Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

signoregalilei.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 196 posts

Re: The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

#111

Post by indoordin0saur »

phyzix5761 wrote: post #21
wiradikusuma wrote: post #13

"Christianity in particular has a history of absorbing other religions’ traditions" -- Tangentially related: I'm a Catholic, so I don't know much about other "distros", but the Roman Catholic Church has a long, pragmatic history of absorbing local traditions in Indonesia. It's interesting dynamic. Catholic Church is notoriously top-down and hierarchical, yet local parishes can feel entirely distinct. It's not uncommo…

Its called syncretism. The Greeks and Romans have been doing it since the time of Alexander the Great.

It's interesting that in religion back then they took the idea of the gods' existence as an obvious fact. So when they encountered other people with different gods they assumed that they were actually the same gods, just by different names. If they encountered civilized/intelligent people with different mythologies it meant either that those people knew something the Greeks previously didn't or they had just gotten events confused and it would become a matter of debate. It was more like two people with different, but honest, accounts of an event in the remote past trying to reconcile their own limited recollection or view point.

Re: The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

#112

Post by aristofun »

Every serious religion worth considering is different and distinct in its fundamental core claims, even if there is a significant influence and overlap on other levels.

No amount of pseudo-philocophical and quasi-historical research can change this basic fact.

Naive attempt of some buddhists to reduce (in their eyes of course its the highest compliment) other religion figures to mere "buddha" label is nothing but silly, laymen kitchen theology. It is disrespectful to both buddhism and other religion.

Re: The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

#113

Post by geye1234 »

jact wrote: post #106
ASalazarMX wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tell a devout old world European catholic about say Day of the Dead traditions and they will probably think its blasphemy. Want to make a Catholic mad? Tell them saints are just minor gods of the Christian pantheon.

> Tell them saints are just minor gods of the Christian pantheon That’s the whole idea though: “God became man so that men might become gods,” -St. Athanasius

Good reply! St Peter's words about "becom[ing] partakers of the Divine Nature" are intended literally.

Re: The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

#114

Post by notahacker »

kshri24 wrote: post #55
dyauspitr wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think anything assimilates religions better than Hinduism. New belief system? Just throw in a new avatar of Vishnu to legitimize it and carry on.

> Just throw in a new avatar of Vishnu to legitimize it and carry on. Except for it's never done. No Hindu believes Allah or Jesus is an Avatar of Vishnu. It can't be. Vishnu literally means the "All-Pervading One". Allah is explicitly not Omnipresent. Jesus is Omnipresent but does not have infinite forms. So neither fit the bill. Even Buddha, who we Hindus associate as one of the Avatars of Vishnu is not the same Bu…

I distinctly remember an Indian man on a bus in Kerala striking up a conversation with me (random white obvious tourist) in which he proclaimed both that he considered Jesus his Lord and Saviour and that he considered him to be an avatar of Vishnu. Not an explanation I'd asked him for, but certainly made a change from the standard bus conversation about where I was from and was I married yet and what salary...

I'm sure you are right that many/most Hindus would consider this incompatible with their belief system (and even more sure your average Christian would think he was missing the point of accepting Jesus as his Lord and Saviour), but this sort of syncretism definitely has been attempted and found its converts, probably rather more of them than Akbar's attempts to combine Islam and Hinduism.

I'm also reminded of this mostly unrelated comedy sketch :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tw7LIykvBw

Re: The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

#115

Post by saimiam »

u1hcw9nx wrote: post #79
swat535 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Side note as another Catholic: Saints Josaphat and Barlaam never had an official decree of canonization. That process didn't exist (in its earliest form) until 1170 AD. Saints before that were generally just acclaimed by the Christians in the area and probably recognized by a local bishop. The Vatican does keep a "Roman Martyrology" by which they try to keep a list of all known saints, but the saints that existed bef…

Catholics surely put great effort into bureaucracy and organization. "The devil and a friend of his were walking down the street, when they saw ahead of them a man stoop down and pick up something from the ground, look at it, and put it away in his pocket. The friend said to the devil, 'What did that man pick up?' 'He picked up a piece of Truth,' said the devil.'That is a very bad business for you, then,' said his fr…

I don’t understand this story. What lesson/joke am I seeing here?

