The Lotus and the Cross: Responses to Questions on Buddhism and Christianity, Part I
May 3, 2008 by Wei-Hsien Wan
Shortly after Sr. Macrina, in a comment, asked me write about my conversion from Buddhism to Christianity, I received an e-mail with some questions by a student who is working on a paper comparing Buddhism and Christianity. In case anyone might be interested in her questions and my responses, I’m publishing them in 2 parts.
First, what encounters have you had with Buddhism and Buddhist teachings?
I was raised in a Chinese Buddhist family in Malaysia and practiced some kind of Buddhism for the first 14 or so years of my life until my conversion to Christianity in 1992. I say “some kind of Buddhism” because Chinese Buddhism is a complex reality, a mixture of Chinese folk religion, Taoism and Buddhism. You may already know that Buddhism can be generally divided into 3 “schools”: the Theravada (”Way of the Elders”), the Mahayana (”The Great Wheel”), and Vajrayana (basically, the Tibetan school). I would place Chinese Buddhism somewhere between the Mahayana and Vajrayana schools, since it embraces a broader range of acceptable beliefs and practices than the Theravada, which is the most “conservative” in these aspects.
I grew up in a family devoted to Chinese Buddhist practices until my last year as a Buddhist (that is, at the raw age of 14!), which I practicing the teachings of the Buddha (dharma or dhamma) according to the Theravadin school.
I would like to insist here that my knowledge of Buddhism, therefore, is in fact very limited, though it might be broader than that of most Americans.
Who is Jesus to you?
I believe that Jesus Christ is God made flesh. I believe that God is a Trinity of Persons—Father, Son and Spirit—in a communion of life and love. The Son became a man, Jesus of Nazareth, who is even now among us. Jesus was crucified and died, but was raised by the Father on the third day. He ascended into heaven 40 days later, but is even now truly present with us in and through the Spirit. He will come again in glory. Jesus is the Christ or the Messiah longed for by ancient Israel, and the Savior of the whole creation.
What similarities do you see between the person of Buddha and the person of Jesus? What similarities in their teachings? Also, what differences?
There are many ways to answer these questions, but I will only present one—the one that is most meaningful to me. It is by no means exhaustive, but we can compare and contrast Jesus and the Buddha by looking at the question of suffering and death.
In a sense, both Jesus and the Buddha were men whose lives were given to the defeat of suffering and death. They were pained by these evils in the world and sought, in their own time, to overcome them. They also taught others, their disciples or followers, how to do the same. Yet their differing perspectives on life, suffering and death constitute the greatest contrast between the two faiths that the world has received through them.
The Buddha (”Enlightened One”) believed that the cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth is inevitable. This cycle is part of the fabric of the universe that must be accepted. He believed also that he had discovered the cause of suffering in the world—craving or desire (tanha), which is essentially rooted in the failure to accept the transience or impermanence of life. He did not attempt to change or affect this cycle, but only to free himself and others from its clutches. He believed that one could be freed from suffering by freeing oneself from tanha. The cessation of desire, then, is the condition under which a person is liberated from the trap of death and rebirth, enters into a state of bliss called Nirvana (or Nibbana) and thereby becomes free from pain and suffering. One can attain to this by following the teaching of the Buddha, summed up in what is called “the Noble Eightfold Path”.
Jesus’ understanding of suffering and death is derived from what we call today “Judaism”, and has quite different from that of the Indian sage. For him, suffering and death are caused by separation from the God who made the heavens and the earth and sustains them in being. Apart from this God, no true life can exist. All of creation, for Jesus, is broken by pain and death because it has cut itself off from God, and that it decays and dies as as a limb severed from the human body decays and eventually dies. He taught that he was God in the flesh, the Son sent by the Father to heal creation and liberate it from suffering and death through the power of the Spirit. He believed that he accomplished this by the historical events of his own crucifixion (death) and resurrection, because in his suffering and death he shared in the suffering and death of all creation, and by rising on the third day, he released the new life which the Father had given him onto all creation also. His disciples are not merely people who accept Jesus’ way of thinking about the world, but who place their trust in Jesus’ power to heal and save them. They believe that Christianity is about sharing in that new, full and unending life of Jesus, in whom they encounter and share in the inner life of the Trinitarian God.
Whereas the Buddha believed that he uncovered the reasons behind suffering and death and taught the way to escape them (without changing their reality in any way), Jesus believed that he truly put an end to suffering and death by reconciling the whole creation to the God who created it. The Christians proclaim, Jesus “is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death”. Because in him, suffering and death (his crucifixion) became precisely the means by which he revealed God’s power and brought new life into the world, we too can experience God’s power and share in that new life through our suffering and death. It is not an exaggeration to say that God meets us in suffering and death, because this is how he came to us in the life of Jesus. For Buddhists, the Buddha is a witness to the possibility of freedom from suffering and death without changing the laws of the universe itself. For Christians, Jesus, by rising from the dead, has “trampled down death by death”.
[To be continued.]
