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Jesus was a Buddhist Monk BBC Documentary
DaltheJigsaw
Mountain View Veteran
in Philosophy
Thoughts? I have no clue. But interesting?
2
Comments
One of the testimonies re: "Jesus in the East" is said to come from supposed texts in Hemis monastery in Ladakh. The first person to report on these texts was a Russian explorer named Nicholas Notovich. He published a book about his supposed findings, with a translation of these Tibetan texts. HOWEVER, it turns out that after the Notovich book was published, a British scholar visited the same monastery, and asked the head lama about Notovich's claims. The lama repudiated Notovich's report, and said he'd never met Notovich. He got angry and asked how it's possible that someone could publish false stories in a book.
An American was poised (she says) to have the tomb in Kashmir opened, to get some DNA samples from the bones inside. As she was about to do this, 9/11 happened, and local Muslims in the neighborhood of the tomb took control of the tomb. Access to the contents has been denied ever since. The government of India, however, has become interested in the tomb as a potential tourist attraction. It wants to open it and try to determine whose remains are in there. Although that part of Kashmir is technically under India's authority, the neighborhood where the tomb is, is still controlled by radical Muslims, so India doesn't dare try anything for the time being.
It would make sense if Jesus went to Kashmir, especially since there was a Jewish community there, and Thomas established a ministry in India. There's endless debate and analysis as to whether he survived the ordeal on the cross, especially the spear wound inflicted by a Roman soldier. In the end, we won't know for sure until/unless the remains in the Kashmir tomb are DNA tested, and at least show Jewish heritage. If his mother Mary's remains are still accessible (said to be located in the same general region in Kashmir) and a match could be made, that might prove something. But it doesn't look likely that this will pan out, given the problems with the Notovich report, even if the political problems in the region resolved at some point.
But yeah, it seems that the Notovich book was a hoax, and then there have been others since then who have said they went to Hemis monastery and saw the same books. So the story seems to have acquired its own momentum, and some people have wanted to perpetuate it.
Jesus-Reach salvation through a God (like any other theistic religion)
Buddha-Reach salvation for yourself by eliminating your own delusions and conquer your suffering.
What's the connection? Nothing.
Reaching salvation through God is not an anti-Buddhist idea if we interpret 'salvation' and 'God' in a Buddhist way. We would reach it by becoming God. And the way would be the way of Jesus.
We can never know for sure. Perhaps Jesus was a deliberately created myth or archetype, as has been argued cogently by Freke and Gandy. Regardless, it is at least possible to interpret the NT as being bang in line with the Buddha's message. Forgiveness, compassion, salvation, contemplation, leaving ones family to seek redemption, overcoming death, it's all there. The four noble truths and the eightfold path are a conceptualisation and technique unique to Buddhism, sure, but they are consistent with the general message. Jesus did not have forty years to organise his message, nor have an inexhaustable supply of skilled monks already well-educated and already on the path.
Thus the Mystical Theology, which reeks of Buddhist ideas and concepts, can be considered a Christian text. Ditto the Philokalia and the Nag Hammadi library.
I'd expect that all true prophets and sages would discover the same truth, since it wouldn't be possible to discover a different truth. But interpretation would be everything. It is perfectly possible to interpret Jesus and Buddha as being at loggerheads, but why would we? To me it would suggest a misinterpretation of one or both, or at best an unnecessary interpretation.
I'm curious about your comment that Jesus "certainly must have known about Buddhism, which would have been a well known religion". Do you have some basis for that?
We are ultimately speaking about the ineffable, where all concepts and ideas must be eventually dropped, and then the open expanse of being or enlargement of the heart is revealed and experienced in its purity.
However, Buddhism and Christianity obviously don't share the same cultural, mythological, and religious roots, so these are where the differences occur between them and they very much influence the "how" of their respective paths, so there are unmistakable fundamental differences despite some of the shared commonality between the paths.
I don't doubt that there has been cross-pollination between the traditions throughout history. I know the Buddha has been made a saint of the Church through the adaptation of his life story and I don't have a problem with that. I wholly embrace it and for me this speaks volumes to Christianity's universalism despite the contrary negative ideas of others.
Also, the desert fathers, and their teachings, have always been very much an integral part of the Church and are the very roots of her monastic tradition that she could not exist without. In fact, the oldest active monasteries in the world such as St Anthony's and St Catherine’s are Christian and not Buddhist.
These holy fathers were in the desert practicing in their caves long before Buddhism arrived in Tibet for example, and there is even some speculation now that their contemplative teachings and practices were transmitted centuries ago there and have influenced aspects of Tibetan Buddhism.
I very much agree that one must work out their own salvation, but we can't very well do that when we are focused on the short comings of others, especially in traditions not our own, and we don't recognize that we are all struggling with the very same weaknesses.
