Justified True Belief

(●) The prince who left a palace to solve the problem of suffering, and founded the one great religion that offers rescue with no rescuer. + Somewhere in the fifth century before Christ, in the foothills of the Himalaya, a young nobleman looked hard at old age, sickness and death, decided that no amount of comfort could make them bearable, and walked out of his father’s house to find a way past them. He was gone six years. What he came back with was not a god, a temple, or a promise of heaven. It was a diagnosis, a cause, and a course of treatment, and something like half a billion people still follow it. He belongs on a Christian site because he is the most serious rival the gospel has, and the rivalry is not the one most people expect. He does not deny that the world is broken. He says so more bluntly than most Christians dare, and he refuses every comfortable answer with a rigor a reader has to respect. The quarrel is not about whether something is badly wrong. It is about what a person is, what the wrongness is caused by, and whether anyone is coming to help. One fact about him is worth holding on to, because it shapes everything else: he wrote nothing, and neither did his students. Every word attributed to him was memorized, chanted aloud in unison by monks who checked one another line against line, and only committed to writing in Sri Lanka three or four centuries after his death. What survives is an oral tradition of extraordinary discipline, not a manuscript. His dates are genuinely unsettled, and being honest about that costs nothing. Buddhist tradition in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia dates him 623 to 543 BC. Western scholars from about 1900 settled on 563 to 483 BC, a figure still printed in most reference books. Then a symposium at Göttingen in 1988 took the supporting evidence apart, and specialists since have generally placed his death nearer 400 BC, with serious proposals running from 404 to 368. The dates given for his life use that later reckoning, and every one of them is approximate. The intervals between them, twenty-nine years at home, six years searching, forty-five years teaching, eighty years of life, come from the tradition, which is consistent about them even where nothing can check it.

(●) c. 480 BC: Born into the ruling family of a small clan on the edge of the Himalaya, and a holy man, tradition says, told his father the boy would be either an emperor or a monk. + He was born in a grove at Lumbini, in what is now southern Nepal, into the Shakya clan, whose center was the town of Kapilavastu. His personal name, Siddhartha, means something like "he who reaches his goal." Gautama was the family name, and Shakyamuni, "the sage of the Shakyas," came later. His father was Suddhodana. His mother, Maya, died seven days after the birth, and he was raised by her sister Mahapajapati, who turns up again at the end of the story in a way nobody would have predicted. The later texts call Suddhodana a king and his son a prince, and the words have stuck for two and a half thousand years, but the Shakya were probably governed by an assembly of noble families with an elected chief rather than by a throne. Picture a wealthy landowning clan running a hill district, not a court out of the Arabian Nights. The family was rich, locally powerful, and small. There is one piece of hard evidence tying the man to that patch of ground, and it is worth seeing. Around 249 BC Ashoka, the Buddhist emperor who by then ruled most of India, came to Lumbini in person, and the stone pillar he set up is still standing. Its inscription records that he "came himself and worshipped (this spot) because the Buddha Shakyamuni was born here," and that he cut the village’s taxes to mark the visit. That is a state monument raised within a couple of centuries of living memory, and it is why the site is not in dispute even where the dates are. The rest of the birth narrative is tradition and reads like it: a dream of a white elephant, a birth from his mother’s side as she stood holding a branch, seven steps taken at once, and the aged seer Asita weeping because he would not live long enough to hear the boy teach. The tradition says the seer told Suddhodana that his son would be either a world ruler or a homeless holy man, and that the father spent the next thirty years making sure it was the first.

