If we were to name the most important religious figures of the Western and Eastern world, they would be Jesus Christ for the West and Siddhartha Gautama, also known as the Buddha, for the East. In this article, we’re going to contrast how Gautama and Jesus reacted when facing the troubles of the world. We will start at the beginning of their lives, putting their reactions to suffering in context of how they grew up, a context which will turn out to be especially formative for the Buddha’s reaction.
Gautama’s Early Years
Gautama was born in privilege. We are told in the Introduction to the Jataka[1] that the future Buddha was a god in the Tusita heaven who, right before he was born, was able to pinpoint the perfect
- Time – when the lifespan was around a hundred years
- Continent – in India where Buddhas are born
- Country – in the “Middle Country” where Buddhas are born
- Family – the warrior caste as this caste was at the time “higher in public estimation”
- Parents – “king Suddhodana shall be my father. . . . The mother of a Buddha . . . has fulfilled the perfections . . . and has kept the five precepts unbroken from the day of her birth. Now this queen Maha-Maya is such a one; and she shall be my mother.”
Thus, Queen Maha-Maya dreamt that after circling her three times, a “superb white elephant” entered her womb. When she recounted her dream to the king, the king summoned 64 wise Brahmans and told them what had occurred. They prophesied that the queen would have a son who could choose between two possible paths: If he continued in the householder path, he would become a “Universal Monarch,” but, if he were to renounce such a life, he would become a Buddha “and roll back the clouds of sin and folly of this world.”
“If he continued in the householder path, he would become a ‘Universal Monarch,’ but, if he were to renounce such a life, he would become a Buddha.”
When he was conceived, we are told that “the ten thousand worlds suddenly quaked,” and all manner of wonders broke out. The blind, deaf, dumb, hunchbacked, and lame were cured. People became kind, weather became lovely, and diseases became benign. Even the fires in the hells were blown out. When it came time for the birth, the Future Buddha emerged spotlessly clean. The infant looked around, surveyed the landscape in all ten directions, and upon seeing no equal, exclaimed, “This is the best direction.” He walked seven steps and shouted, “The chief am I in all the world.” The point conveyed is not to be missed: Gautama was privileged in every way even prior to his conception and was clearly no ordinary child.
Gautama Encounters Suffering
Now, the king naturally desired his son to continue the lineage and so fulfill the prophecy’s alternative of glorious kingship. This explains why the king kept his son from seeing a suffering world outside the palace. On the prince’s first chariot ride outside the palace, the king made sure that the route was cleared of anything that would get his son thinking about suffering, death, and spiritual matters.
This is why Gautama as a young adult had to ask his charioteer what old age, sickness, and death were, as he saw them for the first time on a ride around the city. It also explains why, after returning after each ride, the king interrogated the charioteer: “What then did he see on his drive?” After all, the king reasoned, “We must not have Gotama declining to rule. We must not have him going forth from the house into the homeless state. We must not let what the Brahman soothsayers spoke of come true.” So the king would continue to indulge his son with all imaginable pleasures, in the hopes that Gautama would continue enjoying himself and not stop long enough to consider any futility in his current path.[2]
“The king would continue to indulge his son with all imaginable pleasures, in the hopes that Gautama would continue enjoying himself and not stop long enough to consider any futility in his current path.”
Yet the gods had intervened to where Gautama ended up seeing the very images the king wanted to prevent. He saw a sick person, an old person, a dead person, and a monk. These images of sickness, old age, and death stuck in his mind: “Am I too subject to old age . . . to fall ill . . . to death?” And, as it would turn out, the worst possible image the king could have imagined would lodge itself most stubbornly in Gautama’s thinking: “And he saw, as he was driving to the park, a shaven-headed man, a recluse, wearing the yellow robe.”
And where thoughts of sickness, old age, and death could have filled him with despair, Gautama realized that there was hope in renunciation. It is only those who are “intoxicated with youth . . . health . . . life” who would be “horrified, humiliated, and disgusted” to behold them.
