1) Wanted to share a comment I thought was interesting on twitter from someone who said he's a fan but disagrees with you about the difference between buddhism and christianity:
Your comment: "It was in the early nineteenth century that Western scholars first really began to notice that Buddhism wasn’t just one more exotic flavor of Pagan idolatry for Christian missionaries to sneer at—that it was a prophetic religion comparable to theirs, with theological, philosophical, sacramental, and ethical dimensions in no way inferior to those of Christianity. What made this realization excruciatingly difficult for them was that the ethics of Buddhism are very similar to those of Christianity, but its doctrinal and philosophical underpinnings couldn’t conflict more totally with Christianity’s if someone had sat down and worked them out with that in mind.
It’s indicative of the difference we’re discussing that the salvation offered by Christ is confirmed to his believers by their faith that he returned from death, while the salvation offered by the Buddha is confirmed to his believers by their faith that everyone else returns from death but he did not and never will. It’s equally noteworthy that Christian teaching rests on the idea that each human being has an immortal soul that needs to be saved from damnation, while Buddhist teaching insists that the idea that any of us has an enduring self at all is the very source of our damnation. The two faiths are irreconcilable at levels deeper than most people, and even most theologians, are willing to go."
Their reply: "I think the relationship is much more like that between Newtonian and relativistic gravitation: Buddhadharma is a general, observer-invariant description of what are mostly the same underlying (meta)physics.
For example, kenosis ("[self-]emptying") is a central concept in Christian theology. In Buddhist terms this is very easy to "cash out" as anātman ("egolessness") + śūnyatā ("emptiness"). Similarly we can read "original sin" as beginningless ignorance (anādyavidyā). From a Buddhist perspective the traditional Christian denial of rebirth may be understood as a kind of heuristic teaching (that is, a neyārtha) emphasis on the preciousness of taking birth as a human being, which is one of the four traditional "mind-changings" regarded as preliminary to practice.
Christianity can make spiritual and intellectual-historical sense of Judaism and Islam, however it struggles to categorize anything other than these two as anything other than "paganism." This is tied directly to the exclusivity of the Christian claim on liberation (mokṣa): in effect, from a Buddhist perspective, the Christian claim is that Jesus is the only Buddha who has ever appeared or will ever appear. This in turn is tied to the central Christian emphasis on humanity: Jesus is explicitly the savior of human beings, to the extent that nonhuman beings are effectively written out of the soteriological picture. Notoriously, this shows up as the "do dogs go to Heaven" problem: "officially" (e.g. in Aquinas' Summa), nonhuman animals have no "rational soul," therefore at death they are not eligible for either salvation or damnation and so their consciousness is simply eliminated entirely.
In sum, if you took Buddhist ethics and (meta)physics, but instead of making them perfectly general for any possible sentient being at any possible spatiotemporal location, you treated "birth as a human being" as a kind of Newtonian classical limit, the resulting (meta)physical picture would look very close to, if not identical with, Christianity."
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branchandroot
comment
Date: 2025-04-21 04:27 pm (UTC)Your comment:
"It was in the early nineteenth century that Western scholars first really began to notice that Buddhism wasn’t just one more exotic flavor of Pagan idolatry for Christian missionaries to sneer at—that it was a prophetic religion comparable to theirs, with theological, philosophical, sacramental, and ethical dimensions in no way inferior to those of Christianity. What made this realization excruciatingly difficult for them was that the ethics of Buddhism are very similar to those of Christianity, but its doctrinal and philosophical underpinnings couldn’t conflict more totally with Christianity’s if someone had sat down and worked them out with that in mind.
It’s indicative of the difference we’re discussing that the salvation offered by Christ is confirmed to his believers by their faith that he returned from death, while the salvation offered by the Buddha is confirmed to his believers by their faith that everyone else returns from death but he did not and never will. It’s equally noteworthy that Christian teaching rests on the idea that each human being has an immortal soul that needs to be saved from damnation, while Buddhist teaching insists that the idea that any of us has an enduring self at all is the very source of our damnation. The two faiths are irreconcilable at levels deeper than most people, and even most theologians, are willing to go."
Their reply:
"I think the relationship is much more like that between Newtonian and relativistic gravitation: Buddhadharma is a general, observer-invariant description of what are mostly the same underlying (meta)physics.
For example, kenosis ("[self-]emptying") is a central concept in Christian theology. In Buddhist terms this is very easy to "cash out" as anātman ("egolessness") + śūnyatā ("emptiness"). Similarly we can read "original sin" as beginningless ignorance (anādyavidyā). From a Buddhist perspective the traditional Christian denial of rebirth may be understood as a kind of heuristic teaching (that is, a neyārtha) emphasis on the preciousness of taking birth as a human being, which is one of the four traditional "mind-changings" regarded as preliminary to practice.
Christianity can make spiritual and intellectual-historical sense of Judaism and Islam, however it struggles to categorize anything other than these two as anything other than "paganism." This is tied directly to the exclusivity of the Christian claim on liberation (mokṣa): in effect, from a Buddhist perspective, the Christian claim is that Jesus is the only Buddha who has ever appeared or will ever appear. This in turn is tied to the central Christian emphasis on humanity: Jesus is explicitly the savior of human beings, to the extent that nonhuman beings are effectively written out of the soteriological picture. Notoriously, this shows up as the "do dogs go to Heaven" problem: "officially" (e.g. in Aquinas' Summa), nonhuman animals have no "rational soul," therefore at death they are not eligible for either salvation or damnation and so their consciousness is simply eliminated entirely.
In sum, if you took Buddhist ethics and (meta)physics, but instead of making them perfectly general for any possible sentient being at any possible spatiotemporal location, you treated "birth as a human being" as a kind of Newtonian classical limit, the resulting (meta)physical picture would look very close to, if not identical with, Christianity."