Original sin and Buddhism

What I know about Buddhism would fit on the back of an envelope, with room to spare. I've heard that it is a religion oriented entirely around the elimination of suffering. No doubt I picked this up from long ago reading C.S. Lewis' The Problem of Pain. The Buddha was a rich man who lived a pampered life, and when he finally encountered disease, poverty and death, he was shocked and disillusioned into spending the rest of his life in pursuit of techniques for training the mind and body in ways that would eliminate pain, by detaching oneself from this world that is the cause of pain. It sounds like a religion of escapism, but it's exactly the kind of religion I'd expect people to come up with "on their own," without the benefit of revelation. We either fear the unseen gods, and as pagans do attempt to placate them with elaborate rituals of sacrifice, or (better) we focus on what we see, that this is a world of pain, and we do our best to escape it.

These are the dots I connected in my mind, based on the few bits of information I had. But our understanding of others is always both clear, and incorrect, in inverse proportion to the amount of information that we base it on. So I expected to be found wrong when I picked up Huston Smith's The World's Religions, a nice little book that gives a 100,000 foot view of the world's major religions. Even so, what I found threw me for a loop:

The First Noble Truth [of Buddhism] is that life is dukkha, usually translated 'suffering'....Dukkha, then, names the pain that to some degree colors all finite existence. The word's constructive implications come to light when we discover that it was used in Pali to refer to wheels whose axes were off-center, or bones that had slipped from their sockets...The exact meaning of the First Noble Truth is this: Life (in the condition it has got itself into) is dislocated. Something has gone wrong. It is out of joint. As its pivot is not true, friction (interpersonal conflict) is excessive, movement (creativity) is blocked, and it hurts.

This assessment of affairs is what Christians call "original sin!" It's not just that we're living in a cruel world in which terrible things are constantly happening to us, we're living in a world in which something has gone fundamentally wrong with us. We're not fulfilling our true nature, and it hurts. Paul says it best in Romans 7:15ff:

I do not understand my own behavior; I do not act as I mean to, but I do the things that I hate.
....
so it is not myself acting, but the sin which lives in me.
And really, I know of nothing good living in me -- in my natural self, that is -- for though the will to do what is good is in me, the power to do it is not: the good thing I want to do, I never do; the evil thing which I do not want -- that is what I do.

Every Christian has felt the pain of the situation that Paul so eloquently describes. We know that we can be so much more than we are. We desire with our entire being to do good, and yet we don't. We know that we were destined to be better than we are, and that by doing evil we are constantly acting against our own true nature, but we can't help ourselves.

This worldview doesn't produce an escapist religion, but an aspirational one. Because if there's something about us that's not quite right, if something has gone wrong and it's preventing us from living up to our true potential, then the obvious question is, "How do we fix it?" If I was surprised to find that Buddhism and Christianity agree on the diagnosis, I was even more surprised to find that they offer similar cures:

For the rift to be healed we need to know its cause, and the Second Noble Truth identifies it. The cause of life's dislocation is tanha....Tanha is a specific kind of desire, the desire for private fulfilment. When we are selfless we are free, but that is precisely the difficulty--to maintain that state. Tanha is the force that ruptures it, pulling us back from the freedom of the all to seek fulfilment in our egos, which ooze like secret sores. Tanha consists of all 'those inclinations which tend to continue or increase separateness, the separate existence of the subject of desire; in fact, all forms of selfishness, the essence of which is desire for self at the expense, if necessary, of all other forms of life. Life being one, all that tends to separate one aspect from another must cause suffering to the unit which even unconsciously works against the Law. Our duties to our fellows is to understand them as extensions, other aspects, of ourselves--fellow facets of the same Reality.'

Smith's quote is from Humphreys, Buddhism, p91. Obviously this quote touches on areas where Buddhism is very different than Christianity. I know of nothing in Christianity that parallels Buddhism's idea of "Life being one." Paul's doctrine of the unity of the Church as the Body of Christ may come closest, but that still seems very different. But analyzing differences in religions is much more difficult than finding similarities, especially where Buddhism is involved, which is a religion that tries very hard to avoid dogmas that could be used for comparison, so I won't attempt it.

What does strike me though is that Buddhism posits self-centeredness as the most basic flaw in human nature, as does Christianity, and I imagine, Judaism, and denial of self as the cure. In Luke 9:23ff Jesus says:

'If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross every day and follow me.
Anyone who wants to save his life will lose it; but anyone who loses his life for my sake, will save it.
What benefit is it to anyone to win the whole world and forfeit or lose his very self?

We see this also in the parable of the pearl of great price, in which the merchant sells all that he has to acquire the kingdom of Heaven (Matthew 13). And in the story of the rich man who asked Jesus what he must do to have eternal life, and is told by Jesus, 'If you wish to be perfect, go and sell your possessions and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me' (Matthew 19).

An obvious difference jumps out: the Christian's self-denial is an act of turning toward God, and in particular Jesus Christ, while the Buddhist's self-denial appears to be more of a turning toward his or her fellow creature. The Buddhist appears to have the "You must love your neighbor as yourself" half of the Jewish Law, but not "You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind" (Matthew 22:37ff), much less Jesus' "new commandment" to "Love one another as I have loved you" (John 13:34). This says it well:

Christian enlightenment, based on the gospel, remains irreducibly different from Zen or any other form of Buddhism.

[William Johnston, S.J.,] underscores the radical transcendence of God for Christians, including Christian mystics who use the language of nonduality. The climax of the Christian mystical journey is identifying with the Son and being filled with the Spirit and crying out: "Abba, Father!" At least on the level of expression and religious self-understanding, this is very different from Buddhist perspectives on nonduality, which do not address a transcendent in personal terms.

But again, analyzing differences in religions in difficult, and I know that many Christians have wondered if the Buddhist's nirvana isn't a vision of God of sorts, perhaps as clear a vision as the human mind can perceive without the aid of revelation. For me it's a great surprise, and a great comfort, to know that the Christian and the Buddhist have come to similar conclusions about the state of humanity, and spend the greatest part of their time responding to it in a similar manner: in the attempt to annihilate the self.