Re: The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

#116

Post by Exoristos »

bitsage wrote: post #24

It’s quite ironic how the assimilationist nature of high church Christianity has ended up becoming what early Christianity was in opposition to. Early Christians were non-conformist, to the point of execution, and were sometimes even seen as anti-social. A thousand years later, Christians are incorporating obscure tales from the East. I think this is another argument for a separation of Church and state. It allows pe…

You're using quite a broad brush with "non-conformist," so I'll assume you're referring to Roman Christian martyrdom. The perception of Christians in that era was more or less that they were being coerced to libel Christ and suppress his memory, who moreover had the vital Answer for humankind; and to dissolve their brotherhoods as conspiratorial organizations, including by incriminating friends and family and (in time, certainly by Diocletian) to libel their ancestors. This is quite different from the modern, essentially Reformation, view of them, which is that they were ideologues with an obstinate disinclination to lose the argument. Another misconception is that they were under continuous persecution, when in fact Roman enforcement was more like a limited number of notorious showdowns well spread out over time and terrain; however, this one is not just a modern view but was also promoted by fairly early hagiographers[0]. Finally, resisting even per the rationale I've described was quite controversial, and not all Christians refused to capitulate, even after it had become an established religious concept and practice. For example, see the Donatist controversy in re traditores[1].

0. https://classics.cornell.edu/news/roman-historian-views-earl...

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donatism

Re: The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

#117

Post by geye1234 »

3m4r wrote: post #77
anon291 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Christian and Buddhist monastic traditions are so uncannily similar it's difficult to really think they developed without influence. That's my opinion. Even the Europeans who first set foot in Asia during the age of discovery thought they were being played tricks on, so I don't think it's that wild an idea

The problem isn't really the wildness of the idea (or its direct implications). The problem is that there is almost 2,000 years of culture and the metaphysical beliefs of well-more than half of the human population predicated upon their beliefs being entirely unique and an off-shoot of Judaism and not a fundamentally different syncretic import from the east. Earlier today, I was listening to Evangelical Christian Rad…

People keep highlighting very minor and accidental similarities, like the OP, or some surface-level similarities between the two texts you cite. Yet they seem to ignore essential and basic differences, not only about the Divine Nature but also about very basic questions like whether change is real or illusory, or whether a person exists from moment to moment. I just listed a bunch of them in my previous post. I don't see how anyone can realistically claim Christianity is syncretic with anything eastern. And historically, it was persecuted for three centuries precisely because it refused to be syncretic -- the Romans were happy to tolerate additions to their partheon but couldn't abide Christianity's claims to exclusivity.

Re: The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

#118

Post by dsr_ »

philipallstar wrote: post #103
pstuart wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another appropriate word for the colonization of America is genocide. I'm old enough to remember being taught how America was settled by expanding into the vast wilderness of the continent, and that sometimes they had skirmishes with natives but they found them new places to live. It turns out it wasn't quite as neat and tidy as suggested.

"It's not neat and tidy so it must be genocide" - not sure that's quite right.

In this case, it was genocide.

Re: The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

#119

Post by mwillis »

saimiam wrote: post #115
u1hcw9nx wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Catholics surely put great effort into bureaucracy and organization. "The devil and a friend of his were walking down the street, when they saw ahead of them a man stoop down and pick up something from the ground, look at it, and put it away in his pocket. The friend said to the devil, 'What did that man pick up?' 'He picked up a piece of Truth,' said the devil.'That is a very bad business for you, then,' said his fr…

I don’t understand this story. What lesson/joke am I seeing here?

Organizing information could be considered its own form of (self-inflicted) torment.

Re: The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

#120

Post by samus »

Onavo wrote: post #84
samus wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is moot since nowadays local practices are accepted to a degree. Even if Rome decided to go back on that it would have little practical relevance nowadays since there are lots of branches of Christianity that are not in communion with Rome and who are perfectly fine with that.

It's significant because it effectively lost them their biggest market.

It's significant to the Church, but less so for Chinese authorities, who could always decide to establish their own state Church.
Post reply on HN