(●) c. 464 BC: He married, fathered a son, and spent his twenties inside grounds arranged so that nothing unpleasant could reach him. + He married in his teens by the traditional account, to a cousin the later texts name Yasodhara; the earliest layer of the canon, the great collection of his remembered teachings that the monks carried by memory, usually calls her simply Rahula’s mother. Their son was named Rahula, a word that can be read as "bond" or "fetter," which either says something about how the father felt or is a joke made later at his expense. One of the rare passages where he describes his own upbringing has him listing it almost with embarrassment. He had three houses, one for the cold season, one for the hot, one for the rains. His father had lotus ponds dug in the grounds, one for red lotuses, one for white, one for blue. A white parasol was carried over him day and night so that neither heat nor cold nor dust nor dew would touch him. He calls it living in refinement, utmost refinement (Anguttara Nikaya 3.38 to 3.39; the numbering varies between editions). The traditional biography adds that the precautions were deliberate, that Suddhodana had heard the prophecy and arranged his son’s world so that age, sickness and death would never come into view. Whether or not a father really did that, the story is a good description of how most people manage the same facts. Not by argument. By keeping them off the property.

(●) c. 451 BC: At about twenty-nine he understood what age and sickness do to a body, and left in the night. + The famous version of this is the story of the four sights, and it comes from the commentaries, the explanatory books written around the canon centuries later, rather than the discourses, the sermons remembered as his own words. Riding out to a park, the young man sees for the first time a decrepit old man, "broken-toothed, gray-haired, crooked and bent of body, leaning on a staff, and trembling," and asks his charioteer what is wrong with him. Told that this is what happens to everyone, he says, "Shame on birth, since to every one that is born old age must come," turns the chariot around, and goes home shaken. On later rides he sees a sick man, a corpse being carried out, and a wandering holy man with a shaved head and a begging bowl, and the fourth sight shows him what to do about the first three. The version in the discourses has no chariot in it and is more unsettling for that. There he says he had been drunk on three things, youth, health, and being alive, in the way a person is drunk without noticing, and that the intoxication left him when it occurred to him that he would age like anyone else, sicken like anyone else, and die like anyone else. Elsewhere he puts the departure itself in a single sentence: while still young, black-haired, in the prime of life, he shaved his head and beard, put on the yellow robe, and went out from home to homelessness. The cost did not fall only on him, and admiring his seriousness is no reason to pretend otherwise. He left a wife and a newborn son, and the later texts do not soften it. They have him look in on the two of them asleep and go without waking either. His own tradition has argued about that night ever since. It is probably the first place a Christian reader feels the ground shift, because the gospel puts the care of a wife and a child inside a man’s vocation rather than outside it (1 Timothy 5:8).

(●) c. 451 to c. 445 BC: Six years of famous teachers and near starvation taught him only what does not work. + He did the sensible thing first and went to the best teachers available. Under Alara Kalama and then Uddaka Ramaputta he learned deep states of meditative absorption, mastered what each man had to give, was invited to stay and help lead, and left both. His reason was that the states were real but wore off, and anything that wears off is not a cure for dying. Then he tried the opposite. With five companions he took up the austerities that were the serious religion of the day: fasting to the edge of death, holding the breath, sitting out the sun and the cold. He describes his own body in that period without a shred of nostalgia, his ribs standing out and his spine countable through his belly. The commentarial life story sums up the whole six years in a line worth keeping. They "were like time spent in endeavoring to tie the air into knots." The end of it is the part people forget. He gave up, ate a proper meal, and the five walked off in disgust, convinced he had gone soft and lost the thread. He was about thirty-five, had left a family, spent six years on two systems, and had nothing to show for either. What came out of that failure is the idea his whole teaching turns on: neither the parasol nor the fast, neither indulgence nor self-torture, but a middle way between them. His own biography is the argument for it.

(●) c. 445 BC: Sitting under a fig tree near Gaya he decided he had found it, and his followers called him the Buddha from then on. + The tree was an assattha, the Indian fig, and the place was a river bank at Uruvela, now Bodh Gaya, where a temple stands and a descendant of that tree still grows. He sat down under it and, by his own account, worked through the night until he understood what he had come out to find: what suffering is, what causes it, that the cause can be ended, and how. "Buddha" is not a name and not a divine title. It is a participle: awakened, the one who woke up. He used it of himself the way a physician uses a diagnosis, and he was consistent to the end that he was a man who had woken while others slept, not a god, not the son of a god, and not anybody’s savior. The tradition surrounds that night with a battle against Mara, the tempter, who sends armies and then his daughters. The discourses keep the drama down and give the reasoning instead. One detail in the earliest account is easy to skip and hard to forget. He nearly did not teach it. The Vinaya, the part of the canon that keeps the order’s rules along with its earliest narratives, has him think that what he has seen will not be easy to understand for people "lost in lust and hatred," and incline instead to stay quiet, until the god Brahma Sahampati appears and pleads with him to speak. Notice what that scene takes for granted. There is a god in it, and the god is a character inside the system, subject to the same wheel and unable to see what a man has just seen. That is exactly the place the gods occupy in his teaching, and exactly why the word "atheist" fits him badly and the word "theist" not at all.

