Part I

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I. For more than 1,800 years, the mirrorlike natures of the Buddha and Jesus remained buried in the ancient texts of each religion. Then scholars examining these holy books began to detect remarkable patterns.

Hardly anything was known in the West about Buddhism or the Buddha until the mid-19th century. But with the escalation of European rule in Asia in the 1880s, interest in Buddhism and in its parallels to Christianity began to grow. The similarities between Jesus and the Buddha were so strong that some scholars believed they could only be explained by direct contact or cultural borrowing. (Because the Buddha lived about 500 years earlier, the borrowing would have been from the Buddha to Jesus.)

One of the first of these spiritual explorers, a Dutch writer named Ernest de Bunsen, equated the Asian concept of an “angel messiah”—a messiah from another world—with Jesus. The son of a baron, de Bunsen wrote primarily in German, but also produced sweeping English texts on religion. In his fanciful 1880 book The Angel-Messiah of Buddhists, Essenes, and Christians, he told of Jews returning from the Babylonian Exile, transporting in their caravans not only rare spices from the East but also a revolutionary concept. According to de Bunsen, the angel myth was adopted by the Essenes, a Jewish sect living in the desert during the first century, who applied it to Jesus. But Jesus, de Bunsen claimed, refuted the Essenes and tried to hide the fact that he was the messiah. Difficult to believe in any era, de Bunsen’s theory was completely discredited with the 1947 discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which most scholars attribute to the Essenes. To date, the remains of about 800 scrolls have been discovered; not one mentions Jesus or an “angel messiah.”

Soon afterward, a German writer named Rudolf Seydel (1835–1892) began uncovering strong resemblances between the infancy stories in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke and the second-century B.C. Lalitavistara biography, one of the earliest and most influential texts on Buddha’s life. But it was Arthur Lillie, a British civil servant assigned to duty in India, who fully revealed these parallels. During his off hours, Lillie developed a fascination with Indian religion and began probing the ancient texts. Around 1909, he published Buddhism in Christianity and India in Primitive Christianity. Unfortunately, Lillie drew upon Buddhist texts from such divergent places as Sri Lanka and China, and from canonical and apocryphal gospels alike, failing to consider where or when 022the texts were written. It was difficult for historians to take the king’s civil servant seriously when he cited texts written several centuries after Jesus as evidence for Buddhist influence on the Christian Gospels.

Around the same time, Philadelphia librarian Albert J. Edmunds (1857–1941) elevated the study to a more objective and professional level. Unlike Lillie and his predecessors, who often placed personal religious beliefs before historical accuracy, Edmunds was rigorous and systematic in trying to establish that Buddhism influenced the Gospels. Even today, his two-volume Buddhist and Christian Gospels, which went through numerous editions following its first publication in 1902, remains an invaluable source for the parallel texts.

Later scholars further developed Edmunds’s theory. Dwight Goddard (1861–1939), author of Was Jesus 023Influenced by Buddha?, actually claimed that Jesus followed the Eightfold Path of Buddhism and preached the Four Noble Truths.^a (A Baptist missionary who became one of the first non-Asian Buddhists in the United States, Goddard founded a fellowship of followers of Buddha, as well as a magazine called Zen.) Another writer suggested that the four evangelists had been introduced to Buddhist concepts that they later confused with Jesus’ words and deeds.

Today a majority of scholars believe that Eastern thought (particularly Zoroastrian ideas, which are marked by a belief in a profound dualism and a continuing conflict between a god of light and a god of darkness) was carried from Persia to Palestine by Jews returning from the Babylonian Exile and influenced Jewish writings in the centuries before Jesus. But Persia (modern-day Iran) is still a long way from India, and Zoroastrianism bears little resemblance to Buddhism.

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A minority of scholars are more adventurous with their ideas, envisioning Buddhism traveling along the ancient Silk Road, which led through Central Asia to Iraq, Mesopotamia and Syria, arriving eventually in Palestine. They also point to the monsoon winds, which even in Jesus’ day were carrying trading boats from India to Egypt. After all, they argue, didn’t Alexander the Great conquer part of India in the fourth century B.C., exposing the Greeks to Eastern ways? And didn’t Jesus grow up in a Greek-speaking world, just a few miles from the large Hellenistic city of Sepphoris? Roy C. Amore, professor of religious studies at the University of Windsor, Ontario, discussed this possibility at length in his 1978 book, Two Masters, One Message.

Some scholars are still more imaginative, referring to Jesus’ adolescence and early manhood as the “lost years” and insisting that the New Testament fails to describe this period because Jesus was traveling in India, receiving spiritual instruction from Buddhist monks and yogis.

These theories do not stand up to the rigors of historical scrutiny. For example, not one of these researchers bothers to explain why the Jewish historian Josephus and the Roman historians Suetonius and Tacitus, all of whom discuss Jesus, fail in their voluminous writings to once mention Buddhism. Moreover, the Asian sources which report that Jesus traveled to India are very late.

To many people, these questions are irrelevant: They contend that it is spiritual truth, not historical fact, that matters. Toward that end, two of the world’s most venerated Buddhists recently resurrected the parallels, gazing upon them in a religious light. In 1995 the Buddhist author and monk Thich Nhat Hanh wrote of Jesus and Buddha: “I touch both of them as my spiritual ancestors.” The Dalai Lama has himself suggested that the parallels are more vital today than ever, as we live in a world in which cultures are moving ever closer.

At about the same time that interest in the sayings of Buddha was first developing among Europeans, Rudyard Kipling wrote the famous lines

East is East, and West is West,
And never the twain shall meet.

But there is more to Kipling’s famous poem. In a stanza that the 20th century seems to have forgotten, the poet ultimately observes

There is neither East nor West,
Border, nor Breed, nor Birth
When two strong men stand face to face,
though they come from the ends of the earth.

I. For more than 1,800 years, the mirrorlike natures of the Buddha and Jesus remained buried in the ancient texts of each religion. Then scholars examining these holy books began to detect remarkable patterns.