Jesusians - - Spreading the Truth

Comparing Christianity & Buddhism

"When you are a truly happy Christian, you are also a Buddhist. And vice versa." So concludes best-selling author and Buddhist monk Thich Hhat Hanh near the end of his popular book Living Buddha, Living Christ.

Can we agree with Hanh that people should be able to have "both the Buddha and Jesus within their life"?

Buddhism is the fourth largest religion in the world, with about 370 million adherents. There are more Buddhist texts in major bookstores than works dedicated to Islam or Hinduism, and there has been a steady stream of articles and books by and about the Dalai Lama in recent years.

As one self-proclaimed "Christian Buddhist," John Malcomson, explains, "People often ask me how I could think of myself as a Christian Buddhist. The simple answer is that I don't see God as separate from me." Rather, he states, "God is within me as God is within all things."

What makes this diffusion possible, and why is Buddhism attractive to so many?

The great German Catholic theologian, Romano Guardini, wrote a profoundly insightful and orthodox meditation on the life of Christ entitled The Lord. In it, he noted that no man in history ever came closer to rivaling the enormity of Christ's claim to transform human nature itself, at its roots, than did Buddha (though in a radically different way).

Huston Smith says in The Religions of Man that there have been only two people in history about whom others asked not "Who are you?" but "What are you: a man or a god?" They were Jesus and Buddha.

Buddha's clear answer was: I am a man, not a god; Christ's clear answer was: I am both "Son of Man" and "Son of God."

Buddha said, "Look not to me, look to my dharma (doctrine)"; Christ said, "Come unto me." Buddha said, "Be ye lamps unto yourselves"; Christ said, "I am the light of the world."

Yet contrary to the original intentions of both men, some later Buddhists (the Pure Land sect) divinized Buddha. And some later Christians (Arians and Modernists) de-divinized Christ.

The claims of Buddha and Christ are in fact so different that we may wonder whether Buddhism can be called a "religion" at all. It does not speak of God, or Brahman, as does Hinduism from which it emerged. Nor does it speak of Atman, or soul. In fact, it teaches the doctrine of an-atta, "no soul"—that we are made of "strands" (skandhas) of impersonal consciousness woven together by causal necessity without any underlying substance, self or soul.

Buddhism does not deny God. It is silent about God. It is agnostic, not atheistic. But it is not silent about soul. Its denial of soul has practical import: It teaches us not to be "attached," not to send our soul out in desire, not to love. Instead of personal, individual, free-willed agape (active love), Buddhism teaches an impersonal, universal feeling of compassion (karuna). Compassion is something we often hear more about than agape in the modern West, for (as Dostoyevsky put it) "love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams."

Karuna and agape lead the disciple to do similar, strikingly selfless deeds—but in strikingly different spirits. Both points are shown by the Buddhist story of a saint who, like St. Martin of Tours, gave his cloak to a beggar. But the Buddhist's explanation was not "because I love you" or "because Christ loves you" but rather: "This is the enlightened thing to do. For if you were freezing and had two gloves on one hand and none on the other hand, would it not be the enlightened thing to do to give one of the gloves to the bare hand?"

The Buddhist point is not the welfare of the recipient, but the liberation of the giver from the burden of self. The same end could be achieved without a recipient. For instance: A man, fleeing a man-eating tiger, came to the edge of a cliff. The only way was down. He found a vine and climbed down it; but there, at the foot of the cliff, was a second man-eating tiger. Then he saw two mice, one black and one white (yin and yang) eating the vine in two above him. Just before it broke, he saw a wild strawberry on the face of the cliff. He plucked it and ate it. It was delicious!

The "unenlightened" will wonder what the point is, or why he didn't distract the tiger with the strawberry. But the "enlightened" will explain the parable thus: "The man tasted to the tiger exactly as the strawberry did to the man." In other words, the man, the tiger and the strawberry are all one Self. The "illusion" of individuality is seen through. There is no soul, so there is no fear—no fear of death because there is no one there to die.