Perhaps someday I can rightly call myself a Christian, but for now I have this huge thing stuck in my eye.
btw, thanks to Leon for putting up this topic. The discussion has taken a very interesting turn. Just goes to show that re-running old topics can be very fruitful. :thumbsup:
Yet, we take sides, cast stones, and feel proud that we have in our posession the one true god, the one true faith, the one true teaching. Hmmm. When can we accept the core of all these teachings? The core that has human beings connected to the source as the primary way for knowing itself?
Maybe I am romanticizing the past.... or, more accurately, the "perceived past". But every time we draw a line from one thing to another, how can we still say these things aren't rooted in something much more base and fundamental? How many thousands of years has humanity been learning its purpose? How many years has this been lost? And how many years have we been trying to recollect that basic foundation?
We are all on the same journey. Opening yourself up to this journey is where you will find what you seek. And what you may find is connections that go back 13.6 billion years, or more. And all the while, we have this "hunch" that were are connected to something, nay everything. Well, perhaps its not a hunch. Perhaps its just us, remembering what we are.
Jump on in, Jesus the Buddha. The primordial waters are just fine.
But otherwise, I like your premise.
But otherwise, I like your premise."
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Fossils consitent with having been under the sea for hundreds of thousands of years have been found in the interior of N America. These fossils did not walk there. Every bit of dry land has once been under water. 90%+ of ancient settlements were located on coastlines at a time when the sea level was much lower than it is today.
These settlements/regions may not have been consumed by a giant flood that happened in 40 days/nights, but WATER and its impermanent nature has certainly had major effects on the civilization. The ancient Indian city of Dwarka is one such city, and is said to be 20,000+ years old, now lying under water. There may not have been universal "deluge", but every region of the globe has had a "localized" disaster from the force of water, at some point, and our era has had one most recently in this millenia in the SouthEast Asian Tsunami. And almost every single world culture has some type of a "flood epic" that they credit as having tremendous impact on their ancestors and on their culture. If it didnt happen everywhere, it sure stuck to the allegorical game of "whisper down the lane" that we have been playing ever since our old religion was washed out.---> Pun intended.
Sorry, OP- I know this was a little off topic, but i figured it was worth highlighting, since Jesus is commonly symbolised by a fish----> he did come from the waters, right? Splash, splash, splash!
Even today, with all our accountability and cross checking, we can still manage to misconsrtrue teachings of our own era, yet this hostorical "positivism" says that we are the best civilization and all the knowledge we now posess, we can not lose. Hah! Laughable! If we keep puttng all our eggs in the same basket, we will learn the hard way, again, that the bottom of the basket always falls out, eventually.
The effects were dramatic:
"During deglaciation, the melted ice-water returned to the oceans, causing sea level to rise. This process can cause sudden shifts in coastlines and hydration systems resulting in newly submerged lands, emerging lands, collapsed ice dams resulting in salination of lakes, new ice dams creating vast areas of freshwater, and a general alteration in regional weather patterns on a large but temporary scale. This type of chaotic pattern of rapidly changing land, ice, saltwater and freshwater has been proposed as the likely model for the Baltic and Scandinavian regions, as well as much of central North America at the end of the last glacial maximum, with the present-day coastlines only being achieved in the last few millennia of prehistory. Also, the effect of elevation on Scandinavia submerged a vast continental plain that had existed under much of what is now the North Sea, connecting the British Isles to Continental Europe." wikipedia
Doubtless these events would have been preserved from generation to generation (hard to forget really.)
So I'm quite aware of the changes in the world due to the end of the Ice Age and when those events (both long-term and catastrophic) occurred. One of the best examples of a catastrophic flood as a result of the Ice Ages was the Bonneville Flood in what is today the Pacific Northwest...probably the second largest known flood in earth history. But it occurred about 14,500 year ago.
The problem with your proposition is that while the Ice Ages ended roughly 10,000 years ago, any kind of truly organized religion appeared quite a bit later. Of course, it depends on what you call religion. It is true that Neanderthals and other Hominid groups appeared to bury their dead in an organized way as long ago as 223,000 years ago. But there is absolutely no recorded religion dating back that far. Proto-Indo-European religions -- I assume the religions and traditions you are talking about -- date back -- at the earliest -- about 5,500 years ago. If you want to talk about the Biblical Flood (Noah's), and you want to take work done by Archbishop Ussher (widely discredited), that would have occurred about 2348 years ago, thus having nothing to do with the Ice Age, even if it did occur.
To be honest, I think you're grasping at straws to make a connection that just isn't there...although with any premise, one can find someone to substantiate almost anything.
Carry on with your regularly scheduled programming. I just enjoy those things that make us connect with so much history in the world.
In fact the first instances of recorded 'ritual' activity that suggest some sense of the the sacred developed in hunter gatherers some 50,000 years ago and there is consistent evidence of ritual worship from tens of thousands of years before the end of the last Ice Age.
At the time of the ending of the last Ice Age there is plenty of evidence of mortuary activity with good (shells, ochre, mammoth bones etc) being deposited with the dead and the cave painting so well known from prehistory had been going for many of thousands of years.
