The life stories of Jesus and the Buddha are strikingly similar. Both are conceived without sexual intercourse and born to chaste women. Both leave home for the wilderness where each is tempted by a Satan figure. Both return enlightened, work miracles and challenge the religious establishment by their teachings. Both attract disciples and both are betrayed by one of them. Both preach compassion, unselfishness and altruism and each creates a movement that bears the founder’s name.
A contemporary Buddhist monk that has a large following here in the United States and in Europe sees Jesus and Buddha as “brothers” who taught that the highest form of universal understanding is universal love. The similarities are between the two are striking and would be all the more so had they been contemporaries. But the man who started the Buddhist movement, Gautama Buddha, lived in the 6th century, was born into a noble family on the borders of India and Nepal, grew up as a Hindu, rejected certain tenants of his native faith, and more than likely fashioned his own experiences after the likeness of Jesus’ life. [Holwick: Buddha was born in the sixth century B.C. so he could not have patterned his life after Jesus’.]
The teachings of this man are summed up in what is reported to be his very first sermon to his followers. He made four points [and I would suggest that this is where he went wrong – he should have kept it to three points (sorry had to inject some humor here)] and these points are called the Four Noble Truths:
1. Sorrow is the universal experience of mankind.
2. The cause of sorrow is desire, and the cycle of rebirths
(reincarnation) is perpetuated by desire for existence.
3. The removal of sorrow can only come from the removal of desire.
4. Desire can be systematically abandoned by following the Noble Eightfold
path. And, with the cessation of desire humans pass from this world
of individual existence into the world of pure Being (Nirvana).
The striking difference in the two religions is this: it is the goal of every Buddhist to achieve Buddhahood, to become Buddha himself, to achieve Nirvana. In Christianity a Christian can never become Christ nor should we ever try. It would be heresy to even begin down such a road. Not to mention the fallacy in trying to escapee this individualistic life. What the Buddhist does to the Christ figure is strip him of his divinity, make him into a mere man, and transform him into a figure like Buddha. It is common, in Buddhist circles to regard Jesus as an emanation, a partial and inferior copy, a “truth body” [dharmakaya] they would say, of the Buddha.
The Dalai Lama, who resides in India, and is a kind of “Pope” figure for Buddhist is viewed as the vice-regent of the Buddha and the reincarnation of the previous Dalai Lama. He says that Christ was either a fully enlightened being or achieved a very high spiritual realization.
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Taken from various dictionaries and relies heavily on the articles written in Newsweek magazine — though the presentation here is severely condensed and adapted — “Visions of Jesus: How Jews, Muslims and Buddhists View Him,” (March 27, 2000).