Truth Unites - Buddhism: A Christian Response

Episode Date: January 7, 2022

In  this video I offer a Christian response to Buddhism, focusing on the way  each religion responds to the same fundamental human question, but with  a diametrically different answer. Truth Unites is a mixture of apologetics and theology, with an irenic focus. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) serves as senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Ojai. SUPPORT: Become a patron: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites One time donation: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://gavinortlund.com/

Of all the religions in the world, the one that I find the most fascinating and the most instructive to study as a Christian is the religion Buddhism, which I'll never forget discovering this religion in college and just finding it so interesting. This video will not be a comprehensive or thorough treatment. You just can't do that in one video. I just want to highlight some of the main teachings of Buddhism and engage them a little bit, not in a spirit of attack, but more respectful, compare and context. Because I find it really helpful, especially in the modern West, to compare Western ways of thinking with Eastern ways of thinking. It's just really interesting. And also, in particular, Christianity and Buddhism, I think, make a fascinating point of contrast. Because what we're going to see is that they both address this fundamentally, fundamentally the same challenge, this same struggle of human existence, but they come up with diametrically opposite answers. And I find that so interesting. So let me start by sharing the story of the Buddha, which means the enlightened one or the awakened one, the founder of Buddhism, whose name was Siddhartha Gautama. I'll never forget reading his story and just finding it so interesting. Now, he lived in the fourth or fifth centuries in India. There's lots of different traditions about his life. It's tough to say which are exactly true and so forth. So just take this with a grain of salt as one of the traditions that is often told. But it's very very it's a good entry point. So one of the traditions is that his father was a famous king who wanted to shield Siddhartha from all suffering. And so he kept him, he built three huge palaces for him, and he had all his needs met. He was never allowed to see suffering, deformity, sickness, old age. And so, yeah,

he was sort of shielded, you know, from what life is really like. At age 29, he, he runs. off in search of spiritual answers and he discovers all these different forms of suffering in the world. He sees older people and sick people and so forth. And he becomes a monk or an ascetic for six years searching for spiritual answers. He almost dies at one point from starvation. Finally, he sits down under a tree and commits that I'm not going to leave from this tree until I find what I'm looking for. And after 49 days, so this particular tradition goes, he experiences enlightenment, and he begins sharing his message and a huge following, follows from him, and he travels and

preaches and so forth, and Buddhism is begun. The essence of his teaching can be boiled down to what are called the four noble truths, okay? Number one is that life is suffering, and that doesn't mean that there's no happiness of any kind in life. It means that everything in life is characterized by impermanence and therefore suffering. Number two is that the cause of suffering is desire or the sense of grasping or craving, the sense of clinging to what is not. Sometimes it's parsed as an attachment to what is worldly or transient. Number three is that enlightenment, sometimes called nirvana is the cessation of suffering. And this happens when we see the truth,

which is that this craving and this kind of restless desire that we have, that needs to be quenched. That needs to be quieted. And that happens when we see the truth, which is that we are not differentiated from the world around us. One person said, enlightenment is when you can experience all things without having a sense of independence from them.

Now, I'll come back to that point in just a second. The fourth noble truth is the eighth-fold path, which is essentially a list of ethical requirements and teachings, and meditation also plays a significant role in attaining enlightenment. Now, what I want to highlight just for a moment is this really interesting idea that comes up there in the third noble truth, which is the doctrine of anatman, which means no sense. self, okay? And I'll never forget, as a college student, finding this such an interesting

way of responding to the, you know, the fundamental challenges of the world. It's so interesting. But basically, to boil it all down, and I'm not an expert on Buddhism. So this is my, you know, just from my personal study when I was in college and since then, just finding it interesting. So someone could probably nuance this in various ways. But the basic idea is there's no permanent ego or self or soul to a human being. We're simply a stream of consciousness. Like a river is always moving, a candle is always flickering, and so forth with us. There's nothing permanent. And so the Buddha taught that we shouldn't go around saying, I am not a self, any more than we say, I am a self, because he said, trees don't go around saying I am not a self.

He says, so you get this sense of kind of selfhood is an illusion. And we need to to detach from that. And that's how we fundamentally solve this problem of suffering. Now, if you watched my video on existentialism a few weeks back, you might already be thinking, gosh, there actually are some interesting points of resonance here in terms of the problem being addressed. And one of the points of similarity is that Buddhism also has kind of a pull away from metaphysical questions and this radical focus on the human problem of suffering. And there's a famous story that Siddarta tells about a man who shot in the woods by a poison arrow, and he doesn't know who shot him.

