Jesus Under the Bodhi Tree

An Interview with Marcus Borg
By Kristen Fairchild

Jesus and Buddha: The Parallel Sayings uncovers the shared wisdom of two of the greatest spiritual teachers of all time by placing quotations from their teachings side by side to illuminate their similarities. Let's start by talking about the historical parallels between the lives of Jesus and Buddha.

One of the big similarities is that both Jesus and Buddha, around age 30, have a dramatic religious experience that transforms them and launches them into their public lives as teachers and ultimately founders of religious traditions -- even though I do not see either one of them as seeking to found a religious tradition. For the Buddha, [this transformation] comes in the form of an enlightenment experience under the Bodhi Tree which is clearly a mystical experience of some kind. And for Jesus, it is his relationship with John the Baptizer who, according to authors of the New Testament, seems to have functioned essentially as the spiritual mentor of Jesus. Jesus undergoes what William James might have referred to as a "conversion experience" at age 30 -- not conversion from Judaism to something else -- but a conversion within a tradition where religious energies become the very center of your life. According to the Gospels, Jesus has a vision at his baptism which is a paranormal experience certainly and then goes on this wilderness quest which is a classic example of a vision quest or quest for enlightenment. Both Jesus and Buddha have transforming spiritual experiences that they each sought after. And ofcourse, the other huge parallel is that both Jesus and Buddha become teachers of an enlightenment wisdom.

One of the more stunning parallels between the two is their similar birth stories.

Yes. At the level of how the developing traditions speak of their lives, both Jesus and Buddha have supernatural births. Most of us in the Western world are familiar with the story of Jesus' birth. In the case of the Buddha, it is left ambiguous (I think) as to whether we are to think of his birth as a divine conception because his mother is a married woman and clearly not a virgin. But the tradition intimates that the Buddha is born of a special conception and he comes forth from the womb already walking and talking and so forth. And in both of the stories of Jesus and Buddha, wise men come to acknowledge the birth of the enlightened one or the one who will be the light of the world. Moving beyond the birth stories, both Buddha and Jesus share similar stories of walking on water. And something like a Christology develops arounds the Buddha although Buddhists would never use a world like Christology.

What do you mean?

After the Buddha's death (about 100 years or more), the Buddhist tradition begins to speak about a "Cosmic Buddha" of whom Guatama, the historical Buddha, is the incarnation. And ultimately, the tradition begins to speak of something that sounds very much like the Trinity. But the basic connection is that the Buddha is spoken of as the incarnation of an eternal, divine reality just as Jesus is the incarnation of the word and so forth. So both traditions develop a similar way of speaking of the founder in the centuries after their death.

You say that both Buddha and Jesus were teachers of a wisdom but neither wanted to found a religion.

The Buddha saw himself as seeking the renewal of Hinduism. I suppose you could speak of him as establishing a "renewal movement" in Hinduism. And Jesus similarly saw himself as seeking to do something within Judaism and we commonly speak of Jesus as establishing a renewal movement within Judaism but the word "establishing" is a bit too strong. He sees himself as seeking to transform his own religious tradition and similarly the Buddha saw himself as seeking to transform his own religious tradition. And in the case of both of them, in a number of decades after their deaths, the movements they had each established become organized religions which neither one of them, I believe, originally intended.

What evidence is there that Jesus was exposed to Buddhism or may have travelled to India?

I don't think the evidence is very good. I don't know the dates of these sources but there are written sources in India that claim Jesus came to visit India. And my impression is that those sources are no earlier than roughly the year 1000 A.D. But these traditions seem quite late and probably reflect the acquaintance with the Christian tradition in India. It seems to me that the kind of similarities between Jesus and Buddha we find do not look like cultural borrowing -- that is, they do not look like direct contact because the similarities in the teachings are not word for word quotations or even close paraphrases. They are similarities at the level of underlying insight or vision on the process of spiritual transformation.

One of the major parallels you bring out between Jesus and Buddha is found in their ethical teachings.

At the level of ethical teaching, both Jesus and Buddha share the same doctrine. For example, "Do to others as you would have them do to you" from Luke 6:31 is very similar to Buddha's teaching in the phrase "Consider others as yourself" from Dhammapada 10:1. The centrality of compassion is also a similarity in their teachings. Compassion is the central quality of a Bodhisatva, a Buddhist saint or an enlightened one in the Buddhist tradition. And I also see compassion as utterly central in Jesus' teachings.

Both Jesus and Buddha espouse compassion but do they have different routes to it? In Buddhism, we are instructed that compassion is antecedent to clear thinking. Through meditation, our filters are dismantled, we can see clearly and compassion flows. Is there a similar instruction in Christianity?

At a very generalized level, I think the route to compassion is similar. I think Jesus sees compassion as the fruit of a life centered in God. In other words, the way that you become compassionate is by becoming centered in God or to use language from St. Paul which makes the same point: "Compassion is the primary fruit of the spirit." The internal transformation (within the human being) produces compassion. This is also what the Buddha is teaching - namely, that the way to becoming a compassionate being is through the Eight Fold Path. Where I see them as different is that the Buddha systematizes his teaching in The Four Noble Truths - the Fourth Noble Truth being the Eight Fold Path. It's very important when considering this difference in Jesus and Buddha to realize that the public activity of Jesus may have lasted only a year and at the most, maybe three or four years. In contrast, the Buddha taught for roughly 50 years after his enlightenment. Now, if Jesus had lived 50 years after his transformative experience at age 30, would he have systematized his teachings? Would he have provided really specific directions for how to practice his teachings? Would Jesus have come up with the functional equivalent of the Eight Fold Path in Christianity?

