In the epilogue to Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment, Deepak Chopra says that Buddha’s teaching was a thunderbolt: “Buddhism caused an earthquake in the spiritual life of India.” Chopra adds, “Buddha wasn’t just a kindly teacher who wanted people to find peace. He was a radical surgeon who examined them and said, ‘No wonder you feel sick. All this unreal stuff has filled you up and now we have to get rid of it.’” Thus, while the religion of Buddhism can be perceived as an evolutionary outgrowth of Hinduism, the figure of Buddha represents a revolution against it. Similarly, Christianity can be characterized as evolving from Judaism even as Christ represents a radical reaction to it.
But what is the actual difference between the two Eastern religions? Hinduism and Buddhism share enlightenment as the ultimate goal of a human life and indeed of all human lives. Both religions agree that human suffering is the province of the ego and thus that destruction of the ego is the essential pre-condition for enlightenment. Lastly, they share the belief that overcoming attachment to other people, material things and the world in general is the key to smashing the ego.
It is at this point that they differ. Hinduism is full of gods—Shiva, Vishnu, Brahma, Krishna and Kala the Mother Goddess, just to name a few—who are all aspects of the one God. God has many faces, like the facets of a diamond, and human beings can sometimes perceive some of the facets without ever being permitted to see the Ultimate Reality, the Supreme Being, or the “Godhead” of Christian theology that is, in effect, the Diamond itself. Hinduism is full of devotion to God, and each Hindu master, in an endless cycle of masters across the generations, teaches devotion to his circle of devotees.
Buddhism, on the other hand, also has masters and followers, but it either teaches that there is only one God or that there is no God at all. Buddhism is not simply atheism, but it is not theism either. Buddhism is fundamentally the cult of Reality, whatever Reality happens to be (and Reality bares very little resemblance to what appears as reality to our five senses.) It is devotion to the ultimate freedom from illusion, and in this sense it resembles Western Deism or the notion of “Deus ex machina,” the idea that an impersonal and non-interfering Supreme Being working behind the scenes simply sets the world in motion and leaves it to be. The philosophers of the Enlightenment, including Voltaire in France and Franklin and Jefferson in America, believed in wordly freedom, just as Buddha believed in the Ultimate Freedom.
When we compare the transition of Hinduism into Buddhism to that of Judaism into Christianity, the odd thing is that the processes are in reverse to each other. Buddhism is an extreme simplification of Hinduism, in which the multiple and multifarious Hindu gods are reduced to the one God or the zero God of Buddhism. By contrast, Christianity might be seen as an amplification of Judaism, in which the monotheistic God-the-Father or Yahweh is replaced by the mysteriously more complex Trinity: God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit simultaneously. I would go further and argue that Catholic Christianity as it is actually practiced in most of the world as opposed to how its theology is formally taught, is a Quadrivium in which the Virgin Mary is the fourth “Person” of God. She closely resembles the Hindu Mother Goddess Kala. Either way, Christianity takes the single God of Judaism and transforms Him into several facets of a diamond whose Whole form can never be seen by the eyes of mortal man. This is the reverse of the transition from Hinduism into Buddhism because it represents the evolution of a simpler idea into a more complex one.
Christ is as revolutionary to Judaism as Buddha is to Hinduism. Christ is mysteriously and at the same time both the Son of God and the Son of Man: He is God-and-Man, or man redeemed to his original position in the Garden of Eden before the Fall. Buddha, on the other hand, represents a stripping away of all the aspects of the Hindu gods until nothing but Reality is left. If Buddhism has any God at all, He is the God that existed before Creation and the God that will exist after Creation is finished and nulled. What He is not is God the Creator, God the Father, God the Son. He is not the Son of God and He is not the Son of Man. Because we ordinary human beings are limited by our intoxication with maya, we can never truly perceive God. Still, if God exists (and with all my Western heart I believe He does,) He must in an even more mysterious way be all the facets of an infinite Diamond and none of them at one and the same time.
Bird of Spirit 