When we compare Christianity with Buddhism, the first thing to remember is that we are talking about two very different things, and it’s really confusing when you try to treat both of them under the name of religion. Of course, there are many books about comparative religions, but somehow, when you see put together under the same class things which are so different as Christianity on the one hand or Buddhism on the other, it give me (at any rate) the same kind of shock I would get as if I were reading a book about geology and suddenly came upon a chapter on birds.

And I think the lack of understanding that the functions, the aims, of these two traditions are so different—if we could understand this clearly, it would make for a great deal less recrimination between people who like to say, “Well, my religion’s better than yours.” You see, the word “religion” is a very vague word, and it’s used for so many different things. And if we will agree to use the word “religion” for Christianity and for things like Christianity, such as Judaism or Islam, then we would have to find another word altogether for Buddhism, because otherwise the word “religion” would mean so many different things as to mean nothing.

Now, strictly, the word “religion” comes from a Latin verb, meaning “to bind back.” And thus the essence of a religion is a rule of life. If you use the word “religion” in its very, very strict sense, and you say of someone that he’s gone into religion, this doesn’t mean that he suddenly got converted. It means that he joined a religious order—that is to say, became a monk or a nun. And that is one, in other words, who submits himself to a rule or law of life.

On the other hand, Buddhism is not a submission to a rule. And I have called Buddhism a way of liberation instead of a religion, And we can see the difference most effectively if we look at Buddhism and Christianity with regard to their different social functions. A religion like Christianity serves the social function of cementing a community together, giving that community its laws, its principles of ethics, and its common objectives. The function of Buddhism, on the other hand, as a way of liberation is, as it were, to provide a cure for the inevitable ill effects of making the conventions of a community too strong, making the bonds of a community too strong. We all realize nowadays that it’s very unhealthy for a society to be too conformist, to rule out all kinds of eccentricity, individuality, and independent thought. At the same time, it would be equally unhealthy to go to the other extreme and have everybody acting, talking, and thinking at cross purposes. And so, in this way, a religion and a way of liberation complement one another, and a way of liberation can prevent a religion from becoming too great a burden.

You know, there’s a wonderful Chinese proverb which I always enjoy:

Do not swat a fly

On a friend’s head

With a hatchet.

And thus, when the law is laid down too firmly—and all religions have the temptation to do this—it puts the observance of the law in danger, just as swatting the fly on a friend’s head with a hatchet puts his head in danger.

Now, you see, a religion, then—as I’ve defined it—comes into being because of the necessity for someone to lay down the law in order that there shall be a human community. And so if we go back to the social origins of religions, I can think we can understand how this purpose works. And so let’s go and look at the board, and I want to try and put this in a diagrammatic form.

Religions, as a phenomenon, seem to have arisen historically with the transition from what we might call hunting cultures to agrarian cultures. In the type of life which we’d call a hunting or nomadic culture, we don’t really have religion in any institutional sense. Instead of the priest, there is the shaman. And a shaman is a man who has a religious experience of his own. He goes out into the forest and he meditates, he encounters the forces of the unknown—the spirits, or whatever it may be—and from his own experience he acquires his magical powers, which give him a certain respect in the community. And also, in the hunting culture, every male member of the culture knows all the culture. In other words, he knows all the arts and skills necessary for survival.

But a very different situation arises where a settled agrarian culture comes to birth. And rather naturally, such a culture comes to birth at a place where people meet—you might say at crossroads. And where people meet and settle, they tend, of course, to build a village and a protection around it: a stockade, which not only is the physical stockade protecting them from enemies and wild animals, but also the stockade of the rules of behavior by which that community must abide.

In addition to the necessity for a settled community to agree about ways of behavior and laws, it must also agree about language. But furthermore, in the more complex life of an agrarian community there must be a division of labor and a division of functions, so that the male members of the community no longer are masters of the whole culture. And we find there is a tendency to divide the specializations or functions of people into four main groups. So that if we look at ancient Hindu society, we shall find the groups named as follows. The four castes: the caste called brahmana, that is a priesthood. The caste called kshatriya, nobility. A caste called vaiśya; those would be merchants and farmers. And finally, a caste called śūdra, the laborers, the hewers of wood and the drawers of water. And then, in this way, as I said, a community is constituted. Classes are divided. And the classes originally correspond not so much to questions of prestige and rank, but simply to divisions of function. Later on, of course, problems of rank and prestige arise.

