Buddhism v. Hinduism
Buddhism and Hinduism are two religions that are parallel in some ways and divergent in others. These two religions started in the late B.C.E. period, grew and expanded. Hinduism and Buddhism are similar in that both their origins are in the early India area, both believe in karma based reincarnation, and the religions where spread by Monks. They are different because, the term Brahman differs between the two practices, Hinduism supported the caste system while Buddhism did not, and the worshiping of gods differed in the two religions.
Around 540 B.C.E. in the early Indian subcontinent Buddhism was founded. A prince Siddhartha Gutama went into the world for the first time and realized all the suffering in the world. He meditated in a field for forty days and forty nights, no sleep, no food just meditation. After his mediation he changed his name to Buddha, the enlightened one, and so Buddhism was founded. During early India in the Indus valley civilization Hinduism started. There is no exact date or time for when Hinduism was started, around the time of the end of the Indus Valley people and the Aryan invasions of India. Karma, an early Sanskrit word meaning actions, is used in practices of both Buddhism and Hinduism to explain cause and effect. The process of reincarnation, when a follower of the religion dies they come back the earth reincarnated as another animal or object, was based on that person’s karma. If you did good things while you were alive then you had good karma, your reward for good karma would be being reincarnated as a person of high authority or someone in a high caste. If you were a bad person, such as a criminal, your karma would be bad resulting in being reincarnated into a peasant or someone in a very low caste. If your karma was very bad you could be reincarnated into the Hindu and Buddhist version of hell, an inanimate object. These beliefs were shared in both Buddhism and Hinduism. These...