(●) c. 445 to c. 400 BC: For forty-five years he walked the Ganges plain begging his food, and built an order that outlived every kingdom that housed it. + He went first to Benares, to the deer park at Isipatana, now Sarnath, because the five who had walked out on him were living there. That is where he preached the first sermon, and Kondanna, one of the five, was the first to say that he understood. The community which grew from those five is the Sangha, the order of monks and later of nuns, and in one form or another it is among the oldest continuously surviving institutions in the world. The pattern of the next forty-five years was walking and talking: eight or nine months a year on the roads between the towns of the Ganges plain, a bowl carried for one meal a day, and the three months of monsoon spent settled in one place. Kings became patrons, Bimbisara of Magadha and Pasenadi of Kosala among them, and a merchant named Anathapindika bought a park at Savatthi and gave it to the order, so that a great deal of the canon is set at that one address. The teaching went to anyone who would listen: brahmins (the hereditary priestly caste, the religious establishment of the day), farmers, a barber, a courtesan, a highway murderer, a king. Two hard episodes belong in the record. His cousin Devadatta tried to take control of the order, and the Vinaya, the book of the order’s own rules, says he attempted his life and then split the community; the schism failed, but it happened. And when Mahapajapati, the aunt who had raised him, came to ask that women be admitted, the account has her refused three times, following him on foot with her head shaved to ask again, and admitted only when Ananda took up her cause, and then only under rules that placed every nun under the monks. Buddhists have argued about that decision for two and a half millennia, and it is not a small thing to have on the ledger.

(●) c. 400 BC: He died at about eighty in a grove at Kusinara, telling his monks to look for no successor. + The account of the last months is the longest sustained narrative in the canon, and it is unusually plain. He is old. He tells Ananda, his cousin and attendant of twenty-five years, that he is turning eighty and that his body is like a worn-out cart which can only be kept moving with much additional care. He falls ill, recovers, keeps walking. At Pava a smith named Cunda served him a dish the texts call sukara-maddava, a word in Pali, the ancient Indian language the canon is preserved in, which nobody can now translate with confidence: the Victorian translator Rhys Davids rendered it "dried boar’s flesh," and others read it as a kind of truffle. Dysentery followed, "sharp pain came upon him, even unto death," and the text says he bore it without complaint and sent word that Cunda was not to be blamed or to feel remorse. Then he asked to go on to Kusinara, and lay down between two sal trees in a grove there. What he said at the end is the shape of his whole religion in a few lines. He refused to name a successor, telling Ananda that the order was not dependent on him and that the teaching and the rules were to be their teacher once he was gone. He told them to be lamps and refuges to themselves and to look for refuge nowhere else. He invited questions three times, and three times nobody spoke. His last recorded words were an exhortation: "Decay is inherent in all component things! Work out your salvation with diligence!" The body was cremated and the relics divided among eight claimants. Not long after, the tradition says, five hundred monks met at Rajagaha and recited between them everything they had heard, Ananda giving the discourses and Upali the rules. That meeting is where the memorized canon begins.

