The Lotus and the Cross, Part II

This is the second part of my responses to a series of questions on Buddhism and Christianity. Part I can be found in the previous post.

Some Buddhists understand Jesus as being another bodhisattva. Could this be possible? Does Jesus need to stand alone in his relationship to the world?

Before I can answer this question, a clarification of terms is necessary. Most people today, when using the Sanskrit term bodhisattva, refer to a being who has attained to Enlightenment but is deferring his/her entrance into the state of Nirvana in order to help others attain to Enlightenment. This understanding is a later development in the Mahayana tradition. In the earlier and more primitive Theravadin understanding of the term, bodhisattva (bodhisatta in Pali) refers to the Buddha of a particular era (lokadhatu) on the journey toward Enlightenment. (Every age, in Theravadin thought, can only have one Buddha, and thus only one bodhisatta.) As such, Theravadins typically use the term bodhisatta to refer to the prince Siddharta before he attained to Enlightenment, i.e. before he became the Buddha strictly speaking.

Back to the Mahayanist understanding, which I’m presuming is the one you intend. Could Jesus have been another bodhisattva?

I don’t see how either Buddhism or Christianity can say this without compromising their integrity. Given the data that we have about Jesus in the New Testament and even the non-biblical writings, on what grounds can one say that Jesus is to be regarded as an Enlightened One by Buddhist standards? Yes, there is much in common in the Christian and Buddhist understandings of morality, but if one were to look beyond the level of morality or ethics (and neither Buddhism nor Christianity is a mere ethical code!), then there is insufficient evidence to call Jesus a bodhisattva by Buddhist standards. He was a monotheist; the Buddha was effectively a polytheist. Jesus believed in the goodness of created matter, whereas the Buddha saw matter as an illusion. For Jesus, the aim of a human being was union with God; for the Buddha, it was liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth and entrance into Nirvana. In other words, Jesus and the Buddha subscribed to different views about the universe. I don’t see how one can equate these two world-views except superficially. Even with the greatest generosity, a Buddhist can perhaps regard Jesus as a “good teacher”, but not a bodhisattva. He simply made too many errors to be called such.

From the Christian perspective, Jesus stands as a unique revelation or manifestation of the living God. There has never been anyone like him, nor will there be another like him. To place him as one in a series of prophets or teachers would be, in my understanding of Christianity, to depart from Christianity itself.

What could Christianity take away from the teachings of the Buddha, and what could Buddhism take away from the teachings of Christianity?

I will only answer the first part of that question, since I don’t feel competent as a former Buddhist to answer the second part. I think that there is much that Christians can learn from Buddhism. One thing that I’ve been thinking about lately is the Buddhist insight into the impermanence (anicca) of all things. The Buddha perceived rightly, I think, that all things are subject to transience by death and dissolution. Because of this, he shaped his whole way of life around this key truth.

As Christians, the Buddhist concept of anicca can help us appreciate more deeply what Christ accomplished in his Resurrection. There was a time when death cancelled everything—all life, all joy, all possibility of enduring happiness—but that is no longer the case. “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life,” we sing the Byzantine troparion of Pascha. Because he has conquered death and loosed mankind from its power, and inaugurated a “new creation” (2 Corinthians 5.17), death and anicca no longer have the final word. I think we Christians don’t think about death enough, even though our Scriptures teach that all human beings are enslaved to sin by the fear of death (Hebrews 2.15). This was one of the key themes in thought of the Greek Fathers as well as Benedictine monasticism, yet most Christians today think of Christ’s Resurrection merely as some kind of resuscitation rather than the defeat of Death and its power to thwart God’s plan for all creation. In Buddhism, then, we can perhaps see what is an accurate and profound realization of death and its pervasive capacity to render all things impermanent!

What, if anything, is missing in the teachings of the Buddha?

Again, I cannot confidently answer this question as a non-Buddhist, but there is one observation I would like to make about Buddhism that suggests an “inadequacy,” if one can use such a word without being demeaning. The Buddha once said that no man ought to depend on another to save him:

By each themselves is evil done;
By each is each defiled.
By each themselves is evil shunned;
By each is each refined.

To polish or stain,
On ourselves it depends,
For a person cannot
By another be cleansed. (Dhammapada Ch. XII, verse 165)

In other words, one must save oneself. But the human experience, when taken as a whole, seems to suggest that we human beings are incapable of doing so. Every religion has its own saviors—an “other” who wields abilities and powers beyond the limitations of humankind.

With time, even Buddhism developed this “need” for saviors, as can be seen the piety of the Mahayana and Vajrayana schools. Bodhisattvas and other beings (for example, Amitabha Buddha in “Pure Land Buddhism”) are called upon to help one toward the path of Enlightenment. These beings do not give help merely by their teachings, but they actually extend a kind of supernatural aid to devotees, precisely of the kind that the Buddha taught his disciples not to seek. In my opinion, it is a universal human realization that we cannot save ourselves, even when we understand the word “salvation” differently. Therefore, the Buddha’s teaching that we must rely only on our own effort to liberate ourselves from pain and death seem to me to be fundamentally unrealistic and contrary to human experience.

Could Buddhism and Christianity each be “a way up the same mountain”?

I think that they have mutually exclusive views of what the “mountain” is, so my answer would be “no”. In Buddhism, the mountain is Nirvana, freedom from rebirth and therefore freedom from suffering. The gods are not “in” Nirvana so to speak, since they themselves are subject to suffering and death. In Christianity, the “mountain” is the transforming union with God or deification, not the mere attainment of some kind of bliss. I think the destinations of the two faiths are drastically different, and I don’t see how one can say that they are two routes to the same destination without distorting one of them or both of them.