During the years I taught Philosophy of Religion at a community college in the Finger Lakes, I was always looking for ways to get students to stop thinking of religion as a collection of things they were supposed to believe.
I wanted them to wrestle with the ideas themselves.
One exercise I used involved three figures who, on the surface, could hardly seem more different: Jesus, the Buddha, and Lao Tzu. I gave students a series of sayings and asked them to identify who had said each one.
I did not tell them which tradition the sayings came from.
It was a simple exercise, but it usually became more interesting than I expected.
Students would read a statement and make a guess. Sometimes they were confident. Sometimes they changed their minds. Occasionally, they would look at me as if I had deliberately given them an impossible test.
And in a sense, I had.
The point was not really to see who could identify Jesus, Buddha, or Lao Tzu. I wanted them to notice how difficult it can be to draw clean boundaries around wisdom.
One saying attributed to Lao Tzu reads:
“He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know.”
Another, attributed to the Buddha, says:
“Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.”
Then there is the familiar Buddhist teaching:
“Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule.”
And from the Gospel of Thomas:
“If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.”
When students encountered these statements without the names attached, they were no longer responding to the authority of a particular religious tradition. They had to respond to the words.
Rethinking Jesus
My interest in making these comparisons came partly from my own questions about Jesus.
I had grown up with Christianity, but the more I studied religion, the less comfortable I became with the idea that any tradition could be understood entirely on its own. Religious ideas travel. People travel. Stories travel. Practices cross borders, sometimes openly and sometimes without leaving much evidence behind.
Two books influenced my thinking in particular: Jesus Lived in India: His Unknown Life Before and After the Crucifixion, a 1983 book by German author Holger Kersten, and Neil Douglas-Klotz’s Prayers of the Cosmos: Meditations on the Aramaic Words of Jesus.
Jesus Lived in India presents the controversial possibility that Jesus traveled east during the years of his life that are largely absent from the New Testament. The theory has never been established historically, and I don’t think it should be presented as fact. Still, I found the question compelling.
What if Jesus had encountered Buddhism or Hinduism? What would that mean for how we understood him?
I was less interested in proving the theory than in allowing myself to ask the question.
Neil Douglas-Klotz’s work opened another door. His exploration of the Aramaic language and prayer attributed to Jesus suggested ways of understanding prayer that were less about reciting words and more about entering into a contemplative state.
That resonated with what I had encountered in Buddhist thought. It also made me reconsider the image of Jesus I had inherited. I began to see him less exclusively as the central figure of a religious system and more as a Jewish teacher wrestling with some of the oldest questions human beings have asked: How should we live? What do we do with suffering? What does it mean to love another person? How do we become less captive to our own fear, anger and desire?
Those questions did not belong to Christianity alone.
Back in the Classroom
That was part of what I wanted my students to experience. I would put the sayings on the board and let them work through them. The results were rarely neat.
Some students were surprised when a saying they assumed belonged to Jesus turned out to be attributed to the Buddha or Lao Tzu. Others were surprised by how familiar Buddhist or Taoist ideas sounded when separated from the religious vocabulary surrounding them.
I remember the general feeling of those discussions more than I remember individual responses. There was curiosity, and there was skepticism. Sometimes a student would recognize something in a saying that seemed to have nothing to do with the religious tradition they associated with it.
That was the moment I was hoping for.
Not agreement but recognition.
There is something humbling about discovering that an idea you thought belonged exclusively to your own tradition can also be found somewhere else.
It raises a difficult question: Where does wisdom actually belong?
Similarity Is Not the Same as Sameness
I don’t want to push the comparison too far.
Jesus, Buddha, and Lao Tzu were not saying the same things. They emerged from different cultures, historical circumstances and philosophical worlds. Their ideas about the self, God, suffering, liberation and reality cannot simply be blended together into one generalized spirituality.
Doing that can erase precisely the differences that make each tradition worth studying.
But similarities are worth noticing.
Lao Tzu’s emphasis on self-mastery can sit in an interesting conversation with Jesus’ teaching about what lies within a person. Buddhist attention to the present moment can be placed alongside Jesus’ repeated emphasis on watchfulness and awareness. The Buddhist rejection of hatred as a response to hatred has an obvious resonance with Jesus’ command to love one’s enemies.
None of this proves historical borrowing. It does not prove that Jesus traveled to India. It does not prove that Buddhist teachings influenced Christianity. And it certainly does not mean that Christianity, Buddhism and Taoism are secretly the same religion.
It means that human beings living in very different places have spent a very long time asking some of the same questions. That, by itself, is interesting.
What I Wanted Students to Notice
Looking back, I think the exercise was really about intellectual humility.
It is easy to hear the name of a religious figure and immediately decide whether we agree with them. We carry our assumptions into the room before we have even heard what they have to say.
Remove the name, and something changes. We have to listen. That is a useful practice beyond the study of religion.
In a time when people are increasingly divided into camps, I find myself returning to that classroom exercise. We spend so much time sorting people according to identity that we sometimes forget to listen for the ideas underneath those identities.
A Christian may discover something recognizable in a Buddhist teaching. A Buddhist may encounter something meaningful in Jesus. Someone with no religious affiliation may read Lao Tzu and find a sentence that follows them around for years. None of us has to surrender our differences to recognize that.
I don’t know whether Jesus ever traveled to India. I don’t know whether he encountered Buddhist monks or Hindu teachers. The historical evidence does not give us enough certainty to say. But I have become less interested in proving that connection than I once was.
The more important connection may be the one happening right in front of us. A student reads a sentence written or spoken thousands of years ago by someone from another culture, another religion, another world. And for a moment, it makes sense.
That may be one of the quieter miracles of studying religion. We discover that the past is not quite as foreign as we thought. And that wisdom, wherever we find it, can still ask something of us.
