Part II

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II. If Jesus did not travel to India, if the Buddha’s teachings did not enter Palestine via the Silk Road, then how can their similarities be explained? In the following essay, Marcus Borg contemplates the possibility that they derive not from cultural borrowing but from shared experiences.

I am a Jesus scholar and not a scholar of Buddhism, so I approach this subject as a bit of an amateur. But for about 20 years, I have been struck by the many parallels between Jesus and the Buddha. Like Ray Riegert, I find the similarities impressive. Indeed, I have even said that if Jesus and the Buddha were to meet, neither would try to convert the other—not because they would think the effort hopeless, but because they would recognize each other.

The similarities include not only parallel sayings and stories, a selection of which appear on these pages, but broader similarities that go beyond individual sayings and stories. It is with these greater parallels that I wish to begin.

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Both the Buddha and Jesus were mystics. By mystic I mean a person who not only has vivid, and typically frequent, experiences of “the sacred,” but someone whose perceptions and life are transformed in essential ways by these firsthand experiences.

Life-transforming experiences of this kind were foundational for both Jesus and the Buddha. According to Buddhist and Christian traditions, dramatic experiences of the sacred stand at the beginning of the Buddha’s and Jesus’ public lives.¹ Each was about 30 years old at the time. The Buddha’s long religious quest led to his enlightenment under the Bodhi tree, after which he began his public activity. Jesus’ public activity began after his visionary experiences at his baptism and in the wilderness.

Both became teachers of wisdom who taught a “way” or “path”—a point to which I will return. As wisdom teachers, both also taught ethics—describing the kind of behavior that goes with following the path. Their ethical teachings are quite similar. The parallels involve both particular teachings—nonretaliation, love of enemies, not judging others, the dangers of wealth—and general principles—such as the centrality of compassion.

Both the Buddha and Jesus began renewal movements within their religious traditions, though neither saw himself as the founder of a new religion.

There are also striking parallels in the religious traditions that grew up around them. Remarkable events were said to have surrounded the births of both Jesus and the Buddha. Both were described as having extraordinary powers. Both were seen as more than human even though their humanity continued to be affirmed. Both were given an exalted—even divine—status by their followers. Both were seen as incarnations: Jesus as the word and wisdom of God incarnate, Gautama—the historical Buddha—as the manifestation on earth of the heavenly Buddha. The exalted status assigned to them reflects the enormous impact these two figures had on their followers, both during their lifetimes and afterward.

More similarities could be cited, but I want to note a major difference between Jesus and the Buddha: There is a social and political passion in the message and activity of Jesus not found in that of the Buddha. In the judgment of many scholars, Jesus was not only a wisdom teacher but also a social prophet. As such, he was a voice of religious social protest, who challenged the system of domination of his day and the ruling elites who stood at the top of it; he affirmed an alternative social vision. Jesus’ activity as a social prophet is the most likely reason that his public activity was so brief compared to the Buddha’s.²

But I want to turn now to the one similarity that I find most intriguing: The Buddha and Jesus were both wisdom teachers. For both, the religious life is seen primarily as a way or a path, an emphasis also stressed by their earliest followers. The way of the Buddha is what the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism are about (indeed, the fourth truth is the Eightfold Path). As a wisdom teacher, Jesus spoke regularly of “the way.” Moreover, according to the Book of Acts, the earliest name for the Jesus movement was the Way (Acts 9:2). The Gospel of John takes this image one step further when it speaks of Jesus as the incarnation of the way (John 14:6).³

And most strikingly, the way for the Buddha and Jesus was a subversive way. Both taught a wisdom that undermined ordinary ways of seeing and living. For 026both, the way led beyond the conventions that typically order our lives and shape our identity. Speaking of a way marked by liberation and transformation, they were teachers of “the road less travelled.” Their subversive wisdom was thus also an alternative wisdom.

Moreover, what each said about the way is remarkably similar. Indeed, they seem to know the same way, as is illustrated by three features.

First, for both, the way beyond convention involves a new way of seeing. Sayings about seeing, sight and light are central to Jesus’ teaching. Jesus’ aphorisms and parables often invite a new way of seeing. So too for the Buddha. Indeed, the common description of him as the enlightened one points to the centrality of a new way of seeing. Enlightenment involves seeing differently. Both Jesus and the Buddha sought to lead their hearers to a radical perceptual shift—a new way of seeing everything. The familiar line from a Christian hymn expresses this shared emphasis: “Once I was blind, but now I see.”