For Buddhism, egotism (selfish desire) causes the illusion of an ego. For the West, secular as well as religious, a real ego is the cause and egotism is the effect. Agape is a different effect from the same cause: altruism from the ego instead of egotism from the ego. To the Buddhist, agape is impossible; there can be no ego without egotism, no self without selfishness, because the self is not a real cause that might conceivably change its effect. Rather, the self is the illusion—effect of selfishness. There's nobody there to love or to hate.

How can this apparent nihilism, this philosophy of nothingness, feel liberating to Buddhists? The answer is found in Buddha himself: his personality and the events of his life, especially his "great enlightenment."

Like Jesus, Buddha taught a very shocking message. And, like Jesus, Buddha was believed only because of his personality. "Holy to his fingertips" is how he is described. If you or I said what Buddha or Jesus said, we would be laughed at. There was something deep and moving there that made the incredible credible.

The events of Buddha's life are dramatic and offer a clue to this "something." It is not, however, Buddha's life or his personality that are central to Buddhism; there could be a Buddhism without Buddha. There could not, of course, be a Christianity without Christ.

"Buddha" is a title, not a given name—like "Christ" ("Messiah"). It is his essential claim; for it means "the enlightened one" or "the one who woke up." Buddha claims we are all spiritually asleep until the experience of Enlightenment, or Awakening. Here is the story of how Buddha became Buddha, of how a man woke up.

Born Gautama Siddhartha, son of a king who hoped the prince would become the most successful king in India's history, he was protected in a palace of earthly delights to make kingship irresistibly attractive to him. But curiosity led him to sneak away into the forbidden world outside, where he saw the Four Distressing Sights. The first three were a sick man, an old man and a dead man. Gautama puzzled deeply over these newly discovered mysteries of sickness, old age and death—to no avail. Then came the fourth sight: a begging ascetic who had renounced the world to seek Enlightenment. Gautama decided to do the same.

He spent years meditating on life's deepest mystery: Why is man unhappy? After years of torturing his body to free his soul, all in vain, he decided on the "Middle Way" between his earlier self-indulgence and his later self-torture. Taking a decent meal for the first time in years, he sat in full lotus position under the sacred bodhi tree in Benares and resolved not to rise until he was enlightened. When he rose he proclaimed that he was Buddha. He had broken through the great mystery of life.

The breakthrough had to be experienced, not just verbalized. Buddhism is not essentially a doctrine but an experience. Yet Buddha verbalized a doctrine (dharma): the Four Noble Truths summarized everything he taught. Whenever he was pressed by his disciples to go beyond the Four Noble Truths, he refused. Everything else was "questions not tending to edification."

The First Noble Truth is that all of life is dukkha, suffering. The word means "out-of-joint-ness" or separation—something very similar to "sin," but without the personal, relational dimension: not a broken relationship but a broken consciousness. Inner brokenness is Buddhism's "bad news" that precedes its gospel or "good news."

The Second Noble Truth is that the cause of suffering is tanha, "grasping," selfish desire. We suffer because of the gap between what we want and what we have. This gap is created by our dissatisfaction, our wanting to get what we do not have or wanting to keep what we do have (e.g., life, which causes fear of death). Thus desire is the villain for Buddha, the cause of all suffering.

This explains the "no soul" doctrine. Desire creates the illusion of a desirer alienated from the desired object, the illusion of twoness. Enlightenment is the "extinction" of this illusion. "I want that" creates the illusion of an "I" distinct from the "that"; and this distinction is the cause of suffering. Desire is thus the fuel of suffering's fire.

The Third Noble Truth follows inevitably. To remove the cause is to remove the effect, therefore suffering can be extinguished (nirvana) by extinguishing its cause, desire. Remove the fuel and you put out the fire.

The Fourth Noble Truth tells you how to extinguish desire: by the "Noble Eightfold Path" of ego-reduction in each of life's eight defined areas, inward and outward (e.g., "right thought:" "right associations," etc.).

The content of the Four Noble Truths is specifically Buddhist, but the form is universal. Every religion, every practical philosophy, every therapy, spiritual or physical, has its Four Noble Truths: the symptoms, the diagnosis, the prognosis and the prescription. They are the bad effect, the bad cause, the good effect and the good cause, respectively.