What He Taught

(T1) Everything a person can hold on to is already coming apart, and the ache that follows is the first fact about human life. + Start with a mug. Somebody gave you a good one, you have drunk from it every morning for four years, and last week the handle went. It is a trivial loss and you noticed it anyway, because the mug was quietly on the list of things that were fine. Now scale that up through a job, a knee, a friendship, a parent, and you have the observation he built everything on. Two words carry it, and both get mistranslated. - Anicca means impermanence: nothing you can point at stays. Not the mug, not the body, not a mood, not a mountain. He held this without exception, which is stronger than the way most people hold it, since most of us grant impermanence in general and quietly exempt whatever we are currently counting on. - Dukkha is usually rendered "suffering," and that is too narrow. The word suggests a wheel sitting off its axle, running out of true. It covers agony, and it also covers the low hum of unsatisfactoriness in a perfectly good day. His list is concrete: birth, aging, illness, death, being stuck with what you hate, being parted from what you love, and not getting what you want. This is a diagnosis, not a mood, and it is important not to file it as pessimism. A doctor who tells you the lump is malignant is not being gloomy. A Christian reader should feel two things at once here. The first is recognition, because Scripture says something very close: the creation "was subjected to futility" and "has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth" (Romans 8:20, 22), and Ecclesiastes gets there in four words. The second is a difference that will matter more and more as his teaching unfolds (T3, T5). Scripture calls the world good and then broken, and traces the ache to a rupture between persons, which is the kind of thing that can be healed. He traces it to the way things are, which is not.

(Q) "Birth is suffering; decay is suffering; illness is suffering; death is suffering. Presence of objects we hate, is suffering; Separation from objects we love, is suffering; not to obtain what we desire, is suffering." + Source: the first sermon, Vinaya Mahavagga I.6.19 (Rhys Davids and Oldenberg translation, Vinaya Texts, Sacred Books of the East XIII). This is the opening of the first thing he is recorded as saying after the awakening, preached in the deer park to the five men who had left him. "Bhikkhus," which the translators keep in Pali, means monks, and the word literally means beggars. The sentence goes on to sum the list up as "the fivefold clinging to existence," his shorthand for the five kinds of thing a person is made of and holds on to (T3).

(T2) The ache has a cause, craving, and a cause can be cut. + Here is where the diagnosis becomes a treatment, and where the four famous truths finish out. The first is that there is suffering. The second names its cause. The third says the cause can be brought to an end. The fourth gives the method. The cause he names is tanha, which the old translators rendered "thirst" and modern ones usually render "craving." It is not the wish for a sandwich when you are hungry. It is the grasping that wants to hold what will not be held, the demand that this moment, this body, this person stay as they are. He pictured a man struck by two arrows: the first arrow is the loss itself, which nobody can prevent, and the second is the craving that the loss should not have happened. On his account the second arrow is the one that does the damage: things pass, and the craving that they should not pass turns passing into misery. The end of craving he calls nirvana, and the word is worth pausing on because it is so widely misused. It means blowing out, as a lamp goes out. He would not describe it as annihilation and would not describe it as heaven, and when pressed he mostly declined the question (T5). It is the fire going out for want of fuel. The method is the eightfold path, which in Rhys Davids’ older English runs: right belief, right aspiration, right speech, right conduct, right means of livelihood, right endeavour, right memory, right meditation. Newer translations give the last two as mindfulness and concentration. The point of the list is that it is a training, in the way that learning an instrument is a training. It is also, he insisted, a middle way: not the parasol he grew up under, and not the fasting that nearly killed him. Christian thought agrees with a good deal of this and parts from it at the prescription. Scripture is severe about disordered desire, and says the same thing about where it leads: desire conceives, gives birth to sin, and sin brings forth death (James 1:14 to 15). But it does not treat wanting as the disease. It treats wanting as aimed at the wrong thing, and the cure is not a fire put out but a fire given proper fuel: "As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God" (Psalm 42:1). Augustine, who had tried the palace route himself, put the difference in one line at the start of the Confessions. The heart is restless until it rests in God. It is not told to stop being restless.

(Q) "This, O Bhikkhus, is the Noble Truth of the Cessation of suffering: (It ceases with) the complete cessation of this thirst." + Source: Vinaya Mahavagga I.6.21 (Rhys Davids and Oldenberg translation, Sacred Books of the East XIII). The parenthesis is the translators’ addition, supplying words the Pali leaves implied. The sentence carries on piling up synonyms, as the oral style does when a point matters: an absence of every passion, an abandoning of the thirst, a doing away with it, a deliverance from it, the destruction of desire. Five ways of saying one thing, for men who would have to hold it in memory.

