Board index ‹ Buddhism

[Admiral]

Who is more wiser Jesus or Buddha?

When it comes to wisdom which one is better, if I wish to learn more about life and attain knowledge that will fuel my growth then which route should I take?

[jimwalton]

Jesus and Buddha were both wise. I think a more appropriate question is which one was right? Jesus and Buddha have different worldviews and come to different conclusions. While both of them had many wise things to say, you have to evaluate which of them spoke more to reality and spiritual truth.

Since I'm a Christian, I think that Jesus will fuel your growth more than Buddha. I find Buddhism ultimately inadequate in its answers to the most profound questions of life.

I read this recently in D.T. Niles, Buddhism and the Claims of Christ:

"The Buddha saw that life was meaningless in itself and set out to rescue men from this meaninglessness. Jesus, on the other hand, saw that life could become meaningful in God and set out to call men to share that meaning. Your fundamental choice, therefore, is this: whether you would live life free from meaninglessness only or full of meaning. This is a fateful choice and an inevitable one.

"I know that this difference in terms of meaning that I have pointed out between Buddhism and Christianity can be denied. For few Buddhists do in actual practice live as those who merely seek freedom from meaninglessness; they live, rather, as meaningfully as they can. Besides, the doctrine of the eightfold path itself lends support to this positive attitude. Yet the fact remains that the Buddha does treat death as life’s appropriate adjective, while for Jesus it is not death but life that characterizes life.

"Do I mean to say, then, that the life of the Buddha too was lived in terms of meaninglessness? No, for the Buddha dedicated his life to rescuing men from the despair and disillusion into which contemporary Hindu religion had led them. His was a protest against the cheap optimism engendered by the belief in the cosmic soul, against the fruitless salvation promised by the practices of formal religion, against the irresponsible freedom sought along the way of ascetic renunciation.

"But no protest, however profound, can be turned into a religion; a religion demands primarily something to profess and live by rather than something to protest about and live against. For when the self has done protesting, it inevitably comes to its rude awakening under the challenge of life for responsible living. … Adequate religion means that it shows us the deepest level on which to meet life’s challenge—the level of reality, of life’s inner structure, of life’s true base. It is in the exposition of this level that the fundamental differences of the various religions lie, and it is about this that they have their different dogmas."

[Admiral]

This answer was wonderfully written, thank you for this

I'm glad I took the time out of my day to read this.