According to his own account long after he had renounced the householder path, Gautama would reflect, “Monks, I lived in refinement, utmost refinement, total refinement. . . . I had three palaces.” Yet when he came to realize that he too was subject to old age, sickness, and death, all the intoxications of youth, health, and life “entirely dropped away.” After all, he had seen true serenity in the monk who had “gone forth” into the “peaceful life.”
He came to discover that, just as there was nothing but futility in all the “sensuous pleasures” that had surrounded him, there was no reason to panic at the inevitability of losing them. Thus, though initially disconcerting, the sight of sickness, old age, and disease were, after much reflection, no reason for sadness whatsoever.
Jesus’ Early Years
Jesus, however, was not privileged to be born into a family of wealth. Levitical law dictates that, after bearing a son, the mother would bring the priest a lamb to be sacrificed. However, if she was too poor to afford a lamb, she could bring a pair of turtledoves or pigeons (Leviticus 12:8), and it is this lesser offering that Jesus’ earthly parents, Mary and Joseph, brought to the temple (Luke 2:22-24).
There are few superlatives regarding the family. Joseph was not a king but a carpenter (Mark 6:3). Jesus’ birth narratives blend sublimity—angels’ announcements (Luke 2:14) and wise men’s gifts (Matt. 2:1-2)—with humility, as the newborn is laid in a feeding trough (Luke 2:12) and visited by shepherds (Luke 2:16). Reminiscent of “treasure in jars of clay” (2 Corinthians 4:7, ESV), the “fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (Colossians 1:19, ESV) in an embryo implanted by the Holy Spirit into an unassuming virgin confused why God would pick her (Luke 1:34).
Mary marveled at her reversal of fortunes: “he has looked on the humble estate of his servant. For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed . . . he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty” (Luke 1:48, 53, ESV).
“There are few superlatives regarding the family.”
Thus, although Jesus would eventually renounce carpentry for ministry, it cannot be said that he renounced great wealth in doing so. Like Gautama, however, he became an itinerant teacher, to a certain extent “going forth into homelessness.” When someone eagerly asked to follow him, Jesus answered, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” (Luke 9:58, NIV). As the Buddha and his sangha (community of monks) were supported largely by laypeople’s alms, Jesus and his band of disciples likewise had benefactors, such as the list of women in Luke 8:2-3 (ESV) who “provided for them out of their means.”
Jesus Encounters Suffering
Gautama grew up in a polarity where lavish wealth only temporarily masked the encroaching horrors of old age, sickness, and death. He was able to accept these horrors as inevitabilities as he detached from those pleasures which had diverted his contemplation. Gautama’s reaction against an upbringing of craving the impermanent and dreading the inevitable was to detach into an enlightened equanimity.
What in Jesus’ growing up years makes sense of his reaction to these chronic horrors?
First, let us discuss what Jesus’ reaction was. Now, it will help to note upfront that Jesus healed the sick and raised the dead. So, whatever his reaction, he had the power to make things right. Yet, notice his reaction to the death of a friend whom he was about to raise from the dead. “When Jesus saw [the deceased man’s sister] weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled” (John 11:33, ESV). Then, upon approaching the tomb, “Jesus wept” (John 11:35, ESV).
The implication is confirmed in 1 Corinthians 15, where Paul celebrates the certainty of Jesus’ resurrection, and thus of our own future resurrection. Amidst the triumph, Paul writes soberly, “The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26, ESV). Similarly, the implication of Jesus’ tears at his friend’s tomb is that, in the meantime, death is an enemy.
“The implication of Jesus’ tears at his friend’s tomb is that, in the meantime, death is an enemy.”
Raising the dead and healing the sick, Jesus spread joy, and, contemplating death, Jesus grieved. What Jesus did not exemplify in the face of humanity’s greatest sufferings was equanimity. In fact, even contemplating his own death—the very reason he came in the first place (Mark 10:45)—was unmet by tranquility. Agonizing in the garden, Jesus “began to be sorrowful and troubled,” pleading with his Father to “let this cup pass from me” (Matthew 26:37, 39, ESV). “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death,” he said (Matthew 26:38, ESV).
