The Buddha and the Christ

We’re at the start of a series using Buddhist teaching as a mirror to help us better understand the Gospel. But today I’d like to start by zooming out and looking at the basic canonical story of the Buddha’s life and enlightenment. We’ll see that it represents an interesting foil for both the story of Jesus and the calling narratives of the founding figures of the other Abrahamic faiths.

The basic legend of the Buddha, found in myriad books and sources, goes like this:

The figure known as the Buddha started life as a prince named Siddhartha Gautama, living in the Himalayas of Nepal and northern India roughly around the 6th or 5th C BCE. As a baby, he was visited by a seer who prophesied that he would become either a great king or an important religious figure. Perhaps to protect this potential, his father raised him sheltered inside the palace grounds, and so he grew up — even marrying and becoming a father — ignorant of the world, its sorrows, and evils, and of any religious teaching. But this sheltered life left him dissatisfied, so one day he left the palace and was stunned to witness in turn an old man, a diseased man, a corpse, and an ascetic. So ignorant was he that he had to get his charioteer to explain to him what he was seeing. He became very disturbed and even began to have nightmares about what he saw. He vowed to leave the palace in the middle of the night and undertake a spiritual quest. And so, he became an ascetic.

According to the stories, he excelled in asceticism, by the end eating only a few grains of rice a day, and exerting fierce control over his breathing and thinking. And yet he was still unsatisfied and determined that not only did such extreme practices not help him solve the issue of human suffering, but left him too weak to make any progress. And so, he rejected the ascetic life just as he had renounced the luxury of the palace. And so he realized that “the Middle Way,” a path of moderation in between self-indulgence and and self-mortification, was the way forward. Over the course of a night, he meditated under a ficus tree and was enlightened to the causes of suffering, its relationship to our actions, thoughts, and desires, and the way to let it all go. And so he became the Buddha, the Enlightened or Awakened One, and dedicated the rest of his life to sharing this path of freedom with others.

This is a fun and fascinating story. But what strikes me about it is how different it is from the stories of not only Jesus but also of all of the leaders in the Abrahamic faiths. This is a story about a seeker’s quest for understanding; those are all — from Abraham to Moses in the biblical tradition to Mohammed in Islam — stories about God choosing and calling someone. In the stories of the Buddha’s life, he is the protagonist and even in those versions which involve the intervention of gods, they are minor characters. But when it comes to the Abrahamic faiths, God is the protagonist. They are all stories of grace; the Buddha’s is one of active discovery. This is even more pronounced in the story of Jesus’s earthly life. His conception is unique, virginal, and divine; from the earliest stories of his life he is certain of his identity (”Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” (Luke 2.49)). This is perhaps confirmed for him in a new way at his baptism, but there is no indication that this changes Jesus or his identity.

The differences in these stories is instructive, I think, for the nature of the teaching that comes from these traditions. In Judaism and Islam, Truth is revealed to the prophets. In Christianity, Truth comes directly from the person of Jesus himself (”I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14.6)). But in Buddhism, Truth is not so much revealed as it is simply realized. And so Buddhist teaching is framed more like Newton’s Laws of Physics than divine revelation: something that is out there for all of us to uncover, basic principles for how the world — in this case, specifically, the human mind — works.

Again, I think this is why Buddhist thought is so accessible to so many people, irrespective of their religious beliefs, background, or traumas. It’s psychology far more than it is theology, and so its claims are less of a competition to Christianity’s (or any other tradition’s) claims.

This of course demands we ask the question of what that Truth that governs the functioning of the human mind is. And to this we will turn in the rest of the series.