But this is the fundamental pattern of Hindu society. And we can compare it with almost exactly the same fundamental pattern of medieval Western Christian society under the feudal system. For here you have an exactly similar division of functions. The lords spiritual, or the priests: the church. The nobility: the kings, princes, and dukes, and feudal lords. The agriculturists and merchants, called the commons. And finally the serfs, corresponding exactly to the śūdra, the slaves.

And so you see that, in order to maintain this kind of arrangement, the uncultured individual—the spontaneous type of man who would be your nomadic hunting type—has to submit himself to a rule. He has to be put under a yoke. And so he has to sacrifice himself for the common welfare. And this might be called a kind of cruciformation, or crucifixion, of man.

And thus, in this way, the crucifix—the central emblem of Christianity—becomes a symbol of this particular function of religion. But you’ll see, when you look at this crucifix, that it has a rather rich quality, that it is almost regal. And this is the situation, you see, when a society and the religion are at one—as when, in feudal Europe, Christianity was the religion of the ruling class and of everybody in the society. And so the symbol of the suffering Christ becomes, as it were, identical with the spirit of sacrifice for the common good.

And you will see also that, if you look at, say, a painting such as this—the Annunciation by Martini from approximately the same period—that the setting of the personages in the picture is extremely luxurious. Look in at a detail of the Virgin Mary’s face, and see the rich garment that surrounds her, and the glorious aureole behind her head. Not a peasant woman at all, but a queen. And this is the point of view of the artist of a conception of Christianity when Christianity and the social order are identical. When, in other words, the symbol of the divine being is at one with the social order.

But, of course, there is a kind of double nature about Christianity in this respect. Because, on the one hand, we will speak of Christianity in a society where Christianity is firmly established as being the religion which upholds the society. In other words, to be a good Christian would also to be a good member of the society. But there is something paradoxical in the whole history of Christianity. Because Jesus himself was not acknowledged by his own society as being a particularly good member of it. In fact, it put him to death. And this was because he was in the great tradition of Hebrew prophetism. The prophet was always the man who came—who was a sort of wandering dervish, as a matter of fact—who came in from the wilderness, who came in from outside society, to say to the priests and the nobles and the merchants and the serfs: “You have fallen away from the will of God, and you’re not doing right.” And he would condemn that society—but, of course, with the object of restoring the order of society to the order of God.

And so Jesus is, in a way, thought of in Christianity in both these roles—or has been thought of—as, on the one hand, the upholder and lord of the Christian society, and on the other hand, as the prophet, the one despised and rejected of men, the suffering god coming into human society in order to change it. And, of course, as the feudal system of Europe broke up and Western society tended to turn against it, you pass from these somewhat regal representations of Christ to the representation of him in intense suffering—as, for example, in the fantastic Isenheim Altarpiece by Grünewald, where Christ is depicted crucified on the most rough, brutally wooden cross, tortured completely, and those around him showing every emotion of agony. This is Christ the revolutionary prophet, condemned by the world, as distinct from Christ the triumphant ruler, the pillar and mainstay of the Christian society.

And so, in a way, both Hindu society and Christian society have this paradoxical element in them. For the Hindu society always recognizes the right of an individual to break from society. You see, there’s a kind of pattern of life in India whereby, when you’ve fulfilled your work in society—in whatever caste you happen to be—and you, say, have raised a son who can carry your work on, you can then leave caste and go back to the forest. That is to say, you can become a holy man. And the holy man is called, in Sanskrit, vānaprastha. That means a “forest-dweller:” the man who, in other words, returns back again to the state of nature.

Only, he is a very different kind of man from the man who came out of nature into this. He has undergone a discipline. He has been forced to fit into one of these compartments. He has, in a way, been crucified. And so he returns out of this to find out again who he really is. He no longer identifies himself with the Reverend So-and-so, the priest, or with the Lord So-and-so, the noble, or Mr. So-and-so, the merchant, or Bill Smith, the laborer. But he seeks again to find his true identity.

