Comparison of Buddhism and Christianity
[4][5][6] The central iconic imagery of the two traditions underscore the difference in their belief structure, when the death of Gautama Buddha at an old age is contrasted with the image of the crucifixion of Jesus as a willing sacrifice for the atonement for the sins of humanity.
[7][8] Most modern scholarship has rejected the claims for the travels of Jesus to India or Tibet or influences between the teachings of Christianity and Buddhism as not historical,[9]: 303 and has seen the attempts at parallel symbolism as cases of parallelomania which exaggerate the importance of trifling resemblances.
Rhys Davids wrote that the earliest missionaries to Tibet observed that similarities have been seen since the first known contact: "Lamaism with its shaven priests, its bells and rosaries, its images and holy water, its popes and bishops, its abbots and monks of many grades, its processions and feast days, its confessional and purgatory, and its worship of the double Virgin, so strongly resembles Romanism that the first Catholic missionaries thought it must be an imitation by the devil of the religion of Christ.
To support this claim the author quotes the admittedly prejudicial speech of Max Muller from his India, What Can it Teach Us, which states: "Our natural inclination would be to suppose that the Buddhist stories borrowed from our Christian sources and not vice versa.
[15] Late in the 20th century, historian Jerry H. Bentley also wrote of similarities and stated that it is possible "that Buddhism influenced the early development of Christianity" and suggested "attention to many parallels concerning the births, lives, doctrines, and deaths of the Buddha and Jesus".
Guanyin is the Chinese name for a male bodhisattva in India and Tibet, Avalokitesvara, who underwent a gradual feminization process in China late in the first millennium CE, after a period of proselytization by Turkic Nestorian Christians.
[22] The Tzu-Chi Foundation, a Taiwanese Buddhist organization, also noticing the similarity, commissioned a portrait of Guan Yin and a baby that resembles the typical Madonna and Child painting.
[23] Jonathan Silk emphasizes the miraculous and god-like behaviors and words of the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, in his young years, an infant proclaiming he will attain a cease to suffering, and that he knows all spiritual knowledge there is to reach this goal.
Silk explicitly states the paradox: “The infant, upon his birth, knows everything; the young man he becomes knows nothing”,[24] and spends the rest of the article attempting to persuade readers, specifically those who are Buddhist believers, to embark on this journey of attaining nirvana and facing the stark realities of life, just like the Buddha did.
"[5] However, the notion of theistic creation is generally foreign to Buddhist thought, and the question of the existence of God is perhaps one of the most fundamental barriers between the teachings of Christianity and Buddhism.
[3] The depiction of the harsh crucifixion of Jesus as a willing sacrifice for the atonement for the sins of humanity is central to Christian iconography, and is totally different from the peaceful death of an eighty-year-old Gautama Buddha lying between two trees as he accepts final Nirvana.
