In a comment about my thoughts on the Buddha's "Middle Way," the Preacher (from whom I'm very pleased to hear) wrote:

Christianity has plenty of these paradoxes, though they aren't stated as clearly and beautifully as they are in Buddhism.

That got me thinking about some of the parallels between Buddhism (especially as described in The Diamond Sutra) and Christianity (especially as described in the Gospels), and just how far those parallels can be drawn.

The Diamond Sutra is a dialogue (as Buddhist sutras generally are) between the Buddha and one of his disciples, Subhuti. In the edition I have, the sutra itself runs only twenty-seven pages, but there's another nearly four-hundred pages of commentary. Without that commentary, the text by itself wouldn't mean nearly so much to me (as someone removed from the context of the dialogue by twenty-five hundred years and thousands of miles). Most Buddhist sutras are very much like the Christian Gospels in that sense--they're accounts of activities and discussions from a very different time and place that are prone to misunderstanding when removed from that specific context. (They're also similar in that they were memorized and transmitted orally before being written down, though the Buddhists were far more intentional and honest about that process. Where the Gospels claim to be written by one of the participants, all Buddhist sutras open with "Thus have I heard...")

The similarities go beyond form and mode of transmission into content. As Red Pine puts it, "The Diamond Sutra may look like a book, but it's really the body of the Buddha," and in it, the Buddha speaks of his "dharma body," "merit body," and "apparition body," which, as concepts, aren't that far removed from the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost (though they're manifested and, in the case of the dharma body, shared by all beings, unlike their Christian analogues). And, if I'm not mistaken, Christ is sometimes referred to as the Word, the Church is sometimes referred to as the Body of Christ, and the Body of Christ appears in the sacraments. But opposed to these very suggestive similarities, there's the crucial difference that the Buddha goes to great lengths to ensure that these metaphors or pedagogical techniques are not taken literally, to indicate that they (like everything else in our mundane perception) have no reality of their own. The Preacher says that "the hyperactive, success-driven Christiantiy of America drives [him] insane." For me, it's the small-minded literalism--the fundamentalism--that I find so frustrating.

It's my sense that the fundamentalism currently finding expression in all Abrahamic religions was there from the start, going back at least to the flood, the destruction of the Cities of the Plain, the plagues upon the Egyptians as punishment for Pharaoh's God-instilled stubbornness, and the Jews' violent seizure of the Land of Milk and Honey. In Christianity, this fundamentalist tendency was amplified by the inclusion of the Pauline Epistles in the scripture. Imagine how different Christianity would be if Paul's writings where, like St. Augustine's, seen not as scripture, but as commentary on scripture. Imagine how different the American Fundamentalist agenda would be if it were based solely on the Gospels. Would there even be an American Fundamentalist movement? The direct teachings of Christ (which, incidentally, came about five-hundred years after the Buddha's teachings, of which Christ would surely have been aware), freed of the baggage of the Pauline Epistles, might have developed into something very much like Buddhism.

Yet, lest you get the impression that I'm saying that Buddhism and Christianity are two different views of the same underlying belief, I want to point out one irreconcilable difference between the two, the point at which all parallels end, and the reason that I'm a Buddhist rather than a Christian: suffering. According to Christianity (and all Abrahamic religions), suffering can have moral and spiritual value. According to Buddhism, suffering has no value and is to be avoided. It's central to any version of Christianity that Christ redeemed humanity through his suffering, whereas it's central to Buddhism that the Buddha achieved enlightenment and liberation for himself and all beings by discovering the path to the cessation of suffering. I'm not saying that I've chosen Buddhism because I would prefer to avoid suffering--I'm saying that I haven't chosen Christianity because I can't reconcile an omnipotent God with a God that would demand or even accept Christ's suffering as some sort of compensation.