Since I was a boy I have been inspired by the story of Jesus, and to this day, I still want to know who he really was. I have always felt there is something beyond what we commonly read and hear, and I want to know so that it may stir the devotion necessary to access my own wisdom. I want to know so that I may believe, so that I may trust, and so I may take that leap of faith I need to at least catch a glimpse of a reality beyond the boundaries of my ego.
The following are my reflections.
The Source of His Wisdom: Was he truly the Messiah? The Judaic scriptures prophesied more of a political figure than a spiritual being -- a person who could unite all the tribes of Israel as did King David. Jesus as a teacher and storyteller seems within the tradition of Jewish wisdom, but his message was distanced from Judaism in the struggle to sort orthodoxy from heresy in the early Christian Church. What emerged was a belief that Jesus is God, the Son of God, or a person of the Trinity, and this is simply incompatible with Jewish theology. Thus the Jews deny Jesus as the Messiah and only recognize him as a prophet.
Whether he was the true Messiah, what is most important in my eyes is that Jesus was a fully enlightened being, one of the greatest spiritual leaders ever of humankind. Such an enlightenment almost certainly develops as result of intensive solitary or monastic contemplative practice. There have been many special beings in history who have had flashes of awakening and spiritual insight, but few, if any, ever sustained or deepened their revelation without the support of an underlying discipline. All the true sages, going back to the Buddha, many for whom we have much more complete biographical information, benefited from intensive, extended practice.
This makes me doubt that the prodigal Jesus was content to spend his formative years - his so called lost years -- as a carpenter or that he just suddenly and miraculously became the Christ. The fact that there is hardly a mention of Jesus's lost years anywhere in any of the Christian narrative of his life -- either biblical or apocryphal - speaks to me of its suppression during the formation of the canon. It also makes me suspicious of whether that cover up has not continued in some fashion to this day.
So how did Jesus's wisdom arise, and where did he spend his lost years -- those 13 years from the age of 13-29 never mentioned in the bible?
His Lost Years and Potential Life Post Resurrection: A number of documentaries, most notably one from the BBC entitled, Did Jesus Really Die on the Cross?, popularized a plausible theory that Jesus benefited from time spent in India. Briefly, they tell how Jesus may have:
- Been the reincarnate of an important Buddhist lama 'discovered' by the three Magi,
- Visited and studied in India during his lost years traveling there via the Silk Road,
- Not died on the cross but instead passed out from camphor given to him by a sympathetic Roman soldier, and
- Returned to India upon his 'resurrection' to escape the Romans and live in Srinagar Kashmir where taught until he died at about the age of 120.
Interestingly, in Srinagar there is a Hebrew tomb with foot carvings describing crucifixion for a holy man named Yuz Asaf -- an Arabic version for the name of Jesus. Admittedly, it could be a hoax, but no one is certain.
Although intriguing, this theory alone is not enough.
The Chronological Development of Ancient Religious and Philosophical Thought: The Vedanta (800-300 BCE) originated in northwest India and pre-existed both Buddhism (500 BCE) and Socratic philosophy (400 BCE). The Vedas clearly influenced Buddhism but also may have influenced the Greeks through the many exchanges made possible in trade, war, and migration. The First Persian Empire (550-330 BCE) was pre-Socratic, and extended from Greece to parts of northern India (the birthplace of the Vedas) where it fostered Indo-Greco communities that were probably Buddhist (because Buddhism is non-caste) and a cultural interchange that would continue for 800 years. This mingling intensified through the Persian Wars (500-450 BCE), Alexander the Great's empire (326 BCE), and Indian King Asoka (304-232 BCE) who sent prominent Buddhist monks to Greece and the near East to propagate Buddhism. So by the time of Jesus, Judea was an important crossroad for this exchange and Buddhism was already 500 years old.
Given this chronology, Vedic and Buddhist philosophy may easily have influenced Hellenistic thought, which in turn helped shape the early Christian church, the Gnostics (100 AD), and probably the Essenes. The Essenes are particularly interesting because they were a Jewish mystical sect (200 BCE to 100 AD) emerging in Judea shortly after the arrival of Ashoka's emissaries.
It seems to me then, if not in India, the lost years of Jesus could have been spent in an Essene monastery.
The Similarities in Practices, Rituals, and Teachings: The Hindus, Buddhists, Greeks, Gnostics, Essenes, and apocryphal Christians - all espouse an inner path of wisdom and the truth of unity, or oneness, as the ultimate reality of God. Other similarities include common beliefs in reincarnation, androgyny, and trinities as well as in the use of parables, rosaries, aestheticism, dialectics, and many more.