And so his friends and relatives take him to a doctor to get the poison out. And the man insists that he wants to know who shot the arrow before we take the poison out. And everyone is saying, that doesn't matter. All that matters is getting the poison out. It doesn't matter who, you know. And he says similarly, when we wonder about the big metaphysical questions, like whether the universe is in. infinite or whether it's eternal and where it came from and things like that.

These are, he calls them questions which tend not to edification. He says, they don't matter. That's not, those things don't, it's like, you know, trying to figure out who shot the arrow. The important thing is to get the poison out. He says, what matters is this endless cycle that we're in of transients and suffering and decay and impermanence and grief and despair. and the cessation of that. Now, what I find so interesting about Buddhism, and it helps me understand my own faith better. Sometimes you can understand something more accurately when you see it in

comparison to an alternative, you know, you set it up against something, you see, oh, that, that helps me understand it more clearly. I understand Christianity better when I study other religions, like Eastern religions, like Buddhism, and I do so in a spirit of respectfulness toward them, but it is interesting to see the contrasts. Now, what they have in common is both Christianity and Buddhism are addressing this same fundamental human dilemma of the longing in the human heart for happiness and permanence, which is inescapable and everybody knows that longing. But the reality in our world of impermanence and suffering,

and this fundamental sense of tension between these two things that arises. So both Christianity and Buddhism are addressing that, but they come up with diametrically opposite answers. So Buddhism cuts the tension by taking away the desire through nirvana, through enlightenment. Christianity takes away the tension by taking away the impediments to the fulfillment of that desire, ultimately through heaven. So it's like you've got nirvana versus the beatific vision. Both of these systems are trying to take away the tension between the sort of longing in the human heart for more than what this world will ever give you.

And one of them is doing so by taking away. It's like one of them takes away the hunger, the other gives you food. It's a way you could put it into a metaphor. So the way that Christianity addresses this is by the doctrine of the incarnation, first and foremost, which is the claim that God became a man. What that means is the permanent and the impermanent have become interwoven and interconnected. So the incarnation, when God became a man, was as significant a turning point as is the first moment of creation. At creation, now for the first time there's something other than God.

at the incarnation, God and the thing that's other than him, creation, now become united in a sense. And then Christianity teaches not just the incarnation, but then the resurrection and ascension, which means that Christ, the God man, was bodily raised and bodily assumed to heaven. What that means is, and I've done some writing about this and Thomas Torrance's views on this, which are so interesting, but essentially to boil it down, what it means is the impermanence of our world has not only been drawn up into permanence, it's been drawn up into the very life of God himself. And the biblical word for this is glory. So Jesus has been glorified.

Jesus' resurrected flesh will be physical flesh for all of eternity. This is why Easter is also one of those fundamental turning points in the history of reality. And so you could think of it like this. Those claims, this is where I think to kind of ultimately address this contrast between Christianity and Buddhism, we have to go back to the Buddha's claim about metaphysical questions tending not toward edification. That itself is a metaphysical claim and not an easy one to verify. The claims of Christianity, of incarnation and resurrection are here. historical claims that could be either true or false, but they can't be questions that tend not to

edification. They can't be irrelevant to the question of suffering. To turn the metaphor of Buddha, you might say it turns out to be the case that the arrow and the poison, the only way to get the poison out is to figure out who shot the arrow. In other words, the metaphysical questions are ultimately the necessary questions to answer to address the question of suffering. So whether, you again, those historical claims could be true or false, but they can't be irrelevant to human suffering. Now, again, what I find so helpful in engaging a religion like Buddhism is it just helps me think through my own faith more clearly, and in particular, it helps me understand the boldness of the claims of the gospel. As I was thinking about this again this morning, kind of coming back to it,

what came to my mind is this, that of all the things that make Christianity different from other philosophies, worldviews, and religions. One of them is this, it takes human happiness so seriously. It takes human desire so seriously, and by extension, human beings so seriously. And you see that when you see these two things in comparison. I start off my whole apologetics book with this quote from Hansers von Balthasar, the great Roman Catholic theologian who said, the first thing that must strike a non-Christian about the Christian's faith is that it obviously presumes too much. It's far too good to be true. And you can understand how he would say that. I believe that that if you really see what Christianity is claiming, and then you compare that to various alternatives

