BUDDHA’S PROPOSITION

Vedanta holds that the purpose of life is to find God, whereas Buddhism teaches that eliminating suffering in one’s life is the goal.  Seek out your own salvation with diligence, the Buddha said.  Try it, see for yourself.

The Buddha stated, further, that you can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of salvation than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere.  When we are suffering, we are as much in need of our compassion as is any other being, and we are equally deserving of it.

In the end, only the individual can attain his salvation.  The Buddhas can merely teach that there is a Way.  It is the individual’s responsibility to follow it.  Abide with oneself as an island, with oneself as a refuge.  Seek no external refuge, the Buddha taught.

Of whatever teachings you can assure yourself that they conduce to dispassion and not to passions, to detachment and not to bondage, to decrease of worldly gains and not to their increase, to frugality and not to covetousness, to content and not to discontent, to solitude and not to company, to energy and not to sluggishness, to delight in good and not to delight in evil, of such teachings you may with certainty affirm that this is the Norm, this is the discipline, this is the Master’s message. (Digha Nikaya II.156)

As it happens, no small source of suffering for Vedantists is the struggle to find God, the reason why a percentage of them at least, like the Buddha himself, became and become Buddhists.