magadha” culture from which late Vedic thought borrowed them. Even though most other Indologists don’t go quite so far as Bronkhorst in reconstructing a completely separate non-Vedic source of these ideas, most acknowledge that they were probably to some extent a synthesis of Vedic and non-Vedic traditions.
In other words, Vedism wasn’t the only game in town when it came to religious thought in Vedic-era India, not by a long chalk. So it’s incorrect to assume that Buddhism or any other ancient Indian religion must be merely a “subset” of the beliefs of Vedic polytheism.
In the second place, even if Buddhism did originate entirely within the Vedic tradition, that wouldn’t prevent it from being fundamentally atheistic in the sense of rejecting personified deities and the concept of propitiating them. That’s exactly what the founding doctrines of Buddhism (and Jainism and Ajivikism) did. They held that the mystic but impersonal forces of karma, cyclic rebirth, and so on were the essential reality, rather than the existence or actions or commands of personified gods.
That’s the premise that I’m (and not just me but the majority of Indologists and historians of religion past and present, who typically are not trying to promote any kind of “magical new-age religion-without-god”) calling atheistic. That is, while it doesn’t rule out the existence of deities or of any other supernatural beings, it considers the existence and worship of deities as fundamentally irrelevant to the structure of reality and spiritual/ethical truth.
Now, it’s quite true that both Buddhism and Jainism started to re-syncretize with various specifically theistic doctrines and practices almost from the beginning of their existence as separate traditions, and that most practicing Buddhists and Jainas nowadays do believe in and worship personified deities in one form or another, many of them Hindu deities. But that similarity in modern practice does not eradicate the fundamental “astika/nastika” distinction in the core of Hindu and Buddhist thought. Hinduism asserts the sacred authority of the theistic Vedic scriptures (astika, from Sanskrit asti, “it is”), while Buddhism rejects it (nastika, na asti, “it is not”).
TL;DR version: *No, it’s not true that Buddhism is a subset of Hinduism. Yes, it is in some sense meaningful to speak of Hinduism being “polytheistic” as opposed to Buddhism being “atheistic”, although that description requires a lot lot LOT of qualification and caveat. Meanwhile, in actual practice nowadays there are many theistic Buddhist beliefs and observances that are pretty much indistinguishable from Hindu ones. *
Close, but perhaps more like saying that Labradoodles are a subset of toy poodles. Labradoodles and toy poodles both have a common ancestor in the regular or standard poodle, just as Buddhism (most likely) and Hinduism are related in different degrees to pre-Hindu Vedism. But Buddhism appears to be also fundamentally shaped by non-Vedic intellectual traditions, just as the Labradoodle has a non-poodle strain of Labrador retriever. Still not a perfect analogy, but the best I can do. 
Sure, you can qualify my statement to say that Buddhism and Hinduism draw on a common ancestral tradition to the modern forms of both, just as Christianity and modern Judaism are both derived from, but neither is identical to, Judaism of the first century CE. The point still stands that there is an obvious intertwining of the two in terms of their fundamental beliefs about how the world and its gods operate, and Buddhism, rather than supplanting Hindu beliefs in gods and ritual, actually spread them to places across East Asia that had never known them before, through its own missionary efforts.
Again, you seem to be fundamentally defining Hinduism as the Vedas. In which case, I probably don’t have a beef (heh) with a lot of what you’ve said. But at least in my experience, the Vedas have little to do with the philosophy of Hinduism. Don’t you consider the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita to be a massive part of Hinduism? (The Gita, in particular seems to me be among the most influential Hindu texts) Their philosophical arguments have a lot in common with atheistic Buddhism. And many of the Upanishads apparently even argue against the rituals advocated in the Vedas.
Well, no. Christianity and modern Judaism have a commonality of “fundamental beliefs about how the world and its gods operate” that Hinduism and Buddhism emphatically do not have.
Fundamentally, Hinduism maintains that the ultimate source of reality and truth is what the sacred Vedic texts say specifically about personified gods and their worship.
Fundamentally, Buddhism maintains that the ultimate source of reality and truth is not what the Vedic texts say, but rather impersonal spiritual principles that are independent of any personified gods.
Those are not “intertwined”. They’re orthogonal.
As an atheist of Hindu extraction, I am perhaps even less qualified than the OP was to answer his own question. However, to many Hindus (though generally not your average guy on a street), the most important Hindu philosophy is ekam sat vipra bahuda vadanti from the Rig Vedas (“sages know various truths, but truth is all one”; I don’t know the direct English translation because there are some issues with transposing Sanskrit sentence structure and verb order, and I don’t speak the language).
Idiomatically, this is translated to mean that all religions are facets of the same basic truth. In other words, whatever Buddhists believe is, by definition, something Hindus can believe.
In other words, the toy poodle also has some Labrador retriever in it. That’s quite true, and I acknowledged it a few posts ago when I noted that late Vedism-becoming-Hinduism expanded to embrace some of the same beliefs that the “heterodoxies” espoused.
However, fundamentally, that astika/nastika distinction (which is a basic concept of classical Indian philosophy, I’m not just making it up myself to support my own claim) is still there. The Vedas, which are essentially, intrinsically theistic, are still acknowledged within Hinduism as the supreme sacred authority, even if there’s also a lot of later doctrine in Hinduism that undertakes to question that authority.
And again, I disagree with this.
But these “heterodoxies” that you speak of are important, fundamental parts of Hinduism as it is today, and predate Buddha.
ETA: I guess one way of looking at it is, the Vedas are not to Hinduism as the Bible is to Judaism/Christianity. So even if the Vedas say something, it’s no reason to consider it authoritative and the final word.
Heh, I’m an atheist too. So we’re about equally (un) qualified I think
Perhaps we’re seeing different meanings in the term “fundamentally”. I don’t mean that Hinduism is “fundamentally” Vedist in the sense of American “fundamentalism”, wherein everybody within a particular religious denomination is assumed or required to have the same absolute belief in a particular literal reading of a canonical text.
What I mean is that astika philosophy, which in one school or another comprises the vast vast majority of anything that can be called “Hindu religious doctrine”, universally and officially asserts that the ultimate source of truth is the Vedas. In this doctrine, the Vedas are the foundation of reality.
Sure, that doesn’t mean that every Hindu (or any Hindu, for that matter) is expected to be any kind of “Vedic literalist”. There aren’t bands of Hindus going around performing the horse sacrifice nowadays, for instance (although I’m sure there are some RSS elements that would love to try it :p). But officially and formally, Hinduism remains essentially affiliated to the Vedas in a way that Buddhism is definitely not.
Another crossed wire, sorry. I’m using “the heterodoxies” in the technical sense of “Buddhism, Jainism, Ajivikism and similar non-Vedic religious sects emerging in the late Vedic period”, not just as a synonym for “non-Vedic beliefs” in general, which as you note appear in Hinduism too.