Comparison of Buddhism and Christianity

There is no better description of biblical spirituality than ceaseless vigilance or perpetual mindfulness. ~ Aloysius Pieris

Since the arrival of Christian missionaries in the East in the 13th century, followed by the arrival of Buddhism in Western Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, similarities were perceived between the practices of Buddhism and Christianity.

Quotes

• Buddhism promises nothing, but actually fulfills; Christianity promises everything, but fulfills nothing.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist (1895), as translated by H. L. Mencken (1918)

• So much for the three Christian virtues: faith, hope and charity: I call them the three Christian ingenuities.—Buddhism is in too late a stage of development, too full of positivism, to be shrewd in any such way.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist (1895), as translated by H. L. Mencken (1918)

• It is a significant fact and worth pondering upon that the Bible commences with the words: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.", while the Dhammapada … opens with the words "Mind precedes things, dominates them, creates them". These momentous words are the quiet and uncontending, but unshakeable reply of the Buddha to that biblical belief. Here the roads of these two religions part: the one leads far away into an imaginary Beyond, the other leads straight home, into man's very heart.
  • Nyanaponika Thera, The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1965), p. 21

• It may be relevant here to recall gratefully a fraternal correction I was kindly offered by the Archimandrite Ambrosius of the Greek Orthodox Church. After listening to a lecture I delivered at Oxford University some years ago, he gently chided me (in private, not in public) for not perceiving the difference between the brand of Hellenism affecting Western theology that had absorbed the philosophical thought of ancient Greece, and the Hellenism of Eastern Orthodox theology which had assimilated the spiritual praxis of their non-Christian ancestors. Mulling over this critical observation of his, I came to understand why our scholastic tradition has not given importance to what Greek Orthodox spirituality has named nepsis (vigilance), which is its own technical term for mindfulness.
  • Aloysius Pieris,"Spirituality as Mindfulness: Biblical and Buddhist Approaches," Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality, vol. 10, no. 1, Spring 2010, p. 39

• A “discerning person” (anthropos diakritikos), according to the Orthodox Greeks, is someone perpetually mindful or watchful of God working in all things and at all times. Ever conscious of God’s Love, which is God’s Will, a vigilant Christian is never taken unawares by circumstances. In the eschatological discourses of the Gospels, Jesus advises us to read the cosmic signs that announce God’s recurrent visitations and thus remain watchful and awake every hour of the day and night, that is to say, remain perpetually mindful. Hence there is no better description of biblical spirituality than ceaseless vigilance or perpetual mindfulness.
  • Aloysius Pieris,"Spirituality as Mindfulness: Biblical and Buddhist Approaches," Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality, vol. 10, no. 1, Spring 2010, p. 39

• Buddhism, which only a mere dabbler in religious research could compare with Christianity, is hardly reproducible in words of the Western languages.
  • Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, as translated by Charles Francis Atkinson (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1918)