For example, Marxism's Four Noble Truths are: class conflict, capitalism, communism and revolution. Christianity's are: death, sin, Christ and salvation.

The most crucial of the four steps is the second. The patient knows his own symptoms, but only a trained doctor can diagnose the hidden cause, the disease. Once diagnosed, most diseases have a standard prognosis and prescription which can be looked up in a medical textbook.

On this crucial issue—the diagnosis of the human problem—Christianity and Buddhism seem about as far apart as possible. For where Buddha finds our desires too strong, Christ finds them too weak. He wants us to love more, not less: to love God with our whole heart, soul, mind and strength. Buddha "solves" the problem of pain by a spiritual euthanasia: curing the disease of egotism and the suffering it brings by killing the patient, the ego, self, soul or I-image of God in man.

Yet perhaps things are not quite as contradictory as that. For the "desire" Buddha speaks of is only selfish desire. He does not distinguish unselfish love (agape) from selfish love (eros); he simply does not know agape at all. He profoundly knows and condemns the desire to possess something less than ourselves, like money, sex or power, but he does not know the desire to be possessed by something more than ourselves. Buddha knows greed, but not God. And surely when our very lives and economic systems are based on greed, we need to hear Buddha when he speaks about what he knows and what we have forgotten. But Buddhists even more desperately need to hear what they do not know: the news about God and His love.

Christ versus Buddha

Buddhism offers spiritual vitality in the midst of the emptiness of secular life, gives the promise of inner peace, and meets the desire for an explicit moral code. Another appeal is the non-dogmatic and ostensibly open-minded character of Buddhism. For those who reject the dogmatic, objective claims of Christianity or hold that Christianity should avoid an "exclusive" approach to truth, Buddhism offers an easier alternative.

Buddhists teach that they do not practice a religion, a philosophy, or a type of science but rather a way of life that cannot be explained by or contained within any categories used in traditional Western thought. What makes Buddhism so "open-minded," though, is that its teachings are deliberately ambiguous. Put another way, Buddhism transcends notions of "religion" or "belief" and so can appear compatible with Christianity.

Some state that "Buddha was just a philosopher who urged men to be selfless. Jesus was just a philosopher who urged men to be selfless. Love is just another word for selfless." Such easy parallels between Christ and Buddha, unfortunately, are misleading and distort the teachings of Christ.

Buddhism asserts that to accept the existence of anything is to give birth to its opposite (e.g., love and hate, joy and fear, etc.), which results in the duality of "good" and "bad." Nirvana — literally, "extinguishing a flame" — is the extinction of self and the escape from the cycle of reincarnation.

Sometimes it is said that Buddhism is atheistic, yet Buddhism is not interested in the question of God, so it is more accurate to describe it as practically atheistic or simply agnostic. Buddhism "works" whether or not there is a God. A Buddhist allows others to believe in God or gods, but such beliefs are merely convenient means to the final end, which has nothing to do with God or gods.

"God is neither affirmed nor denied by Buddhism," wrote the Trappist monk Thomas Merton in Mystics and Zen Masters. In Buddhism, all distinctions must be extinguished; even enlightenment has no definite nature.

Despite many external similarities, Buddhist meditation and contemplation is quite different from orthodox Christianity.

The Buddhist mystic seeks absorption into an impersonal whole, looking to rid himself of desire and suffering. The Christian mystic, on the other hand, desires neither the loss of personality nor an impersonal oneness with all but a deep and abiding communion with the Triune and personal God.

Jean Cardinal Danielou, known for his study of Eastern religions, explains in God and the Ways of Knowing that "mystical knowledge partakes in the life of the Trinity. It is the realization by man of his deepest being, of what God meant to achieve in creating him."

For the Christian mystic, there is an object (the loving and merciful God) and a growth in the salvific life of grace, leading to everlasting life. On the other hand, the Buddhist sutras state that the "categories of everlasting life and death, and existence and non-existence, do not apply to the essential nature of things but only to their appearances as they are observed by defiled human eyes."

Buddhism resists existential possibility; Christianity affirms it. Rather than the Beatific Vision, Buddhist teaching holds that non-existence is the only hope for escaping the pains of life.

