Patanjali The Buddha

[Shivani Devi]

Namaste.

Back in the old days of following Raja Yoga and Buddhism, I noticed a similarity in both form and structure between Lord Buddha's Noble Eightfold Path and Patanjali's Eightfold Path...I started to wonder if such similarities do indeed exist in nature?

Patanjali's Eightfold Path:

http://www.yogavistas.com/resources/patanjali.html

Lord Buddha's Eightfold Path:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_Eightfold_Path

Whatever the case there's another point where Buddhism touches on Hinduism. Thoughts?

[Shaunc]

The Buddha was a hindu. To me it seems only natural that buddhism is influenced by Hinduism in much the same way that Christianity has been influenced by Judaism.

[Serrao]

I think Patanjali was inspired by Buddha.

[row37]

I'm not sure why you're referring to Siddharta as Lord. He was simply a man that awakened, and spent the rest of his life teaching a very simple meditation that enabled others to also awaken. He was not a lord (he renounced all worldly things), a god, etc. It's true that he started out on a Hindu spiritual path, and later left that behind and moved on to his own path when that could not give him the answers that he sought.

There were many buddhas before him and after him. Siddharta became known as the teaching buddha, and while alive it appears that he forbade the monks from writing down what he said, lest they became attached to the words and not the actual practice. What little we know about him comes from people who never met him, never heard him, and it's hard to imagine that a lot of errors haven't crept into the so called scriptures. Still, so much has come to us it's amazing. The practice works, for those who practice it. Those who make a scholarly work of it, or an intellectual/conceptual process of it, gain nothing and lose everything.

I am only minimally familiar to Hinduism, but have encountered no other spiritual practice like Buddhism. Almost every other known spiritual practice has a creator god or gods, a good and evil concept, and a sort of reliance on deities. None of this is in Buddhism, although some lineages have made a sort of deity out of human unawakened tendencies. It's important to understand that these are not actual deities, simply ways to perceive and represent unawakened human attributes. The Tibetans often do this. There are really no similarities to anything else in Buddhism, unless one looks at the Tao, which hints at something similar, but isn't actually. Buddhism is a unique spiritual path all of it's own.

I have never understood how Christianity is at all similar to Judaism. People say that all the time, but Jesus/Christ, whoever that great teacher was, taught something very similar to Buddhism, minus the deity aspect. It was a philosophy of love and compassion, none of that eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth business. That is a recipe for constant conflict, which is what we have had in the Middle East for thousands of years. Who was Christ/Jesus ever at war with? No one.

[Shivani Devi]

I am a Hindu and it's merely a mark of respect within our culture and religion...we use 'Lord' to show our mark of admiration, respect and veneration, so there's 'Lord Buddha'...'Lord Jesus'...etc