How Does A Christian Converse With A Buddhist?

Attraction to Eastern spirituality, and particularly Buddhism, is powerful because the human spirit craves spiritual answers. Buddhism best lends itself to today’s postmodern mindset because it provides spiritually without God and presents ethics without an objective moral lawgiver.

To Gautama Buddha, the principal reality of life is suffering. The matter is inescapable. It was to seek an answer to suffering, in fact, that he left all of his comforts and in his enlightened consciousness saw the way to break its stranglehold. Part of the human predicament, he decided, is our attachment to things and to relationships. Having these attachments keeps us vulnerable to pain and suffering when we lose them. The answer he found, therefore, was to extinguish hungers and to detach self from desires (namely, relationships). When people relinquish desires, we lose attachments. We then can attain the state of nirvana where consciousness is absorbed into the impersonal Absolute. Where personal attachments no longer exist. That is the Buddhist’s hope. That is why Gautama Buddha left his family, even his newborn son.

But Buddhism’s attraction provides no real answers. The self—which is undeniable and inescapable—is lost in Buddhist philosophy, which brushes away the legitimate hungers of the soul. Jesus told us to hunger and thirst after righteousness. Ironically, even the Dalai Lama “hungers” for the liberation of Tibet. It is not possible to live and not desire. But there is more. In Buddhism the other “selves” are also dissolved into a lost identity. There is no other to whom we can go, not even a self to whom we can speak. Yet Buddhism’s denial of a personal God is unable to prevent its practitioners seeking to relate to and worship a personal being. There is a universal hunger that drives the self to a transcendent personal other of one’s making. That is why the reverence before idols, forms of ancestral worship, the tendency even to animism, and all the offerings in spirit houses as expressions of Buddhist worship are seen. Often, doctrine and practice are totally disconnected. Practices across generations replace historic teachings of the Buddha.

The gospel message that changes human hungers and offers forgiveness while affirming the distinctive value of every life is so splendidly unique! In Buddhism, the community subsumes the individual. In the Christian faith, the individual brings uniqueness to the community of faith.

Buddha considered one’s present life to be payment for previous lives; thus, each rebirth is due to karmic indebtedness, but without the carryover of the person. In contrast, Christianity sees the individual self as distinctive and existing past death. God’s love is personal. Jesus brought God’s offer of true forgiveness and eternal life while affirming each individual as uniquely created in God’s image. (Buddha left his son in pursuit of personal enlightenment.) God sent his Son to bring us into fellowship with our heavenly Father. For Jesus, suffering is only symptomatic of the life unhinged from right relationship with God. We have broken away from God, from our fellow humans, and even from ourselves.

In contrast to karma—where “sin” is nothing more than ignorance or illusion—Christ’s suffering for our sins and his offer of forgiveness can provide true appeal for the Buddhist. The gospel proclaims that we have come apart from within, and to this brokenness Jesus brings the real answer. In one’s finding true relationship with God, all other relationships are given moral worth. God, who is distinct and distant, came close so that we who are sinful and weak may be forgiven and made strong in communion with God himself without losing our identities.

That simple act of communion from a forgiven life encapsulates life’s purpose. The individual retains his or her individuality while dwelling in community. Everyone who has surrendered all at the feet of Jesus can confess with the apostle Paul, “I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that he is able to guard what has been entrusted to me until that day” (2Tm 1:12). Jesus Christ guards all our purposes, loves, attachments, and affections when we entrust them to him. In many ways, Buddhism is an attractive philosophy. But that’s all that it is—a philosophy. The Christian message is a relationship and worship. One should affirm the Buddhist’s desire to live an ethical life. But the truth is that Jesus Christ gives us what an ethical life alone cannot provide.