Christianity teaches that although suffering is not part of God's perfect plan, it can bring us closer to Christ and unite us more intimately with our suffering Lord. Buddhism teaches that suffering must be escaped from; indeed, this is a central concern of Buddhism.

Christianity is focused on worshiping God, holiness, and the restoration of right relationships between God and man through the work of Jesus. The Buddhist, on the other hand, is not concerned with whether or not God exists, nor does he offer worship. Instead, he seeks his own nirvana.

Fr. Romano Guardini, in his classic work The Lord, stated his belief that Buddha would be the greatest challenge to Christ in the modern age. Such an assertion may appear somewhat exaggerated in our age, but Buddhist teachings seriously threaten Christianity's central doctrines. Because it appears to be peaceful, non judgmental, and inclusive, its appeal undoubtedly will continue to grow.

Buddhism's refusal to articulate dharma in logical ways and its comfortable insistence on a relativistic approach to knowledge and truth makes dialogue quite difficult. Because it offers a spirituality that is ostensibly free of doctrine and authority, it will attract hungry souls looking for fulfillment and meaning.

The perennial teachings of the Church and the Buddhist are inherently incompatible. Whereas God remains completely other, distinct from his creation, higher Buddhist discourse rejects the possibility of any such duality. There can be no Creator / creature distinction in Buddhism.

Shortly before the Holy Father's visit to St. Patrick's Cathedral in 1979, the Dalai Lama was greeted there. A monsignor in the receiving line recalls his encounter with the Buddhist patriarch: The Dalai Lama approached him, gazed into his eyes, and queried, "Father, do you know the difference between you and me?"

"No, Your Holiness," replied the monsignor.

"You believe in a personal God," the Dalai Lama observed, "and I do not."

This, above all, marks the difference between Christians and Buddhists. Beyond the rhetoric of "peace," "compatibility," and "the way," there remains one profound difference between Buddha and Jesus: Jesus is God; Buddha is not.

In his Fundamentals of the Faith, Peter Kreeft writes that "there have been only two people in history who so astonished people that they asked not 'Who are you?' but 'What are you? A man or a god?' They were Jesus and Buddha."

He then contrasts the striking differences between the two: "Buddha's clear answer to this question was: 'I am a man, not a god'; Christ's clear answer was: 'I am both Son of Man and Son of God.' Buddha said, 'Look not to me, look to my dharma'; Christ said, 'Come unto me.' Buddha said, 'Be ye lamps unto yourselves"; Christ said, 'I am the light of the world.'"

Yet as we've seen, it is quite common to find Christ reduced to the level of "philosopher" or "great teacher," just as Buddha sometimes is elevated to a state of divinity. Certainly, there are some laudable ethical teachings of Buddha: Resist greed and anger, be compassionate, and so forth. But there remain profound differences between the two men:

Christ claimed to be the one and only true God who came to suffer, die, and rise again, establishing a unique and everlasting covenant with man.

Buddha is believed to be one of many thatagata (thus-come-one). The historical Buddha is just one of several thatagata who come in various ages to teach that life is an illusion and to remove human desires and attachments.

Christ taught that he is "the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father," Jesus continues, "but by me" (John 14:6). Jesus comes to reveal the Father, the Creator of all things, so man could have fullness of life.

Buddha taught how man could escape suffering through loss of desire and personality. He held that every person must find his own path to nirvana, or the extinction of self.

Christ preached the reality of sin, the nature of God the Father, and the need for repentance and salvation.

Buddha preached the untenable nature of existence and the means to escape suffering. Buddhism denies the ultimate existence of sin and the necessity of grace.

Christ established a Church, with a structure of authority, based on his words and example. He said, "Follow me!"

Buddha left a teaching in which each person must find his own path. He stated, "After my death, the dharma shall be your teacher."

Christ rose from the dead only once and will return as the King of Kings. He revealed his own divinity, saying, "Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am" (John 8:58).

Buddha is a "model," regardless of whether he was a historical person or not. Buddha suggests that "there is no 'I'; there is no 'self.'" At his death, when he experienced pari-nirvana ("final extinction"), he stated that the question of the afterlife was "not conducive to edification."

In short, Jesus is God; Buddha is not.