On Faith - Washington Post - 21st July 2008
The Buddha and Christ in All of Us
Growing up in a liberal Christian family, from early on I was aware that what you believed really mattered. The genial padre at our Presbyterian church intimated as much in his arcane sermons. The youth leaders who brought out their keyboards and electric guitars on a Friday evening were far more direct about what you were supposed to believe: God made the world and was still in charge. He was Love and the Bible was His Word. When you accepted Jesus as your personal savior you were Born Again: if you didn’t, death would be followed by everlasting Hell.I found these beliefs just too problematic to accept; and the whole evangelical experience put me off religion for over a decade. Then in my thirties, working in the high-pressure world of corporate PR, I took up meditation for stress management reasons, and found myself drawn to Tibetan Buddhism. What I discovered could not have been more refreshingly different: don’t be hasty about signing up to Buddhism, the Dalai Lama said, because of the cultural difficulties you may encounter. Don’t believe a word of my teachings, Buddha told people, until you have tried them out and they accord with your own experience. In this new world, whether you called yourself a Buddhist, or held certain beliefs seemed of little consequence – what mattered was your motivations and behavior.
All this made a lot more sense to me. And while karma and rebirth seemed pretty weird on first encounter, I was told not to worry about them. Take what’s useful, my Dharma teacher told me, and put the rest to one side. The objective is not to turn you into a Buddhist, but into a happier person.
Fast forward to my forties, and after some years following Buddhist practices I found myself reading about the historical Jesus. Returning to a partly-familiar story from a different perspective, I was staggered by the parallels with the historical Buddha. At the heart of it, the teachings of both were nearly identical. Both stressed the importance of ethics, equanimity, putting others first, creating positive causes for positive effects and the pointlessness of focusing too much energy on worldly goals.
Mythology surrounding the life stories of both are also remarkably similar, including royal lineage, angels heralding an auspicious birth, a precocious interest in religion, temptation by the devil, criticism of the priestly establishment, the gathering of disciples and betrayal by one of them. Both were said to perform the same miracles – walking across the Ganges/Sea of Galilee, producing food at a wedding when it was about to run out, helping the crippled walk, the deaf hear and the blind see. There are a number of specific stories common to both traditions – like that of the widow’s mite.
Most importantly, both Jesus and Buddha described our life’s most important purpose in a way which, allowing for the different cultures in which they taught, was identical: personal transcendence is to be achieved through heavenly union in the Kingdom of God on the one hand, and experiencing the blissful state of ultimate reality on the other.
Jesus and Buddha both pointed to the same spiritual objectives, and suggested a very similar set of practices for getting there. Where the two traditions diverge is at the level of belief. Which begs the question: how important is belief, really? Having been a part of both traditions I’ve seen the aberration that occurs when belief takes precedence over practice, the hypocrisy that invariably follows when people use religious ideology to make themselves feel superior.
The bottom line is this: follow a good Christian or a dutiful Buddhist around with a video camera, both acting in accord with what Jesus and Buddha respectively taught, and at the end of the day you won’t be able to tell one from the other. Which is why what you believe really isn’t that important – it’s what you do that counts!
David Michie is the author of "Buddhism for Busy People," a national bestseller in Australia released in June in the U.S. by Snow Lion, as well as "Hurry Up and Meditate," coming this September in the United States.