WHY BUDDHISM IS BAD
The Excellence of the Christian Faith • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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-{Genesis 3}
-There are many people who, in trying to promote pluralism (the idea that all religions are the same), make wild claims that their religion is not that different from Christianity or that their religious leader is not that different from Jesus. Strangely enough, Buddhists make that claim. They think that Buddha and Jesus took similar paths and ended up in the same place.
-However, those claims could not be further from the truth. The teachings of the two religions could not be further apart, and the claims by their founders couldn’t be more opposite from one another.
-We have been looking at the excellencies of biblical Christianity, comparing and contrasting it with some of the world’s major religions. This helps us understand our own theology, it helps us learn how to defend our faith, and it trains us on how to share the gospel with people from other religions.
-Tonight we look at Buddhism, the fourth largest religion in the world, with about half a billion adherents. We will consider what they teach and how they differ from the truth as we find it in Scripture.
-To give us some background, back in the fifth century BC there was a son of a rich ruling family in Lumbini, Nepal, whose name was Siddhartha Gautama. They were followers of the Hindu religion, believing in monism, pantheism, reincarnation, and all the stuff I mentioned several weeks ago.
-Siddhartha’s father raised him in isolation trying to shield him from the pain and suffering in the outside world. So, for the most part, Siddhartha was confined behind the walls of their palace grounds, even to the point that Siddhartha was married and had a son, but all of it behind the walls of the palace.
-Eventually, Siddhartha became restless, and when he was 29 years old his father finally agreed to allow him to leave the compound. He was taken by carriage driven by a servant out into what we would say is the real world. And while he was making this trek, Siddhartha saw what would be known as the Four sights. He first saw an elderly man suffering from his old age. He then saw someone who was suffering from sickness. And then he saw a dead body.
-Then finally he saw an ascetic (a monk-type person) who seemed to be content despite his apparent poverty. This got Siddhartha to wondering how the ascetic could be at peace in the midst of a world with such suffering. The monk-type person lived in such deprivation, surviving in the midst of all this suffering going on around him, and yet he was so self-disciplined and calm.
-So, Siddhartha, abandoning his rich life, sneaked back out of the palace for good, leaving behind his wife and child and family and life of luxury, in order to find the answer to overcoming the seeming unending cycle of life and death and suffering. He did not find satisfactory answers in his Hindu religion. (Which, to me, actually is one of the strongest arguments against Hinduism—it gives no answer to the existence of evil and suffering.)
-So, Buddhism began as a means of explaining suffering and finding the answer to suffering. Unfortunately, Buddhism doesn’t give any better answers than Hinduism does. But before I explain further what Buddhism is and teaches, I first want to look at the passage I mentioned, because Christianity has the answer to his first conundrum: why is there suffering?
14 And Yahweh God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, Cursed are you more than any of the cattle, And more than every beast of the field; On your belly you will go, And dust you will eat All the days of your life;
15 And I will put enmity Between you and the woman, And between your seed and her seed; He shall bruise you on the head, And you shall bruise him on the heel.”
16 To the woman He said, “I will greatly multiply Your pain and conception, In pain you will bear children; Your desire will be for your husband, And he will rule over you.”
17 Then to Adam He said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat from it’; Cursed is the ground because of you; In pain you will eat of it All the days of your life.
18 “Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you; And you will eat the plants of the field;
19 By the sweat of your face You will eat bread, Till you return to the ground, Because from it you were taken; For you are dust, And to dust you shall return.”
-These verses explain the suffering that comes upon humanity—they are curses from God. But why does God curse humanity? It is because of what comes prior to this passage—mankind joined Satan, the serpent, in his rebellion against God. Satan deceived Adam and Eve into breaking God’s commands. Because of this sin, death and suffering were the consequences for their rebellion. However, even in the midst of pronouncing judgment, God offers the solution.
-In v. 15 God says that there would be a seed of the woman who would crush the serpent’s head. There would be one who would come who would defeat evil and death, and would reverse the curse of suffering that were sin’s consequences. That is the Christian answer to suffering.
-However, Siddhartha took a different path. After abandoning everything, he spent years in deprivation and yoga, living like an ascetic, hoping to find the answers that he sought. However, the answers were not forthcoming. He then turned to meditation, and the tradition goes that at the age of 35, while leaning against a sacred Bodhi tree in Bodh Gaya, India, he vowed that he would not stand up and leave that position until he discovered the truth.
-And he claims that after 49 days there he finally achieved enlightenment. The fear of suffering left him because he found his answer. From that point on Siddhartha became known as Buddha, which means “Enlightened One.”
-From then on the Buddha taught the Four Noble Truths to understand suffering, and then the Noble Eightfold Path to help release humanity from suffering. As we consider these things, you must remember that he is coming from a Hindu background, so he still believed much of the Hindu religion, however he tweaked it a bit to fit his supposed answers.
-So, Buddhism does teach monism, that everything belongs to one entity. It teaches reincarnation (which Buddhists call rebirth), it is a cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. This cycle is driven by Karma, where your current actions have consequences that affect this life and future rebirths. And ultimately you are trying to find liberation from these cycles of rebirths so that you get re-absorbed into the One entity that exists.
