The Buddha taught within the same north Indian intellectual world that produced the Upanishads, roughly the sixth century BCE, and his teaching shares substantial common ground with it: both accept samsara, the cycle of rebirth, both accept karma as the mechanism governing that cycle, and both agree that liberation from the cycle is the appropriate goal of a serious spiritual life. Where Buddhism departs sharply, and in a way that shaped the whole subsequent relationship between the two traditions, is on the single question this series has spent considerable effort establishing: whether there is a permanent, unchanging self underlying experience at all.
Vedanta’s entire method, from drig drishya viveka through the sakshi, is aimed at locating a constant, unchanging witness beneath the shifting content of experience. Buddhism’s foundational teaching of anatta, non-self, denies that any such constant witness exists, arguing instead that what looks like a persistent self is, on close analysis, a rapidly changing stream of physical and mental processes, the five skandhas, with no unchanging substrate underneath them at all, not even a witnessing awareness. Where Vedanta finds, at the end of systematic elimination, a residual seer, Buddhist analysis finds, at the end of a structurally similar elimination, nothing residual at all.
This is a genuine and significant philosophical disagreement, not a difference in vocabulary describing the same underlying insight, and later commentators from both traditions took the disagreement seriously enough to write extensively against each other’s positions. What makes the relationship more interesting than simple opposition is how much surrounding structure the two traditions continued to share even after this split: shared assumptions about karma, rebirth, the practical value of meditation, and even significant overlap in specific meditative techniques, despite disagreeing sharply about what, if anything, is doing the meditating.
A separate reform movement, arising in roughly the same period and geography, took the ethical implications of karma in a different but related direction, building an entire metaphysics and practice around the principle of non-violence with a rigour distinct from either Vedanta or Buddhism, examined next.
Part 36 of 100 — Series II: To the Eternal
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