And that is where my confusion is! I feel like in Buddhism we have clear instructions on how to love, how to find compassion through the Four Noble Truths and the Eight Fold Path. But in Christianity, we are told to "turn the other cheek" but we're not told how. We're instructed to "love your neighbor as yourself" but we're not told how which I find confounding!

Yes. And I think it's especially confounding because in Christianity over the last few centuries the emphasis has come to be so much on believing. And that is because central Christian doctrinal claims have become very problematic since the Enlightenment. And a lot of Christians believe that what is most central to Christianity is believing Christianity to be true. But you can believe and it will have no transforming effect on your life at all! There is no intrinsic connection between believing this stuff and any internal change in your life. In fact, in some people, believing this stuff can simply contribute to their own sense of superiority, righteousness and differentiation.

You say that Jesus and Buddha were not teaching us what to believe -- that rather, they were each teaching us a path to transformation.

Yes. In the Buddha's teachings, you get real specific directions on how to follow the path. In Jesus' teachings, you get primarily metaphors describing what the path is about. And the metaphors are metaphors like: "Those who exalt themselves shall be humbled and those who humble themselves shall be exalted." And it's real important to realize that humbling meant "emptying." In other words, those who empty themselves will be filled.

This idea of self-emptying is also an essential teaching of the Kabbalah.

Yes. And it also utterly central to Zen Buddhism. And I think that same contrast between exalting and self-emptying is meant by the Jesus' teaching: "The first shall be last and the last shall be first." When Jesus speaks of humbling oneself, he is instructing us to let go of status, possessions, religious rectitude as a basis of identity which is very similar to the Buddhist idea of letting go of attachments and ego.

You make a connection between the Buddhist idea of "letting go" and the Christian idea of "dying."

Yes. The way this connection is most commonly seen in the New Testament is dying to the world as the center of one's identity and security - that is, dying to the self as the center of one's preoccupation. In modern language, I guess that could be expressed as dying to one's ego identity in so far as ego identity is a social construct. And one of the reason's I find dying such an interesting metaphor for the internal spiritual path is when you think of what's involved in physical dying, as in a terminal illness, it requires a letting go quite literally of one's future, one's past and ultimately of one's present. So dying becomes a wonderful metaphor for letting go of oneself and letting go of the world.

It seems that many contemporary Christians are more concerned about the literal death and resurrection of Christ rather than its metaphor for spiritual transformation within oneself.

I think shortly after Christianity became the dominant religion of the West, it became primarily a religion of the afterlife and I think that's because of its accommodation to culture. I think before Christianity became the predominant religion of the West, I don't know that it was centrally about an afterlife. I think early Christians believed in an afterlife but I think they were much more in touch with being Christian as a spiritual path and being part of an alternative community that saw things very differently than how dominant culture saw things.

It seems that many contemporary Christians are more concerned about the literal death and resurrection of Christ rather than its metaphor for spiritual transformation within oneself.

In other words, early Christians saw their religion as a practice, more like Buddhism, rather than a theology.

Yes. And once Christianity became the dominant religion, it had to take on the function of reinforcing the superego. Historically, across cultures, one of the primary functions of religion was to reinforce the superego - that is, the voice of predominant culture. And religions throughout history have said that internal voice of right and wrong is the voice of God. The way the voice of God is given sanction is by saying that if you take the voice of God seriously, you will have a blessed hereafter. If you ignore the voice of God, you will be punished beyond death, whether in purgatory or eternally. When Christianity was simply a minority religion within the Roman Empire, it didn't have to worry about reinforcing the superego. But when it became the dominant religion it became primarily a religion of the afterlife and about preserving yourself forever rather than letting go of yourself so you might be reborn. I think that popular versions of Christianity, and I say this as a deeply committed Christian, have been religious forms of eternal self-preservation. And this connects with the modern Christian preoccupation with the literal resurrection of Christ. I don't know if people care so much about the literal corpse of Jesus coming back to life but they get that tied up with, "Will I live forever?"

Why didn't this same problem with superego happen in Buddhism?

One might make the case that Buddhism does this in a different way with its teaching about Karma. Karma reinforces superego function.

What would you say is the single biggest difference between Jesus and Buddha as spiritual teachers?

Jesus was a social prophet and Buddha was not. I see Jesus not only as wisdom teacher but as a God-intoxicated voice of religious social protest. Buddha's teaching is really very individualistic. There is a community emphasis in Buddhism but it is the community of the Dharma. [Buddhism] is not about how to transform society but how to, amidst a world like this, become an enlightened person. Buddhism is very strong on personal ethics. Jesus as a peasant would have experienced poverty all around him but the Buddha, growing up in a privileged social class, may not have had that first-hand experience of injustice that could arouse a passion for justice. Buddha's enlightenment came in part from becoming aware of how much suffering there is in this world. And his basic strategy is to try to find a way to escape this world of suffering rather than, as in Jesus' teachings, to find a way to transform the structures that produce suffering in the world. I want to be clear here that I have no interest in making a case for which one is better, Jesus or Buddha! I am simply stating what I see as a fundamental difference between them.

You pose quite a deep question at the end of your introduction to this book: Were Jesus and Buddha, both spiritual masters, inspired by one cosmic source? What is your answer to that question?

My answer would be yes. I see all the major religious traditions as being responses to the experience of the sacred in the cultures in which those experiences occur. I am convinced that they are responding to the same "sacred." Some scholars would say that our language and our cultural conditioning shapes our experience so much that there isn't a single experience of the sacred. And I understand what they mean. Obviously, culture shapes our experience. Christians hardly ever, if ever, have visions of Krishna and Hindus really don't have visions of Jesus. But I'm convinced that the sacred is and can be experienced and that Jesus and Buddha were both responding to the same cosmic source.

Marcus Borg is a "leading figure among the new generation of Jesus scholars," according to The New York Times. He is the author of Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time and The God We Never Knew

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