What are some commonalities in Eastern religions?

The second major worldview category comes from the East. It is called pantheistic monism, which says, "All is one, one is all, and all is God." Hinduism and Buddhism share important elements of this worldview. The New Age movement is, in great part, a Western adaptation of Hindu and Buddhist religious and worldview thinking.

Things developed much differently in the East. Typically, Eastern religions emphasize that everything in the world is temporary, changing, ephemeral and unreal and that our perceptions of the world are most often misleading and illusory. The physical universe is not seen as a rational, ordered universe revealing God's glory (see Ps. 19:1‑4), but as a hindrance to experiencing "Ultimate Reality."

In the East, Ultimate Reality is thought of as attainable within each individual by realizing intuitively that the "self" is Divine, or at least part of the Divine. God is, for the most part, seen as an impersonal, unifying force who takes no personal interest in individuals. The idea of a creator having authority over the universe and making universal moral demands is, by and large, rejected.

TWO CORE BELIEFS OF HINDUISM

Hinduism is not really one religion, but many religions that interact and blend with one another. There is no known founder of Hinduism, no creedal statements of faith to sign and no agreed‑upon authority. In fact, one can be a good Hindu and believe in one god, many gods or no god at all! This is because, for Hindus, contradictory ideas are not a problem. All reality, contradictory or not, is seen as "one." There are, however, two foundational assumptions that almost all Hindus believe without question: reincarnation and karma.

Reincarnation is the belief that the atman, a person's uncreated and eternal soul, must repeatedly be recycled into the world in different bodies. In some forms of Hinduism, souls may be reincarnated as animals, plants or even inanimate objects. Reincarnation is the process that takes the Hindu through the great wheel of samsara, the thousands or millions of lives (all full of suffering) that each atman must endure before reaching moksba ‑ liberation from suffering and union with the infinite.

Karma ("action") has to do with the law of cause and effect. For the Hindu, karma means merit or demerit, which attaches to one's atman (soul) according to how one lives one's life. Karma from past lives affects a person's present life, and karma from this life will determine a person's station in the next life.

Other Hindu concepts Buddha rejected included the Brahmin priesthood and the entire Hindu sacrificial system; instead, he emphasized ethics over ritual. He rejected the caste system and taught that enlightenment was open to anyone‑including women‑not just Brahmin males. Finally, Buddha radically challenged all the indifferent Hindu gods and goddesses, saying they were essentially unimportant in the quest for enlightenment.

Buddha did accept the Hindu teachings on reincarnation, along with karma (the soul gains merits or demerits according to how one lives his life) and dharma (the duty one has to perform according to his station in life). Buddha taught that one could be reborn as a human, an animal, a hungry ghost, a demon or even as a Hindu god. He also incorporated yoga and meditation, which were highly developed skills in Hinduism, into his teachings.

THE MIDDLE WAY AND THE EIGHTFOLD PATH

In some ways, Buddhism is similar to the Hinduism from which it evolved. In other ways, it is quite different, and many of Buddha's teachings were rejected as heresies by the dominant teachers of Hinduism, the Brahmin priests. For example, Buddha denied that the Vedas and the Upanishads were divine writings, saying they were of no help in finding the way to nirvana. He also denied that man has an atman (soul), which is part of the Brahman (world soul), and that the present world is maya (unreal).

PATHS TO MOKSHA

For Hindus, the great spiritual challenge is that the soul, or atman, is separated from Brahma (Ultimate Reality) and trapped in samsara, the seemingly endless process of being reincarnated over and over. Moksha, which is liberation from samsara and reunion with Brahma, is the goal. In Hinduism, there are basically three paths to moksha: the path of works (dharma), the path of knowledge (inana) and the path of passionate devotion (bbakti).

Suffering is universal. Buddha taught that the very act of living involves suffering from birth until death. Even death brings no relief, however, because of the cycle of rebirth, suffering and death. Salvation (nirvana) is to be released from this unending cycle of suffering. The cause of suffering is craving (selfish desire). People remain in this endless cycle, because they are too attached to their health, wealth, status and physical comfort. This is because they are ignorant of the nature of reality and they fall victim to what Buddha called tanha (attachment, desire). The cure for suffering is to overcome ignorance and eliminate craving. Since to live is to suffer and suffering is caused by craving, if a person could remove craving from his or her life, suffering would end. Suppress craving by following the Middle Way ‑ the Noble Eightfold Path. First, Buddha isolated the cause, tanha, humanity's inability to escape from the squirrel cage of death and rebirth. Next he worked out a system called the Eightfold Path by which a Buddhist could rid himself of tanha. The Eightfold Path consists of eight ways of right living: (1) right viewpoint, (2) right aspiration, (3) right speech, (4) right behavior, (5) right occupation, (6) right effort, (7) right mindfulness and (8) right meditation.

Buddha claimed that whoever could follow this Eightfold Path would eventually reach nirvana, a release from the endless cycle of death and rebirth. When Buddha was asked to define the state of nirvana, he replied that he had never tried to solve this question. His mission was to show man the way to escape the suffering of life, not to describe what he would find once he had been liberated.

The Hinduism that Buddha rejected said that life in this world is maya (illusion); thus, suffering, which is part of this world, is also illusion. Buddha, however, proclaimed that life in this world is quite real. It involves real suffering; because of this suffering, the world must be escaped by following Buddha's Eightfold Path.

Buddhism has always had great appeal for the peoples of the East. Unlike the elitist ideas of Hinduism, Buddhism offers a precise definition of man's problem, along with an exact "plan of salvation" for everyone.

The Theosophist’s theory of universal brotherhood is based upon a mystical conception of “the One Life”—an idea derived from and common to various forms of Eastern thought, Vedic and Buddhist.

When following dharma, the path of works, a person has a set of specific social and religious obligations that must be fulfilled. He must follow his caste occupation, marry within his caste, eat or not eat certain foods and, above all, produce and raise a son who can make a sacrifice to his ancestors as well as perform other sacrificial and ritual acts. By fulfilling these obligations, the person using the path of works may hope to attain a better reincarnation and perhaps, after thousands or tens of thousands of reincarnations, achieve moksha.

A more difficult way to achieve moksha is the path of knowledge (inana), which includes self‑renunciation and meditation on the supreme pantheistic reality of Hinduism. This very aesthetic path is open to men only in the highest castes, and it is described in the Upanishads, a series of philosophical treatises composed beginning around 600 B.C. The Upaninshad texts teach that the world as we experience it is mere maya (illusion) and that Brahma is the only thing that really exists and has meaning.

The path of knowledge most often includes the practice of yoga (yoking, or union). Yoga is the attempt to control one's consciousness through bodily posture, breath control and concentration, to the extent that one comes to understand experientially that one's true self, one's undying soul (atman), is identical with Brahma. This leads to the famous Hindu saying, "Aham asmi Brahma" ("I am Brahma").

The Bible flatly contradicts Hindu ideas of reincarnation and karma. Hinduism teaches that the atman (soul) is uncreated and eternal. The Bible teaches that each person is created by God, will die once and then be resurrected once at the judgment (see John 5:17‑30; 1 Cor. 15; Heb. 9:27). Hinduism teaches that the atman is perfect, free and unlimited, and no matter how many lives it takes, eventually each and every atman will realize its divine nature. The Bible teaches that each person has one life to live, and after this comes the judgment (see Heb. 9:27).