CHRISTIANITY AND BUDDHISM

From their beginnings Buddhism and Christianity reached out beyond the region of their birth. It was inevitable that their paths would cross, but for the first fifteen hundred years these encounters were of little significance to either faith. A brief period of enthusiasm by Christian missionaries for Buddhist teachings followed, only to be extinguished by a posture of confrontation that lasted for nearly four hundred years. It was not until the twentieth century that full and meaningful contact between the two religions developed.

Antiquity

The greatest missionary effort of Buddhism was concentrated between the third century b.c.e. and the eighth century c.e., by the end of which it had reached virtually all of Asia. Buddhist history records no Constantine or Holy Roman Empire to elevate the religion to the stature of a multinational force; Buddhism participated in no colonial exploits such as those that transported Christianity around the globe from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Emblematic figures, such as the Greek king Menander who converted to Buddhism in the second century b.c.e., Emperor AŚoka who established a Buddhist kingdom in third-century b.c.e. India, and Prince ShŌtoku who proclaimed a Buddhist-inspired constitution in seventh-century Japan, were able to secure ascendancy for Buddhism at a local level, but had no imperial designs on neighboring countries, let alone on the West.

The Christian mission was a different story. Already from its earliest years it turned east to establish communities in predominantly Zoroastrian Persia and in India. The Gnostic Christian Mani is said to have traveled from Persia to India in the third century, declaring the Buddha a special messenger of God alongside Moses and Jesus. Despite certain doctrinal coincidences—especially in the case of Gnosticism—speculation concerning the influence of Buddhism on the Essenes, the early Christians, and the gospels is without historical foundation. Indeed, aside from a brief report in the writings of Clement of Alexandria (200 c.e.), based largely on Greek historians, there is no extended record of Buddhist beliefs in Christian literature until the Middle Ages.

During the third and fourth centuries Christianity spread to the major urban centers of Asia, and in the fifth century to China. These small Christian communities barely brushed shoulders with the Buddhist faith, but even this contact came to an end with the outbreak of persecutions in the late Tang dynasty against all foreign religions. From the tenth to the sixteenth centuries, barbarian invasions in Europe and the advance of Islam would erect more formidable barriers between the West and Asia, further limiting the possibility of Buddhist–Christian interaction.

Late Middle Ages and Renaissance

Travelers from Europe in the thirteenth century, such as Giovanni de Piano Carpini and William of Ruysbroeck, were the first to send back to Europe reports of Buddhism as a religion whose scriptures, doctrine, saints, monastic life, meditation practices, and rituals were comparable to those of Christianity. Records of the voyages of Marco Polo from 1274 to 1295 include expressions of admiration for the religion and mention Buddha as a saintly figure lacking only the grace of baptism. During the next fifty years Christian monks like Giovanni de Montecorino (in 1289), Odorico da Pordenone (from 1318 to 1330), and Giovanni Marignolli (from 1338 to 1353) traveled more widely and confirmed the unity of the Buddhist faith around Asia.

Mention should also be made of the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat, a story of uncertain authorship but popularized through an eleventh-century Greek translation. It tells of Josaphat, an Indian prince, converting to Christianity under the guidance of the monk Barlaam. So beloved did the story become that the two saints were eventually accepted into the Roman martyrology. Only around the middle of the nineteenth century was the hoax uncovered: Josaphat was a recasting of the Prince Siddhārtha based on the first-century biography of the Buddha. The saints were not removed from the liturgical calendar, however, until the middle of the twentieth century.

Many of the first Catholic missionaries to arrive in Asia in the sixteenth century sent home idyllic accounts of Buddhism. Among them was Francis Xavier, whose direct contact with Buddhist monks and scholars in Japan from 1549 to 1551 opened the way for successors to study Buddhism in greater depth. Relying on their reports, the French orientalist Guillaume Postel in 1552 ventured to call Buddhism "the greatest religion in the world." Reading his words, missionaries in Goa on the coast of India concluded that the Gospel must have been preached in these lands already, though its truth dimmed over the centuries by the darkness of sin.

