Nothing is Everything: How Buddhism and Hinduism are Two Sides of the Same Coin – 3
This is an excerpt from the book "Why Buddhism is True" by Robert Wright. It talks about Buddhism's focus on 'Nothing' and Hinduism's focus on 'Everything'. In Hindu thought, specifically within a Hindu school of thought known as Advaita Vedanta, there is the idea that the individual self or soul is actually just a part of what you might call a universal soul. To put the proposition in Hindu terminology: atman (the self or soul) is Brahman (the universal soul). Now, to say that atman is anything at all – Brahman, whatever – is to say that atman exists in the first place. And the very birth of Buddhism, its distinct emergence within an otherwise Hindu milieu, is thought to lie largely in the denial that atman exists.
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Nothing is Everything: How Buddhism and Hinduism are Two Sides of the Same Coin – 2
In this brilliant excerpt from the famous book “Why Buddhism is True”, author Robert Wright explains through the aid of evolutionary biology and parasitology how the illusion of the clear boundary between the individual Self and the outside world breaks down. He then also discusses the implications and the meanings of ‘I’ and ‘Rest’ in such light, leading on to the differences in social thinking of Buddhism and Hinduism.
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