But you don't need evidence of religion 'organised' or otherwise to postulate that a sea rise of over 110 metres in the Northern hemisphere would have been a shatteringly important event for these communities, destroying huge areas of their hunting grounds and that such events could easily be carried down through hunter gatherer 'memes' for many generations and be recorded in the earliest religious writings of a host of different communities.
You see my point?
But the BBC documentary would have been implausible if Buddhism had not been known in that part of the world at the time. Freke and Gandy offer an explanation of why Jesus' life so closely mirrors that of previous archetypes, Dionysius, Krishna, Mithra, etc.
@vinlyn - I cannot vouch for this essay, but it seems to cover the ground.
http://www.thezensite.com/non_Zen/Was_Jesus_Buddhist.html
I also disagree that burial ceremonies necessarily means there was an advanced religion with fables that could be connected to the Great Flood...and again, do you have some evidence of the date of Great Flood pushed way back to more than 10,000 years ago. At least that's not what I have found in reading about the fabled event.
But I caution again -- how many scholars would agree with the premise of this thread -- specifically that Jesus was a Buddhist monk?
The Church existed a few centuries before the New Testament was compiled. It was written by the Church, the believing community, for the Church and is a part of her tradition. The notion that it is distinct from this community as a source for Divine guidance and belief is not traditional Christianity.
Though the New Testament is a central part of her tradition it does not contain all there is to know about the faith or how to understand it in fullness. It is the other parts of Church tradition which also have been passed down through the ages that give it life and meaning.
How is the mystery of the Holy Eucharist celebrated anyway? The details certainly are not in provided in the New Testament but the basis for that tradition certainly is.
St Paul admonishes in 2 Thessalonians 2:15 “Therefore, brethren, stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle."
So yes, there is more to understanding what Jesus accomplished and taught than by the bible alone.
See, by every account Jesus was a devout Jew. His actions were those you'd expect of a devout if unorthodox Jew and his teaching fits into the Messiah tradition of the Jewish faith. There simply is no reason to postulate he was a secret Buddhist.
Also, there's no record of or reason to believe the little backwater kingdom of Israel had ever hear of India or Buddhism, and schooling consisted of studying the Torah unless you were upper class and had private tutors. It would take some very strong evidence to overcome these points.
Florian's a nice guy, but I get the sense that he wants this -- that Jesus was Buddhist monk -- to be true. So he sees a source or two that speculates on it, but he ignores that probably (and this is just a guess) 99% of the scholars of Jewish/Christian history would disagree. Are outlier theories ever correct? Yes. Are they often correct? No.
And I say this as a person who would like there to be connections, since I have one foot in Christianity and one foot in Buddhism.
So now shall we postulate that Buddha was an ancient astronaut? See, that's where these speculative journeys into flights of fancy can go.
I've explained why I don't agree you. You've explained why you don't agree with me.
Nobody wins.
Sorry.
That way - we ALL win!
(Don't be sorry - I enjoyed myself)
It's sort of like out here in the American West...and I suppose all over the North American continent...virtually every Native American peoples have some landmark they consider the center of the universe. I've visited at least half a dozen myself. So just because that belief has been passed down for hundreds or even thousands of years doesn't mean that particular landmark is the center of the universe. In fact, none of them are. None of them are where that NA tribe came up out of the earth. So, in reality, it's just a nice fable.
Artifacts in a sea bed don't necessarily indicate a catastrophic flood (in fact, catastrophic floods are the exception, not the rule). A slow encroachment of the sea would, over hundreds or thousands of years, cover artifacts left behind by a culture. But the vast majority of these sites were not suddenly inundated.
I was in Thailand at the time of the tsunami, although luckily I had canceled a trip down to Phuket. That kind of tsunami is not unheard of, but it is still the exception. If you have some direct evidence that a peoples fables are the Great Flood, and that there is evidence that such an event actually took place, I'm open to hearing it. So far, what I feel I'm hearing are lots of suppositions. And of course, anything is possible. And I don't see how the discussion at this point is proving that Jesus was a Buddhist monk. As I said earlier, maybe Buddha was an early Christian.
Sure -we have gone a bit off topic and it is all supposition, as you say.
Glad to hear you weren't in Phuket - that was fortunate.
Tell you what though - our discussion has made me consider how much of our 'hunter-gatherer' mind is still with us. You know how readily we love to sit round fires outdoors - that's a habit we have learned over many millenia I am sure.
Buddhist ideas of consciouness as a life-stream spanning many lifetimes would suggest that some of us would have spent previous lives as hunter-gatherers.
Hmmm... you have set me off now but this belongs on another thread.
Anyway - good posting dude - we shall speak again!
Ideas did flow with the caravans along the Silk Road. We have no idea what any kingdom, backwater or not, was exposed to by travelers and caravan drivers. I've also read there were Buddhist monks or teachers in Alexandria during Jesus' time, and lots of people visited there from Judea. Including possibly Jesus during the so-called lost years, even if he didn't go to India.
I don't think it's implausible that Buddhism would have been heard of, and that Buddhist ideas might have been circulating. We have no way of knowing for sure, either way.