Unfortunately, Bill, there’s nothing quick about Buddhism. And, while there are certainly some parallels between the teachings of Jesus and those of Siddhatta Gotama, the Buddha, there are very few similarities between Buddhism and Christianity. I’m going to take a stab at providing an overview of the similarities and of the differences. Understand that this is as I see it, and I am not an expert; I’ve read a lot of the Buddha’s teachings and find those more complete and truer than the teachings of any other sage I know. When I wrote the first version of this essay, I was still hesitant to call myself a Buddhist; I’ve lost that hesitancy.

There are three things, I think, that most clearly distinguish the Buddha’s teachings from the Christian scriptures: the authenticity and coherence of the scriptural documents, the differing natures of Jesus and the Buddha, and the vast differences in the core doctrines. I’ll take these one at a time.

The authenticity of the documents. Although the Buddha predated Jesus by about 500 years, the oldest records of his teachings are almost certainly a more authentic reflection of his actual words than many of the teachings attributed to Jesus.

Almost from the beginning of Christianity, there has been significant dispute about the authenticity of the Gospels; they do, after all, differ considerably in the stories they tell of some of the more significant events in the story of Jesus the Christ; they frequently seem to be promoting a particular doctrinal agenda; and the emphasis each one lays on the events in the life of Jesus and the importance of those events and of his various teachings differs considerably from one Gospel to the next. There is also the nagging question of alternative Gospels, with an equal or greater claim to authenticity than the canonical four, that would have changed the message of the canon considerably had they been included with the others. The work of The Jesus Seminar has cleared up a lot of questions, but, for very many Christians, it has raised more questions that it has answered.

There are three main reasons to trust the authenticity of the Buddha’s teachings.

• First, the Buddha had a long career as a teacher. As against the very brief teaching career of Jesus, Siddhatta Gotama achieved enlightenment when he was 35, and he died at the age of 80; in the intervening 45 years, as the Buddha, he travelled throughout Northern India, teaching and attracting followers, and he took a very active and well-documented role in creating the sangha of renunciant followers that endures to this day, following very much the same set of rules that the Buddha himself established.
• Second, the followers of the Buddha were extremely proficient at memorizing (similar, in that regard, to a lot of other cultures in which writing had not yet developed or was not commonly used to disseminate ideas.) And they understood that one of their important purposes was to listen closely to the Buddha’s dhamma talks and to carry them to others in as nearly verbatim a form as possible. The Buddha, in his turn, used many devices in his teachings to make them easier to memorize and repeat. There are a lot of numbered lists; there is also a lot of repetition, and exceptional consistency with regard to the expression of the core ideas.
• Third, the sangha, just three months after the Buddha’s death, convened a large council specifically to organize a system for remembering the dhamma as the Buddha taught it. To that end, they organized into groups with particular areas of responsibility: one group had responsibility for remembering the core teaching concerning the nature of the human condition and the ways to overcome the suffering inherent in that condition; another group took responsibility for remembering the rules of the vinaya—the governance of the sangha and the prescribed conduct of its members; a third group took responsibility for teachings on the philosophy that provided an underpinning for the teachings. Each group met regularly and repeated to one another the teachings for which it took responsibility. Organized in that way, with that sense of purpose, it’s probable that they maintained the teachings with considerable fidelity through the several centuries during which the primary transmission continued to be an oral one. I’ve written an essay about the circumstances that led to the eventual compilation and recording of that oral tradition, known as the Pali Canon for the language in which it was written. Remarkably, the Pali Canon is accepted as authentic and its core content is accepted as foundational doctrine by all existing Buddhist sects, which in other regards are more different from one another than are Unitarian, Southern Baptist, and Greek Orthodox Christians.

The actual records of the Buddha’s discourses (and those of his closest disciples) are known as suttas (from the Pali word for “thread”). In them, we receive the picture of a teacher who speaks with compassion, great self confidence, and a firm and consistent voice. There are more than 10,000 suttas; taken together, they form a body of literature probably three or four times as long as the Bible.

The differing natures of the teachers. The second basic difference between Christianity and Buddhism concerns the contrasting nature of Jesus the Christ and Gotama the Buddha.

While it’s possible to take from the Gospels a picture of Jesus that is distinctly human—a smart and charismatic person, standing in radical opposition to the orthodoxy of his day, leader of a small group of revolutionaries focussed on the overthrow of the priestly establishment and of the occupying Romans who supported it—that is not the Jesus on which the religion of Christianity or the Christian Church is based. The Christian Jesus is, above and beyond any other characteristics, a divine Being, Son of God Himself, Who took birth as a man to fulfill His Father’s heavenly purpose, and Who, after His crucifixion, was bodily taken back up to Heaven to sit at His Father’s right hand.