(T3) There is no self at the center of a person, only a bundle of parts passing through. + A Greek king in second-century BC India, so the story goes, told a monk named Nagasena that he had arrived by chariot. Very well, said Nagasena: is the pole the chariot? No. The axle? No. The wheels, the body, the yoke, the reins, the goad? No, no, no. All of them together? No. Something other than all of them? No. Then, said the monk, "the word chariot is a mere empty sound." The king had not lost his chariot. He had lost the idea that there was one more thing there besides the parts. That is the teaching Buddhists call anatta, not-self, and it is the hardest of them for a Western reader, which is why it is the one most often quietly softened into something friendlier. He is not saying that selfishness is bad, which everyone agrees with. He is saying that when you look for the one who is having the experience, you find only the experience: five heaps of stuff, which the canon lists as body, sensation, perception, mental formations, and consciousness, arising and falling and nothing underneath doing the having. The obvious objection is the one the canon itself raises. If there is no self, who is reborn? His answer is that a causal series continues without an owner, the way one candle lights another and the second flame is neither the first flame nor a different fire. Whether that is coherent has been debated inside Buddhism for two thousand years, and outside it for two hundred. Christian teaching contradicts this at the root, and it is better to say so plainly than to look for a compromise. Scripture treats the person as the very thing God knows, names, calls, and keeps: the days written in a book before one of them existed (Psalm 139:16), and a resurrection in which the one who was sown perishable is raised imperishable (1 Corinthians 15:42 to 44). Christians and Buddhists can share a great deal about desire and death. They cannot both be right about this.

(Q) "Therefore, O Bhikkhus, whatever body has been, will be, and is now, belonging or not belonging to sentient beings, gross or subtle, inferior or superior, distant or near, all that body is not mine, is not me, is not my self." + Source: Vinaya Mahavagga I.6.44 (Rhys Davids and Oldenberg translation, Sacred Books of the East XIII). This is from the second discourse, preached to the same five monks in the same deer park a few days after the first. He begins with the body, saying that if the body were the self a person could simply order it not to fall ill, and then works through sensation, perception, mental formations and consciousness in turn, ending each the same way. The chariot dialogue (T3) comes from the Questions of King Milinda, a later Greco-Indian text of perhaps the first century BC, which is where the illustration was sharpened into its famous form.

(T4) What a person does plants what a person becomes, and the harvest outlasts a single lifetime. + Anyone who has watched a footpath appear across a lawn knows the mechanism. Nobody decided on the path. People took the shortcut, the grass gave up, and after a season there was a road where there had been a garden. That is close to what he meant by karma, a word which simply means action. Two things about it are usually got wrong. It is not fate, since it concerns what you are doing rather than what is being done to you. And it is not a ledger kept by a judge. There is nobody keeping it. Actions leave dispositions in the way footsteps leave a path, and the process is as impersonal as weather. The wheel those actions turn is samsara, the round of birth, death and rebirth, driven by craving and by not seeing things as they are. Notice that his goal is not a good rebirth. A good rebirth is still a rebirth, and every one of them ends in a deathbed. The goal is to get off the wheel. The moral seriousness in this is real and should be granted. On his account nobody gets away with anything, ever, and the powerful man who dies unpunished has not escaped. But look at what the machinery cannot do. An impersonal law can register a debt and it cannot cancel one, because there is no one there to forgive. Scripture’s answer to the same problem is a person who removes the debt himself and puts it out of reach: "As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us" (Psalm 103:12). Forgiveness has to come from somebody, and that is the gap where the gospel does its work.

(Q) "All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage." + Source: Dhammapada 1 (Max Müller translation, Sacred Books of the East X). The Dhammapada is a short anthology of verses inside the canon, the one Buddhist book most readers have actually held, and this is its opening line. The ox-cart image is the whole doctrine in miniature: the wheel is not punishing the ox, and it is not going to stop following it either.