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Second, both paths involve a similar internal psychological and spiritual process of transformation. Both the Buddha and Jesus saw the world of convention as a snare in which one could easily get caught. Both saw the path of liberation as a departure from—a dying to—the world of convention and the self as defined by that world.

According to the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, the way of the Buddha entails a reorientation of one’s life from grasping (the cause of suffering) to letting go of grasping (the path of liberation). The images running through Jesus’ sayings and stories point to the same path. Those who empty themselves will be exalted, and those who exalt themselves will be emptied; those who make themselves last will be first, and first last. To become like a child means to become newly born. The path of discipleship involves “taking up one’s cross,” which is understood as a symbol for the internal process of dying to an old way of being and adopting a new way of being.

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Such was not only the message of Jesus but also the experience of Paul, the first Christian writer: “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). Dying to an old way of being was at the center of the Christian movement during the earliest stage to which we have access.

Buddhist letting go and Christian dying are very similar processes. Dying is the ultimate letting go—of the world and of an old self. With each, the world of convention as the center of one’s identity, security and preoccupation, and the self as defined by that world, passes away. This letting go, this dying, is liberation from an old way of being and resurrection into a new way of being. There is thus a Buddhist “born again” experience as well as a Christian “liberation through enlightenment” experience.

Third, the ethical fruit of this internal transformation is the same for both: becoming a more compassionate being. The Buddha is often called the compassionate one, and the central characteristic of a bodhisattva (roughly, a Buddhist saint) is compassion.

So also for Jesus. When he sought to describe in one word the kind of life that results from following the way, the word he uttered was “compassion”: “Be compassionate, as God is compassionate” (Luke 6:36). Paul’s word for compassion is love, and he spoke of love as the primary fruit of the Spirit and the greatest of the spiritual gifts (1 Corinthians 13). As Paul put it, “We are being transformed from one degree of glory to another into the likeness of Christ” (2 Corinthians 3:18).

Thus the way taught by the Buddha and the way taught by Jesus and his earliest followers strongly resemble each other. How do we account for this similarity?

As has been noted, cultural contact is one possibility: Jesus and his followers might have come into contact with Buddhist teaching, whether firsthand or secondhand. But the similarities do not suggest such contact. We would expect at least occasional linguistic similarities: an echo of a phrase or a metaphor used in the same way. But we do not find this. Rather, we find different images and metaphors whose underlying meanings are similar.

The most satisfactory explanation, to me, for these similarities of meaning is the commonality of religious experience. The teachings of Jesus and the Buddha about the way are similar because both knew the way from their own experience. Both embarked on intense religious quests; both had experiences of the sacred; and for both, we may infer, their paths involved letting go and dying.

Such experiences are noetic; they involve a knowing, not just a feeling.⁴ One sees differently afterwards and knows something one didn’t know before: One knows the way things really are. In comparison, our ordinary seeing and knowing seem like blindness. From this new way of seeing flowed the Buddha’s and Jesus’ teachings about the way.

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The striking similarities between the Buddha and Jesus do not mean that Christianity and Buddhism are identical or even nearly so. I accept a common contemporary scholarly definition of religions as “cultural-linguistic traditions.” Each religion is not only shaped by the culture in which it emerges, but also becomes a culture with its own language (including images, myths, stories, rituals and practices). Buddhism and Christianity are thus as different as the cultural-linguistic traditions in which they are embedded.

Yet unlike some advocates of the cultural-linguistic understanding of religion, I see a strong connection between these traditions and religious experience. I see each religion as both a response to the experience of the sacred and a mediator of such experiences. Thus, as different as Buddhism and Christianity are, I see both as having their origin in experiences of the sacred. The striking parallels in the teachings of Jesus and the Buddha point to a shared religious experience of the most powerful kind.

II. If Jesus did not travel to India, if the Buddha’s teachings did not enter Palestine via the Silk Road, then how can their similarities be explained? In the following essay, Marcus Borg contemplates the possibility that they derive not from cultural borrowing but from shared experiences.