Like Hinduism, Buddhism posits the belief in the transmigration of souls but, unlike Hinduism, Buddhism denied spiritual substance to the soul (which in my mind is confusing enough).
Buddhisms belief is more like you are a bundle of energy, no real “core” to your being… it’s not substantialist metaphysics. In fact all of reality is coreless, the Void or Emptiness at the root of everything, “turtles all the way down”. This is not based on logic, but on meditative experience.
Interestingly enough Mahayana believes that human aspirations are supported by divine powers and it includes petitionary prayer. The most interesting figure in Mahayana Buddhism is the ideal of the boddhisattva, a being, who having reached the brink of nirvana, voluntarily renounces the prize and returns to the world to make nirvana available to others. (rings a bit of a bell, I guess).
There are some themes similar to Christianity in Mahayana Buddhism. Particularly the idea of sacrifice, though they don’t legally spell out why sacrifice is better, it’s assume it’s a greater enlightenment in the end to forgo your own enlightenment altogether. It’s sort of like forgetting yourself totally.
Buddhism is more “head” oriented, whereas Christianity is “heart” oriented. The “heart” stuff in Buddhism is more confined to Taoist/Buddhist folk stories, like the Princess Miao Shan, an enlightened being with limitless merits and purity who empties Hell in one folk story, and sacrifices her eyes and hands to her evil father out of compassion to save his life, in her death she is transformed into her true form as a Taoist immortal or Buddhist bodhisattva (depending on who tells the story), and her father repents and becomes religious. Incidentally, she is the “Virgin Mary” figure of East Asian Buddhism, Guanyin or Kannon, sometimes depicted with 1000 arms, which has an esoteric meaning (the many ways that wisdom is manifest as compassionate activity).
“The rough, shorthand way of putting the difference is that the Christian pities men because they are dying, and the Buddhist pities them because they are living. The Christian feels sorry for what damages the life of a man; but the Buddhist is sorry for him because he is alive.” G. K. Chesterton
Yeah, well, I’d say with all respect to Mr. Chesterton, that’s uncharitable until you put yourself in the Buddhist worldview. Buddhism starts off acknowledging that life has alot of pain in it… if not for you, then somebody else. Christianity starts with the Fall, Buddhism starts with “Life is suffering”.
Theravada focused on something more like “annihilation” as Nirvana (which is where Chesterton got his ideas, probably from 19th century British intellectuals studying that as the “true” form of Buddhism at the time), Mahayana focuses on Nirvana as an “ocean of oneness”, an ineffable state of peace/bliss. Perhaps it is a similar idea to the Christian concept of love, there are limitations on human language so it’s impossible to say for sure, since you are talking about an extremely subjective experience. In practice, Mahayana focuses on an “awakened heart”, compassion, being “one” with other peoples suffering (and happiness, too).
The only issue for me with Buddhism… reincarnation. I never found I had a past life, and I honestly in the end didn’t believe in them. I believed in alot of the other stuff, I do believe Buddhists have discovered alot of spiritual truths. Reincarnation, however, tends to make the individual rather irrelevent, since there’s nothing distinctive about a person in the end. Plus, the scientific worldview, I felt, squares better with Christian ideas than Buddhist ones, in the end.
Christ: the Eternal Tao is a good book to read, though it is written from a Christian Orthodox perspective. There are aspects of Eastern religions that are closer to the Orthodox mysticism, Hesychasm, than to Catholic theology. In particular Orthodoxy focuses on apophatic theology alot which is very similar to the Buddhist concept of Emptiness. Hieromonk Damascene draws paralles between the Nameless in Taoism, and similar ideas in Orthodoxy. Another thing I’d compare Mahayana Buddhism to is Kaballah, the Orthodox Jewish theosophy. Many of the ideas are very similar, and both have an energetic metaphysics. Both Kaballah and Orthodoxy have an “enlightenment” of sorts as a goal.
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