that are out there, you see one of the points of difference is, I mean, you just think, oh gosh, you must be dreaming, you know, that that's like infinitely happy that claim, which of course is what the word gospel means, good news or happy news. So let me conclude. here by kind of putting this in a sort of Pascalian wager, you know, we'll ask the question of what if, you know, what are the implications if each of these turns out to be true? And we'll just consider what if the gospel is true? What if there is a satisfaction of the human longing for joy that is attainable? That the longing we have for that is not an illusion. It's not something that needs to be quenched. Rather, it's a clue. It's a little voice whispering

of what we once had in Eden, like Lewis and Tolkien call it the echoes of Eden, and what can be regained through the gospel of Christ. What if that? Well, if that's true, then the attempt to remove ourselves of the illusion of selfhood and the cessation of desire, all of that turns out to be very tragic. It's like somebody who overcomes their hunger, and they don't realize that a feast is being prepared for them right next door. And so it's like, you know, in other words, it's the cessation of a desire that could be fulfilled. And the sadness and tragedy of that makes me think of the character Frost in my favorite novel by C.S. Lewis called That Hidious Strength.

He has a different philosophy in many respects, but he shares this belief that there's no permanent soul to human beings. Well, at the end of his life, and I won't tell you how he's dying or what's happening, but he comes to realize he's wrong. And Lewis writes, Not till then did his controllers allow him to suspect that death itself might not, after all, cure the illusion of being a soul. Nay, might prove the entry into a world where that illusion raged infinite and unchecked.

Escape for the soul, if not for the body, was offered him. He became able to know, and simultaneously refused the knowledge, that he had been wrong from the beginning, that souls and personal responsibility existed, he half saw, he wholly hated. And then we can ask, okay, what if the gospel is true, and you do obtain that, that what theologians call the beatific vision, the sight of God in heaven, this infinite happiness that theologians speak of as the joy of heaven.

If you want to understand that more, my favorite theological text, and what I wrote my dissertation on is by a medieval theologian called Anselm, and the whole point of this book called the proslogion is it climaxes in this vision of joy. It's so amazing. I can't possibly summarize it all. But one of the things he talks about is how the joy of heaven for redeemed human beings and angels has this paradox to it, that it's both infinite and ever-increasing. So at the moment of the entry into heaven, there's an infinite, it's not just a lot of joy, it's infinite joy because you possess God. and yet somehow paradoxically not only is it infinite it's ever increasing as well at the same time never ever ever to stop for all eternity if you really start to grasp what christianity is claiming again it's that feeling of oh golly that's too good to be true you know you've got something of the gospel if you

think wow could it really be that good that happy so think of it like this and i'll close with this and this is how i sum up my whole book um if the gospel is true then and the resurrection of Christ is true, then what that means is, first of all, our deepest sadnesses in our life will be transformed into glory. Somehow, in a way we cannot fathom, the pain and suffering of this life won't be merely canceled out. It will actually accomplish something glorious and good and happy for all eternity. Second of all, the happiest things in our life are not over forever once they're done, but they'll return to us in some deeper form in heaven. And I talk about this with reference to the passage in the Lord of the Rings where Sam says,

does this mean that everything sad is going to come on true? And I put a thought experiment to the reader, and I'll put it to you here to close this video. So as a thought experiment, think back on the happiest moment of your life. Perhaps an idyllic childhood memory when the world was safe and calm. Perhaps being truly known by another person and for the first time loved rather than rejected. perhaps the attainment of a dream or reconciliation with a friend or a simple moment of contentment out in nature. Happiness often sneaks in during quiet moments like that. Now imagine, for the sake of supposal, that you knew in your deepest heart of hearts that you would have that feeling of happiness

back permanently, that in fact it was only ever an anticipation or foreshadowing of that final, settled happiness that you will experience forever with ever-increasing awareness and enjoyment. In other words, imagine that your happiest moments are not gone from you once they are over. Instead, they will return to you in some deeper, yet all-familiar form. What all of this does for me is it helps me appreciate the stakes of the gospel. Seeing the happiness of the gospel doesn't prove automatically that you should believe in it or that it's true, but it just helps us appreciate how much is at stake, you know? So I'll conclude by mentioning kind of two examples in my own life of when I've experienced this deep longing for heaven that all of us, I'm guessing even though I feel that I cannot possibly describe it adequately in this video, that people watching this video know something of what I'm talking about because it's part of a human desire, right?

