Servant Song

I watched the PBS program on Buddha last week- it was pretty well done, a good overview of things, at least as far as I understand it. All I know about Buddhism is from one college course, and a bit of reading. The question that I had was this; when talking about Buddha investigating the religions of his day, and how he mastered ascetic disciplines and then rejected them, the program kept calling them “vedic practices” or “vedic religion.” I guess this is accurate, and I’m sure that Hinduism has undergone transformation in the last 2500 years, but were they just avoiding calling what Buddha was rejecting ‘Hinduism?’ That would make things easier. I know that these kinds of historical parallels never work exactly, and have all kinds of dangers and oversimplifications, etc. etc., and I know that things are different because the places where Buddhism eventually took root most deeply were places that didn’t have a Hindu tradition, but... isn’t there something of an explicit rejection of Hinduism at the core of Buddhism? Can the relationship at all be compared to a Buddhist Christianity to a Hindu Judaism? Or a Buddhist Islam to a Hindu Christianity? Or a Buddhist Martin Luther to a Hindu Catholicism?