The Buddha, on the other hand, was quintessentially human. It was, in fact, his recognition of his humanity—the fact that he was subject, as all others were, regardless of their station in life, to birth, aging, disease, and eventual death—was what lead him to shave his head, trade his princely garments for a simple yellow robe, and leave his home and family to enter a life of wandering, searching for the insight that would lead to release from the suffering and stress that attended every level of the human condition.

Not only was the Buddha not God, but there is, in his teaching, no concept of God as we in the West have come to understand Him (or fail to understand Him, as many believe). There were gods in the culture that the Buddha was born into—millions of them, in dozens of heavens. But they fulfilled an essentially metaphorical function in the Buddha’s teachings. The realms of the gods were more fortunate realms than our human realms—happier, with longer life spans and fewer temptations to unskillful action. But what actually went on in those realms is not part of the teaching, and the gods themselves had little to do with what went on in the human realm. The Buddha is quite clear on the fact that the gods themselves were subject to kammic law; they took being, were subject to aging and illness, and eventually (albeit after unimaginably long periods of time) died. And were reborn again, depending on the quality of the kamma that their behavior had evoked, into another godly realm, perhaps a higher or lower one, or into the human realm. If they had been particularly unskillful, even gods could be reborn in the animal realm or the realm of the hungry ghosts.

But there is no single God, Who created the universe and mankind, Who is the authority for moral behavior, and Who will eventually judge each one of us and assign us our particular rewards.

When the Buddha was questioned about such metaphysical issues as gods, salvation, the nature of the soul, he always refused to give an answer. His purpose, the Buddha told such questioners, was to teach the truths of human suffering, the cause of suffering, the way to end suffering, and the practice of that way. The Buddha had come to those truths, not by any divine gift, but by his own efforts, pursued over innumerable lifetimes and culminating in the enlightenment he received, toward the end of the Sixth Century BCE, after sitting in meditation all night at the base of a fig tree near the village of Bodh Gayh in northern India. What the Buddha had achieved was accessible to anyone who was willing to undertake comparable effort and persist in it; it was a human achievement and required no supernatural intervention.

Contrasting doctrines. And that brings us to the most significant difference between Christianity and Buddhism: the vastly different doctrines at their cores. In what follows, I’m going to focus on two aspects of doctrine: what each religion teaches about the purpose of life and what each presents as the rules for living a good life—essentially, ontology and ethics. And I want to protest in advance that I am not and have never been a Christian; in all of what follows, I am on shaky ground.

The primary ontological focus of Christianity, as I understand it, is soteriological: Christianity is all about sin and salvation. Orthodox Christianity views the original condition of humankind as a state of sin; the role of Jesus as Messiah, Savior, was to redeem that sin and save mankind from the fate that sinners are doomed to suffer. To carry out His mission of redemption, Jesus had to die on the cross and rise from the tomb. To benefit from Jesus’s sacrifice, to participate in Salvation, it is only necessary to believe in Him.

The focus in Buddhism, on the other hand, is primarily psychological and behavioral. The condition of human life is dukkha (which is usually, but inadequately, translated as “suffering” or “stress”; in fact, it is broader than those terms, encompassing the familiar experiences of frustration, despair, dissatisfaction, general malaise.) Birth, the Buddha taught as the First Ennobling Truth, is dukkha; aging, disease, and death are dukkha. Even happiness is dukkha, because it is destined to end. In the Second Ennobling Truth, the Buddha explained that the cause of dukkha is craving—wanting what we don’t have, not wanting what we’re stuck with, wanting it to go on forever, wanting it to be over and done with. In the Third Ennobling Truth, we are told that the way to end dukkha is to stop craving—to give it up completely, without any residue remaining. And, in the Fourth Ennobling Truth, we are shown the way to end craving, that is through the practice of a Path with eight factors: right understanding, right purpose, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right diligence, right mindfulness, and right concentration.

Koan: how do you get
to Carnegie Hall?

So, right off the bat, as it were, Christianity puts more emphasis on faith, while Buddhism puts its emphasis on practice.

