The most important and far-reaching difference between the Buddha and Brahmanism is that he did not speak of Ātman and Brahman, but instead taught the doctrine of anātman or no-self. Instead of teaching people to discern a permanent, fixed, independent selfhood, the Buddha taught how to relinquish attachment to self by pointing out that the self is just a label given to the five ever changing and mutually interdependent aggregates of form, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness. The Buddha pointed out that none of these five aggregates has any permanence. They all function in a constant state of flux. Additionally, they must all function in tandem. Any one of the five aggregates would be unable to exist without the other four. This lack of a stable basis for existence precludes any kind of peace or security that depends on something substantial and abiding. The life of the five aggregates is a dynamic interrelated process, and one who seeks some uninterrupted satisfaction from this process will only find suffering instead. Because the five aggregates are impermanent and lead to suffering, they are said to be without a self. Specifically, this means that one cannot attribute to them the permanently abiding and happy self that was the goal of the religious sages and mystics of the Upanishads. A provisional self can be attributed in an abstract way to the life process, but an actual thing or substance called a self cannot be found within the process. Nor can one meaningfully talk about a self apart from the five aggregates because such a self would be a mere abstraction with no substance or empirical reality to back it up. The conclusion is that the five aggregates of form, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness are characterized by the three marks of impermanence, suffering and non-self. In this way, the Buddha revealed the vanity of the idea of a permanently abiding happy self. Once one ceases to think in terms of such a self, then one is free from all the compulsions, fears and desires that go along with the assumption that there is such a self to find, protect, or appease. One then becomes an arhat, or “worthy one,” who will no longer suffer from the cycle of birth and death.

There is also much in the Vedic worldview that carries over into Buddhism. The law of karma carries over, though the Buddha refined it and put the emphasis on the intentions behind purposeful action when determining whether a given act is wholesome or unwholesome. The various beings and worlds of the Vedic cosmology carried over and this eventually became the six paths of rebirth in Buddhism (the hell-dwellers, hungry ghosts, animals, fighting demons, humans, and heavenly beings), though the Buddha would propose a way to escape the round of rebirth among these six worlds. The Buddha certainly agreed with the Upanishadic sages that the benefits of the Vedic sacrifices, worldly wealth and rebirth in the heavens, were temporary at best and that a more transcendental goal was needed.

Not everything carried over, however. The Buddha did not agree with the system of the four classes (what became the basis of the caste system) and frequently argued with brahmins who believed that they were superior simply by virtue of being born as brahmins, whereas the Buddha pointed out that it is only by virtuous deeds that one could claim to be pure and worthy of honor. The Buddha also did away with the more extreme and harmful forms of asceticism like wearing no clothes, fasting to the point of starvation, or subjecting oneself to the five fires (sitting in the middle of four bonfires with the hot summer sun overhead as the fifth fire). Instead he proposed a set of dhūta (lit. “shaking off’), twelve relatively mild austerities such as keeping only three robes, or only eating once a day, or sleeping under the open sky. The dhūta were a voluntary practice for those monks and nuns who felt the need for such extra discipline to help shake off the habits of self-indulgence. Note that in the Lotus Sūtra it says that one who keeps the sūtra even for a moment “should be considered to have already observed the precepts and practiced the dhūta.” Finally, although the Buddha did teach the methods of yogic concentration that he had learned from Ārāda Kālāma and Rudraka Rāmaputra, he taught the yogic methods only to provide a means to concentrate the mind in preparation for the distinctive Buddhist practice of “insight” (Skt. vipa’yanā; Ch. kuan; J. kan) meditation and as a form of peaceful abiding for the arhats. By itself, the yogic discipline only leads to the meditative absorptions known as the four dhyānas (Ch. ch’an; J. zen) and other states of deep concentration. These states were only temporary respites as were the heavenly rebirths that corresponded to their cultivation. This has been discussed in regard to the wrong views relating to eternity in the Buddha’s Supreme Net Discourse.