-Thus, Buddhism begins with the Four Noble Truths. First is the reality that life is inherently marked by suffering or dissatisfaction—suffering is just a fact of life. Second is the belief that suffering arises from attachment, desire, and ignorance. Third is to realize that it is possible to end suffering, and that happens by letting go of your attachments. And fourth and finally is the teaching that the Noble Eightfold Path helps to lead to one’s liberation from this suffering.
-This Eightfold path entails, first, having a right view of the Four Noble Truths. Then there is the right intention to renounce sensual pleasure and to do no harm. Then there is right speech and then right action (such as love, joy, etc.), then right livelihood, then right effort to avoid evil and produce good, then right mindfulness and finally right concentration. So, it is to meditate on the right things and do the right things. They teach that if you follow this path, you will become enlightened and break the cycle of rebirths, and become one with the One, thus ending suffering. Now, there is no explanation of what makes something right, or according to whose standards something is right, so it is left with a lot of vague interpretation.
-While there are several different schools of Buddhism, the one that Americans might be more familiar with is Zen Buddhism. This seemed to take a greater foothold in the States in the 1960s and 1970s with the rise of Eastern Mysticism that led to the New Age Movement that I spoke about last week.
-While Zen Buddhism has much of the same foundation as the other schools, it is more a philosophical way of life rather than a religion. It emphasizes the direct experience of enlightenment rather than any sort of doctrinal study. It pushes it’s adherents to reject the normal way of thinking about things, especially dualistic thinking (good vs. evil, self vs. other). Instead, it teaches what might be called transcendence—it is above normal human thinking, so stop trying to think logically. So it might use paradoxical riddles or statements (like, what’s the sound of one hand clapping) to force its adherents to break with conventional wisdom. This is the only way to be enlightened according to them.
-But Buddhism’s search to answer the problem of suffering will only cause its adherents to an even greater suffering for all of eternity. You see, Buddhism does not center on a Creator God—there is an impersonal force of which everyone is a part. But we believe that there is one, omnipotent, personal God who created and governs the universe. This God is holy and just, and we have sinned against a holy God, leading to our condemnation.
The psalmist admitted:
4 Against You, You only, I have sinned And done what is evil in Your sight, So that You are justified when You speak And pure when You judge.
And even the prophet Daniel admitted:
5 we have sinned and committed iniquity and acted wickedly and rebelled, even turning aside from Your commandments and judgments.
And Paul tells us:
12 Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned—
-Buddhism says there is no God that you have sinned against, so that can’t be the source of your suffering. But we know that there is a holy God that we have offended.
-For Buddhism, if there is no God, there is no need for salvation and deliverance from the consequences of our sin. They teach that you need to be liberated from the cycle, and that is achieved through self-discipline, meditation, and insight into Buddhist teachings. Liberation is an individual journey of enlightenment to end suffering and rebirth.
-But we know that since we have sinned against God, God’s justice must be handed out against the lawbreaker. And there is a way for a sinner to be set free from that sentence and God’s justice yet to be met. And that comes through the atoning death of Jesus Christ. Not by human effort, not by enlightenment, but by Jesus. As Paul teaches:
21 He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.
-You are either covered by Jesus’ blood, or you are not:
22 And according to the Law, one may almost say, all things are cleansed with blood, and without shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.
-And then Peter:
18 knowing that you were not redeemed with corruptible things like silver or gold from your futile conduct inherited from your forefathers,
19 but with precious blood, as of a lamb unblemished and spotless, the blood of Christ.
-That means that there is no cycle of rebirths or karma. A human being lives one life, and then their eternal state is determined by what one has done with Jesus Christ.
27 And inasmuch as it is appointed for men to die once and after this comes judgment,
-Jesus makes a distinction between people. He says about the day of judgment what He will do with believers and unbelievers:
46 “And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”
-And unlike what Hindus and Buddhists teach, the final state is not to be re-absorbed into the impersonal force of Brahman or whatever. There will be a resurrection. Jesus Himself taught:
28 “Do not marvel at this; for an hour is coming, in which all who are in the tombs will hear His voice,
29 and will come forth; those who did the good deeds to a resurrection of life, those who committed the evil deeds to a resurrection of judgment.
-Even Daniel prophesied:
2 “And many of those who sleep in the dust of the ground will awake, these to everlasting life, but the others to reproach and everlasting contempt.
-So, we do want to pray that Buddhists come to enlightenment, but we want it to be the true enlightenment—the truth of Jesus Christ. Yes, there is suffering in the world, but it is the natural consequence of sin. But God has made a way of escape for eternity. That doesn’t mean that we won’t suffer in our time here on earth. But it means that suffering does not have the final say. Death and suffering will be swallowed up in eternity and be no more for those who have believed in Jesus. But for those who have not believed, they will have an eternity of suffering. But we want to pray that they avoid that and come to truth, and that God would use us to bring them to faith...