This is what all the religions and all the philosophies of the world are wrestling with. We long for something beyond what this world has to give us. it's just an inevitable fact that we try to escape it in the modern west with all our busyness and technology and entertainment but it's just a fact that this life is filled with suffering and it will end it's not going to go on forever and we all wonder well what does that mean right so two times in my life i felt this incredible overpowering longing for something more once i remember when i was in my 20s and i discovered the city of princeton new jersey and I had this strong academic drive back then.

I was doing my master's degree. I wanted to do a PhD. And I just remember studying about Princeton and something about Princeton. Again, this longing for heaven often comes in somewhat randomly and you can't explain why. But something about Princeton, New Jersey. And I visited it several times since this happened. I think I just was seeing a picture on Google Maps of Princeton in the snow, the campus of Princeton in the snow. Something about Princeton and just the history of that place, the intellectuals.

richness of that place. It's such a beautiful town. And in the sense of adventure, the sense of learning, the sense of intellectual discovery. You know, it's in there in the Northeast. I was living in the Midwest. I was really intrigued by the Northeast. It's right equidistant between New York and Philadelphia. A really cool city. Something about that. I just remember this longing in my heart to study, to go on an adventure, to learn, to, you know, to go for it, to do everything I can, to learn, to the best of my ability. Now, of course, I know if I were to go to Princeton, that wouldn't satisfy that desire. That's the great riddle of this life, you know.

It's never about the thing. It's always something beyond. Another time happened more recently. I currently have COVID. I'm just getting over it. It hasn't been severe in its symptoms, but we've been quarantined, my whole family. We have four kids. Of course, everybody gets it, so we're all together.

And one of the things I've been doing to pass the time is watching episodes of Whose Line is in any way on your own. YouTube, because I love that show, the improv. They're so good. I've always been a big fan of that. Something not only about the humor of it, but about their friendship. You can tell they're comfortable with each other. And I, for some reason, got into it and I was learning. And then, so from watching the show, that led me to interviews with the actors. And I was learning more about these various guys, and they're so talented. And I was learning about Wayne Brady, who's one of the guys on the show, I admire because he's so talented. And, you know, you just give him any type of music and any topic.

and instantly he'll make up songs about it. It's unbelievable. But I was reading about how he did an interview where he was sharing about when he was auditioning for the show and when he finally got the news that he was. And for some reason, it just made me imagine what would that be like, you know, to audition for that show and make it. And now he's had so much success. And I was thinking about that with the other actors on the show as well. And I was thinking, imagine the flood of happiness that would be. And that's my challenge to you watching this video.

Whatever it is for you, it's probably something. something different than my random, and I have other things in my life too that have tapped into this desire. What is it that makes you long the most when you're walking at night and you hear the wind rustling through the leaves of trees? What is it that stirs up in your heart that you desire and long for the most in all this world? We will never get that fully in this life. That's the great paradox of being a human being. You know, the Bible says God put eternity in our hearts, but we're never going to get that in this life. And the claim of the gospel, whether it's true or not, it's just good to understand the magnitude of the claim. The claim of the gospel is that's not an

illusion, that desire, that you will one day, you know, all the bad things in your life and and all the good things are perfectly running together ultimately to lead you to an experience that you will have when you stand before the Lord God in heaven, if you know Jesus Christ. And the flood of infinite joy that you will experience when all the bad of your life is transformed to glory and all the good of your life catches up with you and returns to you and then from there you never go down but it always ever infinitely increases up swelling up into more and more and more and more joy because you have God and God is infinite and God is the most interesting thing you can ever think about if you think about wow oh yeah that would be an infinite never-ending joy to have God

So that's what the gospel claims. Whether it's true or not, it's pretty powerful to see the magnitude of the claim. And it helps me understand the magnitude of the claim when I consider it in relation to alternatives, even the ones I respect like Buddhism. So that's my sharing about that from some of a personal angle, but maybe someone else out there can relate to that. Hey, thanks for watching this video. Hope this was of interest to you.

I do videos once a week on apologetics and theology coming from an ironic focus. I do a lot of ecumenical stuff, but I'm going to be, while not stopping that, putting a little more emphasis on apologetics over the next few months. And I have some dialogues and other things coming up that I'll share more about in future weeks as well. So I'm really excited to share all that. Thanks for watching again. Let me know what you think in the comments. God bless.