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The Gospels and the traditional biographies of the Buddha are filled with stories about Jesus’ and the Buddha’s power over nature. For the Buddha miraculous powers resulted from karmic virtue and the perfecting of the mind, whereas for Jesus they were evidence of God’s power working through humans.
- The Parallel Lives of Buddha and Jesus…in Thought
Although Jesus was born to a peasant family in Galilee, and...
- The Parallel Lives of Buddha and Jesus…in Thought
Although Jesus was born to a peasant family in Galilee, and the Buddha to a powerful ruler who held sway over northern India, both arrived at the same moral destination. Each felt not only that wealth was not the way to heaven and enlightenment, but that worldly riches interfered with an attempt to lead a good life.
While Jesus believed that God would soon destroy the world in an apocalypse of brimstone and fire (Matthew 10,23; 16,28), the Buddha had little interest in predicting the future and would have found Jesus’ grim prediction rather puzzling.
The Buddha taught for 45 years, Jesus for a mere two or perhaps three. The two men’s understanding of the wider reality has almost nothing in common. The Buddha did not believe in a creator God and Jesus did. For the Buddha, the Absolute was a non-anthropomorphic ‘Unborn, Un-become, Unmade, Un-constructed’ (Ud.80).
Buddha and Jesus were separated by about 500 years (Buddha came first). How Can the Similarities Between These Figures Be Explained? Although Buddha and Jesus were separated by centuries and distance—about 3,000 miles—their stories and teachings have many similarities.
In order to determine how the Zen Buddhist views Jesus Christ, I will first present a brief history of Zen, including a brief overview of the life of the Buddha.
As a Jesus scholar and a Christian, I address two central subjects raised by the essays, the first more historical and the second more theological. I briefly compare the historical Jesus and the Buddha and then reflect about the exclusivist and abso-lutist claims made about Jesus by the most common forms of Christianity.