There was a deep sadness Jesus felt in his ministry toward all things that reminded him of the ancient curse (Genesis 3). This is why “when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it,” because Jerusalem had not recognized its visitation from the Son of God (Luke 19:41, 44, ESV). This is why, when the synagogue leaders valued Sabbath traditions over the restoration of a man’s withered hand, Jesus “looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart” (Mark 3:5, ESV).
Where Does Jesus’ Sadness Come From?
So, where did this deep sadness come from? If it is difficult to connect it to Jesus’ upbringing, as is appropriate for Gautama, perhaps we should look further back in the past. In the Gospel of John, Jesus is referred to as the “Word.” The beginning of John’s Gospel tells us, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” and that “All things were made through him” (John 1:1, 3, ESV). We are told that “by [Jesus] all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible” (Colossians 1:16).
It is Jesus’ preexistence as Creator that makes sense of his grief at what had become of his creation. True, if existence were bookended with endless cycles of impermanence, as Gautama believed, then it would make perfect sense to approach the highs and lows with equanimity, if only for one’s own internal well-being. Yet those aren’t the bookends which Christianity teaches. Jesus believed himself to bracket any impermanence with the splendor of his and his Father’s eternality: “And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed” (John 17:5, ESV). Since “In the beginning God created” (Genesis 1:1, ESV) and God said his creation was “very good” (Genesis 1:31), then old age, sickness, and death were not the world as they had been intended. And, in the meantime, disease and death grieved Jesus.
Accepting Suffering VS Grieving It
Thus, we arrive at a contrast between these two founders as it relates to their abilities to combat this-worldly suffering. Gautama accepted suffering with equanimity, while Jesus grieved it as an unwelcome enemy. Now, this does not mean that Christianity sees no good coming from suffering. Indeed, the Bible provides many examples of suffering’s benefits. Yet suffering’s benefits are set in the context of a world under a curse in which “death reign[s]” (Romans 5:14) and “all die” (1 Corinthians 15:22). This cursedness is what Jesus grieved, and so Jesus did the kinds of things we would expect if the Creator were to write himself into his fallen creation. He grieved sickness and so healed the sick. He grieved death and so raised the dead.
Gautama, on the other hand, is known for welcoming thousands into the serenity he had found in the midst of suffering. Yet even radically changing one’s perspective toward death, which is only a mental escape, is not a par with defeating death itself so that the person is restored. When it came to broader social change, Buddhism scholar Mudagamuwe Maithrimurthi writes,
“The Buddha was almost always depicted as hesitant and reserved when he was asked to comment on events like war and other social concerns. In the rare cases where he is seen as discussing such problems he is rather concerned about the psychological, moral and salvific relevance of the problem for each and every individual, rarely about what we call today a social problem.”[3]
“Gautama accepted suffering with equanimity, while Jesus grieved it as an unwelcome enemy.”
Zen teacher David Loy adds, “According to the Pali Canon, the Buddha was consulted by kings and gave them advice, yet apparently he did not castigate or challenge them. Nor did the sangha do so after he died.”[4] It seems that even what Gautama could have done to actually combat suffering outside the mind, equanimity prevented him from doing.
[1] The information in this section about Gautama’s birth comes from the “Introduction to the Jataka,” found in “Sources on the Buddha’s Life and Death,” Fordham University, 1998, https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/india/buddha-life.asp.
[2] The information in this section about Gautama’s path from prince to renunciant comes from “Sources on the Buddha’s Life and Death,” Fordham University, 1998, https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/india/buddha-life.asp as well as the “Sukhamala Sutta: Refinement AN 3.38,” translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu, Access to Insight, 1997, https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an03/an03.038.than.html.
[3] Mudugamuwe Maithrimurthi, “The Buddha’s Attitude Towards Social Concerns as Depicted in the Pali Canon,” 124.
[4] David R. Loy, “Why Buddhism and the West Need Each Other: On the Interdependence of Personal and Social Transformation,” Journal of Buddhist Ethics, 20 (2013): 407.
Excerpted from Daniel McCoy, Buddhism or Christianity: Which Is Better for the World (Moral Apologetics Press, 2021).