And so—in a parallel way, but with rather different ideas involved—in the West, outside these four castes there could always be the hermit, or the cloistered monk, outside society. And it’s interesting that when the Hindu monk or the Christian monk leaves society, he renounces his class and he takes on a new name, and the character of that name is usually a divine name. He becomes (instead of Joe Dokes) Brother Peter, taking the name of Peter the Apostle. Instead of being Mr. Mukhapadjaya in India, he becomes Krishnananda, the name of Krishna and bliss. He takes a divine name—indicating, you see, a transformation of his personality. He’s no longer, as it were, a chopped-up person, he’s no longer divided. Because this division of labor divides man. He becomes again one, he becomes again integrated. He is, in a sense, re-membered, having been dismembered.

And so it’s interesting, then, against this background to see a very important difference between Jesus and the Buddha. From what caste did the Buddha come? He came from the kshatriya caste, the class of nobles. He was a prince; he was heir to his father’s throne, and he renounced that throne. Jesus was a carpenter and came from the class of the laborers. And this makes an enormous difference. Look for a moment at Rembrandt’s conception of the crucified Christ: here is no regal figure, but a strong, muscular laborer, suffering. A man, as a matter of fact, who in the world has never had authority, and who stands always for the underdog, the depressed. And for this reason the emphasis of Christianity is constantly upon transforming society, and improving it, and making it better. But look at this very typical face of Buddha: typical of so many Buddha images, because the face is unquestionably regal, aristocratic, calm—but, in a way, resigned.

And this speaks a great deal for the difference between Christianity and Buddhism. On the one hand, Christianity is vitally concerned with the transformation of the world. It is fundamentally a revolutionary doctrine, and also a historical doctrine. That is to say, when you consider what Christian doctrines are, they are really the telling of a story. The doctrine can be summed up so briefly by saying that, in the beginning, there was God, who created the world. But that through the evil one and through the fall of Man the world fell away from the perfection in which he made it. To restore it to that perfection, God the son himself entered into the world and became Man in the historical Jesus of Nazareth, and took upon himself all the tragedy, all the evil, and all the suffering of the world in the act of being crucified. And in doing this he, as it were, united the divine nature and the divine power with death itself in such a way as to transform death. He rose from the dead and founded a church. Note this: he founded a community. And this community has as its purpose, as it were, the bringing together of the whole universe back to the sovereignty of God.

So it is a historical religion, looking for its fulfillment in the course of time. But in the end its objective is to put God—or to acknowledge God, rather, not to put him—as ruler of the universe. For it is fundamental to the whole conception of Christianity that God is the ruler. And here one sees the figure of God the Son, the Eternal Word, in the act of creating the world. Notice how he is measuring it out with his compasses, creating it, as it were, as an artifact. And so the goal of Christianity is the kingdom of God. And you see in, say, Dante’s Paradiso, where the final vision of the perfection of the world is shown, that it is a vision of the rulership of God over all. For he says in the end, “But my volition now and my desires were moved like wheel revolving evenly by love that moves the sun and starry fires.”

So the monarchical ideal of everything perfectly submitted to the will of God is contrasted with the ideal of the Buddha—who, having been a monarch, is not so interested in monarchy. Having been a monarch, he has seen the difficulties of rule and is not anxious to rule. And in the Buddhist conception of the universe there is no ruler, there is no king, but the universe is self-ruling: it goes by itself, it orders itself. And Buddhism does not look forward to a transformation of the world in time. Yes, it does look forward to a transformation of the world, but not at the end of time, but now, through the overcoming of our self-centered point of view.

You know, there’s a wonderful old story from India that, in the far-off days, when men didn’t wear shoes, the stony ground was hard on their feet. And a great king said, “Let us sacrifice hundreds of cattle and cover this intolerably rough earth with their skins.” But a wise sage at his court said, “No, sire. Just kill a few cattle, and let us take their skins and bind small pieces of skin to the bottom of our feet, so that we shall have protection wherever we go.” And this story is rather typical about the different attitudes of East and West to the transformation of the world. The West is like wanting to cover the whole ground with skins; to transform outward events. The East—like putting a sandal on one’s foot—is to transform one’s own mind.

So that it is said in Buddhism that when every phase of our mind is in accord with the mind of Buddha, there shall not be one atom of dust that does not enter into Buddhahood. To see the world in a new way by altering one’s self rather than changing the world. So that, as the old Zen master Hakuin said: “When we get this point of view, this Earth is the lotus land of purity, and this body is the body of Buddha.”