(T5) The questions that do not pull the arrow out are not worth asking, and where the world came from is one of them. + A monk named Malunkyaputta got fed up. He wanted to know whether the world is eternal or not, whether it is finite or infinite, whether soul and body are the same thing, and whether a person who has reached the goal exists after death, and he announced that if he did not get answers he would give up the religious life and go home. The reply is one of the most famous things in the canon, and it is a story about a man with an arrow in him (Q). The friends of the wounded man run for a surgeon, and the wounded man says: not yet, first tell me the caste of the archer, and his name and clan, whether he was tall or short, dark or fair, and what kind of bow he used. He will die, the Buddha says, still asking. Then he lists what he has not explained, ten questions of exactly that kind, and says why: "this profits not, nor has to do with the fundamentals of religion," nor does it lead to the end of suffering. Then he lists what he has explained. Suffering, its origin, its cessation, and the path. Two things need saying about this, and the honest order is the uncomfortable one first. - It is not atheism in the modern sense, and calling him an atheist misses what is actually going on. His world is full of gods, called devas, and one of them talks him into teaching at all. They are long-lived, powerful, pleasant beings, and they are inside the wheel with everyone else, subject to the same law, dying eventually, unable to help. What is missing is not gods. It is a God who is not part of the system, and to whom a person might pray. - That absence is not an oversight but a decision. The questions about the world’s origin and duration were put to him, and he set them aside, on the ground that answering them would not remove the arrow. This is the sharpest point of disagreement, and it is not really a disagreement about God at first. It is a disagreement about which questions are practical. If there is no one outside the system, then he is right, and the arrow is yours to deal with. If there is, then the question about the archer is the most practical question a wounded man can ask, because it opens the possibility of a hand other than his own. Paul, standing in Athens among philosophers who had their own reasons for setting the question aside, made exactly the opposite move: the whole arrangement of history and geography exists so that people "that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us" (Acts 17:27).

(Q) "It is as if, Malunkyaputta, a man had been wounded by an arrow thickly smeared with poison, and his friends and companions, his relatives and kinsfolk, were to procure for him a physician or surgeon; and the sick man were to say, ‘I will not have this arrow taken out until I have learnt whether the man who wounded me belonged to the warrior caste, or to the Brahman caste, or to the agricultural caste, or to the menial caste.’" + Source: Majjhima Nikaya 63 (Henry Clarke Warren translation, Buddhism in Translations, 1896), where the discourse is titled "Questions which tend not to Edification." The list of things the dying man insists on knowing runs longer than this in the original, through the archer’s name and clan, his height, his complexion, his village, and the make of his bow. The comedy is doing the work: at every step the arrow is still in.

(Q) "For hatred does not cease by hatred at any time: hatred ceases by love, this is an old rule." + Source: Dhammapada 5 (Max Müller translation, Sacred Books of the East X). Anyone raised on the Sermon on the Mount hears this and stops, because it is a hair’s breadth from "love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" (Matthew 5:44), and the resemblance is not an accident of translation. Verses like this one are why almost every serious Christian encounter with him has begun in recognition rather than in argument, and why the parting of the ways, when it comes, has to be argued for rather than assumed.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The church knew his name by about the year 200, and later retold his life as a Christian saint’s without knowing whose it was. + Clement of Alexandria, a Christian teacher in Egypt writing around AD 200, went through the philosophies of the nations looking for wisdom outside Greece, and he got as far east as this: "Some, too, of the Indians obey the precepts of Buddha; whom, on account of his extraordinary sanctity, they have raised to divine honours" (Stromata I.15). Two centuries later Jerome, in the middle of an argument about virginity, reported the Indian tradition "that Budda, the founder of their religion, had his birth through the side of a virgin" (Against Jovinianus I.42). Neither man knew much, and both knew he was there. Then comes one of the stranger episodes in the history of religion. A Greek romance called Barlaam and Josaphat, which became one of the most widely read books of the Middle Ages, tells of an Indian prince whose father, warned by a prophecy, raises him where he can never see sickness, age or death. The prince sees them anyway, meets a hermit named Barlaam, becomes a Christian, and renounces his kingdom. The plot is his. So is the name. Josaphat comes from bodhisattva, the title for a Buddha-to-be, worn down through Arabic and Georgian into Greek and then into Latin and every language of Europe. Barlaam and Josaphat were entered in older editions of the Roman Martyrology with a feast on 27 November. For several centuries, without the faintest idea what it was doing, Christian Europe kept the story of the Buddha’s renunciation on its calendar of saints. (The Greek text was long credited to John of Damascus; scholars now assign it to the Georgian monk Euthymios of Athos, working around the year 1000.)