This was one side of the picture. When Vasco da Gama and the Portuguese colonizers came to Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, in 1505, they confiscated Buddhist properties across the land, with the full cooperation of the Christian missionaries. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Dutch continued the suppression. Elsewhere, when Matteo Ricci entered China in 1583 he quickly forsook his interest in Buddhism for Confucianism, rejecting the former as an inferior religion and its monks as the dregs of Chinese society. His contemporaries Michele Ruggeri and Alessandro Valignano—as indeed did the majority of missionaries in China for centuries to come—concurred.

In TheravĀda lands, the missionaries were often more positive. In seventeenth-century Thailand a number of French priests actually lived in Buddhist monasteries. The century before, in Burma, several missionaries had written tracts favorable to Buddhism. In Cambodia there are records of a similarly positive approach, though it is Giovanni Maria Leria who is better remembered for his bitter hatred of the religion, rejecting Buddhism as a deliberate wile of the devil to transform all that is beautiful in Christianity. His views were to become the norm that held throughout most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. An exception is Paul Ambrose Bigandet, bishop of Rangoon from 1854 to 1856, who mediated an exchange of letters between the Dalai Lama and Pope Clement XII in which the latter recognized Buddhism as "leading to the happiness of eternal life."

The modern age

It is only with the arrival of Sanskrit studies in Europe in the late eighteenth century and the subsequent availability of Buddhist texts that one can speak of a proper encounter in the West with Buddhism. Esteem for its tenets and practices grew apace, and the end of the century saw the first examples of Westerners converting to Buddhism and even entering the monastic life. Buddhist associations were formed in Germany, England, and later in the United States. Monks accompanying emigrants from several Asian lands to the Americas gave additional strength to the presence of Buddhism in the West.

The World Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in 1893 symbolized the change in attitude that had taken place in the Christian world, though not without opposition from the established churches. These initiatives prompted favorable responses from several quarters of the Buddhist world of Asia.

While all of this was taking place, the continued role of Christianity in the colonizing of Asia was provoking a backlash from Buddhists. In Sri Lanka, now under British rule, Methodist missionaries had begun to study Buddhism in the 1840s as a tool for conversion. In the following decades the Buddhists fought back, supported by European Theosophists who helped them to organize along Western lines. The outbreak of riots, followed by a nationalistic fervor that spilled over into the twentieth century, exacerbated tensions. It was not until the 1960s that steps toward dialogue and cooperation could be made.

Similar confrontations were taking place in Japan. When the country opened its doors to the outside world in 1854 after two hundred years of seclusion, Japan's Buddhist establishment began to fear its own demise and took steps to oppress the Christian missions during the 1890s. Subsequent generations abandoned this approach and began the long journey to a more creative coexistence and dialogue with Christianity.

The world missionary conference at Edinburgh in 1910 was the first public forum in the Christian world to recommend a constructive approach to the religions of Asia. Formal declarations at the Second Vatican Council in Rome (1965) and at the Uppsala assembly of the World Council of Churches (1968) paved the way for more direct rapprochement. Concerted efforts to organize Buddhist–Christian dialogue through worldwide associations and journals began in earnest and reached a groundswell in the 1980s. The Society for Buddhist–Christian Studies, based in the United States and with active membership both in Asia and throughout Europe, lent academic respectability to the dialogue. Christian institutes devoted to dialogue at the scholarly level already existed in several lands of East Asia and in 1981 organized themselves into a network based in Japan and known as Inter-Religio. An exchange of Buddhist and Christian monastics, initiated in 1979, continues in the twenty-first century. Christian theological centers throughout the West, and increasingly in Asia, are deepening their commitment to the encounter with Buddhism, and there are clear signs that the Buddhist world has begun to respond in kind.

See also:Entries on specific countries; Colonialism and Buddhism

Bibliography

de Lubac, Henri. Recontre du bouddhisme et de l'occident. Paris: Éditions Montaigne, 1952.

Thelle, Notto R. Buddhism and Christianity in Japan: From Conflict to Dialogue, 1854–1899. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987.

von Brück, Michael, and Lai, Whalen. Christianity and Buddhism: A Multicultural History of Their Dialogue, tr. Phyllis Jestice. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001.

Zago, Marcello. Buddhismo e cristianesimo in dialogo: Situazione, rapporti, convergenze. Rome: Città Nuova, 1985.

James W. Heisig