That’s not to say, of course, that Christianity ignores the importance of good conduct, although it’s sometimes hard to discern, through the layers of authorship and frequently conflicting testimony, just what proper conduct consists of. From the Old Testament, Christianity inherited the misleadingly named Ten Commandments, which prohibit a number of behaviors, including the making of graven images, failing to give appropriate honor and pride of place to the Lord’s name, killing, stealing, failing to honor one’s parents, adultery, and covetousness. To those, Jesus added one big one: love your neighbor as you love yourself and be forgiving of his sins. In addition, hints are scattered throughout the Gospels regarding behaviors and habits of mind that Jesus approves: humility, generosity, voluntary poverty, among others.

Nor do I mean to imply that there is no place for faith in Buddhism. In fact, faith is a core virtue in Buddhism, but it seems to me that it means something different there than it does in Christianity. In Christianity, faith is where it ends; if you have faith, you’re in, you’re saved. In Buddhism, faith is where it begins; we have to have faith that the Buddha was, in fact, awakened, liberated from attachment to transient things and the dukkha that attends such attachment; and we have to have faith that he was being honest about the Path that led to his awakening. Without that measure of faith, we’d have no incentive to undertake the practice of the Path ourselves. But we also need to have faith that the Buddha did all that as a human being and that his accomplishment, awesome as it is, is within our reach as human beings. We must have faith in our own ability to reduce dukkha and, eventually, to bring it to an end.

When it comes to the conduct of a virtuous life, Buddhism is much more direct and explicit than Christianity, and more concise as well. There are five precepts that every Buddhist accepts, the practice of which will lead to action that is skillful, conducive to our own well-being and the well-being of those around us. The Five Precepts are eminently practical:

• Do not kill.
• Do not take what’s not given.
• Don’t speak so as to deceive or spread discord.
• In your sexual behavior, be faithful and treat your partner(s) with respect and tenderness.
• Don’t take alcohol or any other substance that makes you careless and stupid.

(For monastics, the list expands considerably, and the basic five take on more rigorous meaning: members of the monastic Sangha are expected to live celibate lives, for example, and the injunction to speak without deceit or hurtfulness is expanded to prohibit gossip and idle chatter.)

In addition to the kinds of skillful action covered in the precepts, many of the Buddha’s discourses covered the specific practices involved in following the Eightfold Path—how to preserve mindfulness in confused or difficult situations, what kinds of livelihood were most likely to generate good kamma, how to resist the temptations of the senses, the material world, and the rambling mind. There is a coherence and consistency to the Buddha’s advice, and a straightforwardness, that seems to me to be missing from many of the passages in both the Old and New Testaments that deal with behavior. The Buddha’s teachings were always purposeful, and the purpose was always the same: to bring an end to suffering.

Christianity and Buddhism are both rich topics for discussion, and many very smart people have spent many hours and many gallons of ink pursuing that discussion. In this article, I’ve tried to cover what seems to me to be the essential differences between the two traditions. In the parts about Buddhism, I’ve focused on the Pali Canon and the particular tradition known as Theravada; I’ve pretty much ignored the traditions that have evolved into Zen, the Pure Land Buddhism of China, or Tibetan Tantraism. That’s for two reasons: first, I don’t know very much about those later traditions, and, second, all of the traditions accept the Pali Canon as a starting point.

In the parts about Christianity, I’ve also tried to ignore the doctrinal differences between sects and focus on the teachings that all Christians more or less accept. The result of that approach is that pretty much anybody who knows a particular doctrine very well can take issue with what I’ve said. If such issue is taken, it’s yours; I give it freely, and I’ll try to learn from whatever corrections you have to what I’ve said. I’m not interested in disputes about Christian doctrine.

You are likely to know more about web resources for the study of Christianity than I do, and perhaps you know of resources that deal specifically with comparisons between Christianity and Buddhism (and other traditions as well.) I’d appreciate it if you’d leave pointers to such resources in the Comments.

Regarding resources for the study of Buddhism, one could do worse than start with Wikipedia; their articles on Buddhism are extraordinarily complete and well-written, and they include many links for further study. My own study of Buddhist traditions has benefitted enormously from the Access To Insight website. That site contains almost one thousand translations from the Pali Canon’s Sutta Pitaka, all well-written, competently translated, and intelligently organized; I think there is no better way to study Buddhism than to start with the Buddha’s own teachings. The Access To Insight site also contains a number of other essays and complete books on Buddhism; one particularly delightful piece, Bhikkhu Tissa Dispels Some Doubts, is as entertaining an introduction to Buddhism as I’ve seen, full of warmth and wisdom. Finally, I am hoping to make this site more and more helpful as a resource for the study of the Buddha’s Dhamma.

I welcome your comments.