(†) Modern Christian writers have granted him the diagnosis and denied him the cure. + G. K. Chesterton, who is not usually accused of being fair to other religions, is unexpectedly exact about him. In The Everlasting Man he refuses the lazy comparison that lumps founders together, calls the teaching "a metaphysical discipline" and describes its way out precisely, as escape from recurrent sorrow "simply by getting rid of the delusion that is called desire." Then he sets the two teachers side by side in a sentence that does more work than most chapters: "Christ said ‘Seek first the kingdom, and all these things shall be added unto you.’ Buddha said ‘Seek first the kingdom, and then you will need none of these things.’" The recognition has also been made formally. The Second Vatican Council, speaking for the Roman Catholic Church in 1965, said that Buddhism "in its various forms, realizes the radical insufficiency of this changeable world," and laid down that "the Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions" (Nostra Aetate 2). Protestant and Orthodox writers have made the same double movement in their own vocabulary, and the shape of it is always the same. What is granted is a great deal. The world really is not as it should be. Everything really does pass. Comfort really cannot cure it, and a person who has not faced that has not started. Scripture says as much and says it early: creation "was subjected to futility" and "has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now" (Romans 8:20, 22), and Ecclesiastes needs four words for it, "Vanity of vanities! All is vanity" (Ecclesiastes 1:2). A Christian who cannot say those sentences with a straight face has not read his own book. What is denied is the cause and the prescription. He looked at the ache and concluded that the trouble is wanting things in a world where nothing lasts. Scripture looks at the same ache and concludes that the trouble is a broken relation with the one who made the world, that the world is going to be mended rather than escaped, and that the wanting is a homesickness rather than a disease.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: a God who speaks, a self worth saving, one death, and rescue rather than technique. + The honest column of the ledger, at full strength, in five places. - God. He set the questions of origins aside as unhelpful and taught a universe with no one outside it. Scripture opens with someone outside it who speaks, and whose speaking is the whole reason anything is there (Genesis 1:1; Hebrews 1:1 to 2). If that is true, the arrow can be drawn by a hand that is not the wounded man’s own, and setting the question aside was the one mistake that mattered. - The self. Not-self says the person is a process with nothing at the middle of it. Scripture says the person is exactly what God knows, names and keeps, days written in a book before there were any (Psalm 139:16), and the same one who died raised imperishable (1 Corinthians 15:42 to 44). This is the deepest of the disagreements and the least negotiable. - Rebirth. He taught life after life on the wheel, and the goal of getting off it. Scripture answers with one life and an appointment: "it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment" (Hebrews 9:27). - Desire. The path treats craving as the illness and puts the fire out. Scripture treats desire as misaimed and turns it around, and what it promises at the end is not a man who has stopped wanting but a world worth wanting, where God "will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain" (Revelation 21:4). - The teacher. Dying, he told his monks to look for no successor and to take refuge in nobody: "be ye lamps unto yourselves. Be ye a refuge to yourselves. Betake yourselves to no external refuge" (Maha-parinibbana Sutta II.33). Christ said the opposite in the plainest sentence in the New Testament: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6). One of them leaves a prescription and steps out of the way. The other claims to be the medicine. He faced death without flinching and refused every cheap answer, and that is exactly why the comparison has to be made carefully rather than dismissively. The gospel does not say he asked too much of the world. It says he stopped one question short of the answer.