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.

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D

• Mahayana became to Hinayana or primitive Buddhism what Catholicism was to Stoicism and primitive Christianity. Buddha, like Luther, had made the mistake of supposing that the drama of religious ritual could be replaced with sermons and morality; and the victory of a Buddhism rich in myths, miracles, ceremonies and intermediating saints corresponds to the ancient and current triumph of a colorful and dramatic Catholicism over the austere simplicity of early Christianity and modern Protestantism.
  • Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage : India and Her Neighbors.

• As in Mediterranean Christianity, these saints became so popular that they almost crowded out the head of the pantheon in worship and art. The veneration of relics, the use of holy water, candles, incense, the rosary, clerical vestments, a liturgical dead language, monks and nuns, monastic tonsure and celibacy, confession, fast days, the canonization of saints, purgatory and masses for the dead flourished in Buddhism as in medieval Christianity, and seem to have appeared in Buddhism first.
  • Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage : India and Her Neighbors.

• While Christianity committed its monstrous atrocities, Buddhism, which did not create an organized church in the manner of the occident in India, nor did it create a central authority to decide on the true faith, was much more tolerant.
  • Während das Christentum seine monströsen Greuel verbrach, war der Buddhismus, der in Indien keine organisierte Kirche nach Art der abendländischen, auch keine Zentralinstanz schuf, die über den rechten Glauben entschied, sehr viel toleranter.
  • Karlheinz Deschner - Criminal history of Christianity. Introduction. Volume. 1, 58

F

• The Buddhists kept five centuries in advance of the Roman Church in the invention and use of all the ceremonies and forms common to both religions.
  • J. Fergusson, as quoted in Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage : India and Her Neighbors. [1]

H

• In the teachings of primitive, southern Buddhism, Catholicism would have found the most salutary correctives for its strangely arbitrary theology, for its strain of primitive savagery inherited from the less desirable parts of Old Testament, for its incessant and dangerous preoccupations with torture and death, for its elaborately justified beliefs in the magic efficacy of rites and sacraments. But, alas, so far as the West was concerned, the Enlightened One was destined, until very recent times, to remain no more than the hero of an edifying fairy tale.
  • Aldous Huxley, Grey Eminence, 1941

• The religions whose theology is least preoccupied with events in time and most concerned with eternity, have been consistently less violent and more humane in political practice. Unlike early Judaism, Christianity and Mohammedanism (all obsessed with time) Hinduism and Buddhism have never been persecuting faiths, have preached almost no holy wars and have refrained from that proselytizing religious imperialism which has gone hand in hand with political and economic oppression of colored people.
  • Aldous Huxley, The Perennial philosophy, 1945

M

• The religion of Buddha has spread far beyond the limits of the Aryan world, and to our limited vision, it may seem to have retarded the advent of Christianity among a large portion of the human race. But in the sight of Him with whom a thousand years are but as one day, that religion, like the ancient religions of the world, may have but served to prepare the way of Christ, by helping through its very errors to strengthen and to deepen the ineradicable yearning of the human heart after the truth of God.
  • Max Muller, quoted in Shourie, Arun (1994). Missionaries in India: Continuities, changes, dilemmas. New Delhi : Rupa & Co, 1994

N

• What a yes-saying Aryan religion, born from the ruling classes, looks like: Manu’s law-book. What a yes-saying Semitic religion, born from the ruling classes, looks like: Mohammed’s law-book, the Old Testament in its older parts. What a no-saying Semitic religion, born from the oppressed classes, looks like: in Indian-Aryan concepts; the New Testament, a Chandala religion. What a no-saying Aryan religion looks like, grown among the dominant classes: Buddhism.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, quoted from Elst, Koenraad. Manu as a weapon against egalitarianism: Nietzsche and Hindu political philosophy in : Siemens & Vasti Roodt, eds.: Nietzsche, Power and Politics (Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2008).

The Antichrist (1895) by Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist (1895), as translated by H. L. Mencken (1918)

• Buddhism promises nothing, but actually fulfills; Christianity promises everything, but fulfills nothing.

• 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.

• In my condemnation of Christianity I surely hope I do no injustice to a related religion with an even larger number of believers: I allude to Buddhism. Both are to be reckoned among the nihilistic religions--they are both decadence religions--but they are separated from each other in a very remarkable way.

• Buddhism is a hundred times as realistic as Christianity--it is part of its living heritage that it is able to face problems objectively and coolly; it is the product of long centuries of philosophical speculation.

• Buddhism is a religion for peoples in a further state of development, for races that have become kind, gentle and over-spiritualized (--Europe is not yet ripe for it--): it is a summons 'that takes them back to peace and cheerfulness, to a careful rationing of the spirit, to a certain hardening of the body. Christianity aims at mastering beasts of prey; its modus operandi is to make them ill--to make feeble is the Christian recipe for taming, for "civilizing." Buddhism is a religion for the closing, over-wearied stages of civilization. Christianity appears before civilization has so much as begun--under certain circumstances it lays the very foundations thereof.

• Buddhism, I repeat, is a hundred times more austere, more honest, more objective. It no longer has to justify its pains, its susceptibility to suffering, by interpreting these things in terms of sin--it simply says, as it simply thinks, "I suffer." To the barbarian, however, suffering in itself is scarcely understandable: what he needs, first of all, is an explanation as to why he suffers. (His mere instinct prompts him to deny his suffering altogether, or to endure it in silence.) Here the word "devil" was a blessing: man had to have an omnipotent and terrible enemy--there was no need to be ashamed of suffering at the hands of such an enemy.

P

• 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

T

• 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

R

• Among religions, Bolshevism is to be reckoned with Mohammedanism rather than with Christianity and Buddhism. Christianity and Buddhism are primarily personal religions, with mystical doctrines and a love of contemplation. Mohammedanism and Bolshevism are practical, social, unspiritual, concerned to win the empire of the world.
  • Bertrand Russell, "The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism", (London, 1920), pp. 5, 114-115

S

• 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)

V

• Is it mere chance, or was Buddha's religion but the foreshadowing of that of Christ? The majority of your thinkers seem to be satisfied in the latter explanation, but there are some bold enough to say that Christianity is the direct offspring of Buddhism.
  • Swami Vivekananda, India's gift to the world, (Brooklyn Standard Union, February 27, 1895)