- The rejection of reality as being solid, and instead all phenomena being "empty, false and fleeting"
- The perception of ultimate reality as only being accessible through non-conceptual and non-verbal awareness
- The importance of maintaining a mental attitude of equanimity and dispassionate outlook in the face of events
With so many similarities, these ancient streams of religious and philosophical thought were either independently discovered universal truths or evolved through mutual influence. The problem with the Universalist view is that in so many other ways these cultures were vastly different.
Combined with the chronology, the similarities seem to lean in favor of the primacy of the East - for thought both East and West - and Jesus was likely exposed to it.
Doubts about His Story As Told in the Bible. It's hard for me to completely believe all of the biblical version of Jesus because only 2 of the 27 books in the New Testament were even possibly written by people who knew him, and many of those were made orthodox primarily to address the social challenges of the time and the political purposes of the church.
New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman (among many others) examined how the early struggles to sort heresy from orthodoxy affected the transmission of its books. He highlights the existence of forged books in the New Testament which were written in the names of the apostles by Christian writers who lived decades later, and how Christian doctrines, or myths, such as the divinity of Jesus and the ascension were simply added later to reinforce the orthodox view.
Perhaps most revealingly, in her book Beyond Belief, Elaine Pagels describes how fourth century Christians needed a creed that would unify and standardize a diverse and wide range of rival groups during the turmoil of early Christendom. She argues that a comparison of the biblical Gospel of John and the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas became the focus for devising what would become the Nicene Creed (named after the Council of Nicea), and eventually the Christian canon. Both books were written at about the same time in the first century, although there is evidence that Thomas came first and John somewhat later as a refutation.
- John taught us to be believers while Thomas taught us to be seekers,
- John taught Jesus was the Son of God, Thomas taught the Son of God is within us,
- John taught us to atone for our sins by accepting Jesus as our savior, Thomas taught the us salvation comes from knowing ourselves
The early fathers of the Catholic Church "found the Gospel of John helped provide a foundation of stability the Church needed, which Thomas with each person's search for God, did not." With the need for order then - John was in and Thomas was out - leaving the early bishops empowered to develop and enforce the Creed.
As a result, a wide range of early Christian teachings, teachers, and literature were banned, ex-communicated, and destroyed at tremendous cost to our ability to understand fully who Jesus really was and what he taught. Worse, the Creed froze into place a dogma that has had little room for challenge until the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts almost two millennia later. Contrast that to the Buddhists who were constantly revising, refining, and refreshing their teachings through dialogue and discourse as a practice to renew and sustain their faith.
The Gospel of Thomas and Other Textual Similarities to Buddhism in the Bible: Elaine Pagels also said "one need only listen to the words of the Gospel of Thomas to hear how it resonates with the Buddhist tradition." As a practitioner of that tradition, I too recognize this to be true, and to me it provides the most powerful evidence that Jesus was influenced by Buddhism.
Although often considered Gnostic because of its inclusion in the Nag Hammadi, this list the sayings is probably not because Thomas likely pre-dates the biblical Gospels and Gnosticism is clearly post-Christian. Thomas also lacks the extravagant mythology of many of the other Gnostic texts.
- One who knows everything else but who does not know himself knows nothing.
- Therefore I say that if one is unified, one will be filled with light, but if one is divided one will be filled with darkness.
- You analyze the appearance of the sky and the Earth, but you don't recognize what is right in front of you, and you don't know the nature of the present moment.
- Split wood, I am there. Lift up a rock, you will find me there.
- If you bring forth what is within you what you bring forth will save you. If you do not rise to it, what you do not have will destroy you.
Add to this the other sayings of Jesus in the bible that are similar to those of the Buddha, and the argument for the influence of Buddhism becomes convincing. These similarities are remarkable given the discrepancies that naturally arise from the different translations they would have undergone. Here are a few:
Jesus: A foolish man who builds his house on sand.
Buddha: Perishable is a city built on sand.
Jesus: Do to others as you would have done to you.
Buddha: Consider others as yourself
Jesus: If any one strikes your cheek, offer the other also
Buddha: If any one gives you a blow ... abandon your desires and utter no evil.
To paraphrase Pagels - imagine then, if Thomas instead of John were aligned with the books of Mathew, Mark and Luke, how the life of Jesus may have taken on a starkly different whole new meaning.
In the end, to me the evidence points in the direction of Jesus being influenced by Buddhism. The only real question in my mind is just how much. He was either directly exposed through his travels or indirectly through the Essenes during his lost years. It's the only way for me to make sense of how his wisdom came to be.