A Historical Comparison of Christianity and Buddhism

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Two of the world’s most important and magnificent religions share little in common on the surface. Yet as the Dalai Lama’s recent interfaith dialogues have shown, locating points of intersection between Christianity and Buddhism can be a more fruitful endeavor than focusing only on differences. Buddhism is older than Christianity, but only by about 500 years. From their points of origin, Buddhism and Christianity spread far and wide geographically: Buddhism to East Asia and Christianity to Europe. One of the things Christianity and Buddhism share in common most is that their respective faiths are not as entrenched in their places of origin as they are in the places that adopted these religions later. For instance, Christianity is more popular in the Americas, Africa, and Europe than in the Middle East, and Buddhism is more popular in the rest of Asia outside of India than in India, where the Gautama Buddha was born.



The founders of Christianity and Buddhism also worked within their own cultures and communities, not necessarily intending to start brand new religions, but more to reform or revitalize their own. Gautama Buddha “was one of the many critics of the religious establishment” in his time: namely the Vedic religion that the world now knows as Hinduism (Violatti 1). Several centuries later, Jesus of Nazareth served a similarly disruptive role in his community, being leader to a movement that pushed for political change within the religious establishment of Judaism. The New Testament is filled with references to Jesus upsetting the Jewish religious order.

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Jesus says of the Pharisees, “So you must be careful to do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach,” (Matthew 23:3). Unlike Jesus, Buddha did not have a core set of disciples that followed him around and write down his precise teachings. Therefore, less is known about what Siddhartha Gautama actually did to dismantle Vedic authorities, but the legends that sprouted up around this revolutionary figure do paint him as someone interested in solitary meditation and the pursuit of wisdom through the cultivation of the mind. Rather than ascribe to the rote rituals that dominated the Vedic traditions, the Buddha and his disciples sought a purer form of spiritual practice, which is what Jesus had also proposed to do, albeit in a completely different manner.



The source texts of Christianity and Buddhism were both written quite a long time after their founding fathers had taken their last breaths. Disciples of Jesus penned their own versions of their encounters with the man who they believed to be the “son of God,” and these gospels later became officially canonized and compiled into what is now known as the New Testament. Buddhist scripture was also inscribed into the collection of texts known as the sutras, but hundreds of years after Siddhartha Gautama lived. Unlike the Christian Bible, the sutras are not a standardized collection of texts. There are many different….....

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Works Cited

Bible: NIV

Buddhist Scriptures: http://here-and-now.org/buddrel/Study_Aids.html#[3]

Narada Maha Thera. “A Manual of Abhidhamma.” http://www.buddhanet.net/pdf_file/abhidhamma.pdf

Violatti, Christian. “Buddhism.” Ancient History Encyclopedia. https://www.ancient.eu/buddhism/

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