Buddha Vs Jesus
Buddhism teaches that attachment is the root cause of all suffering.
on Attchment
There can be some good consequences to the Buddhist teaching of detachment. Christians would do well to avoid becoming attached to temporary things of this world and instead store up our treasures in heaven (Matthew 6:19-21). But aiming to have more and more detachment from the world is a very tricky thing to do without Christ, because we can easily become more and more detached from others, leading to seeing people as a hindrance to one’s long-term goal. Not only that, but our love comes from Him! We love because He first loved us (1 John 4:19) and He gives us joy and encouragement even in difficult circumstances (see the 9 fruits of the Holy Spirit such as love, joy, and peace in Galatians 5:22-23). Additionally, I found that the more detached I became from the things of the world and the feelings and drama of the people in it, the more uncaring and cold-hearted I became towards others. Detachment made it much harder to have love and compassion for people, even my own parents who I had a deep love for appeared more and more foolish and mundane the more time that I practiced Buddhism.
Buddhism does teach one can self-sacrifice in the form of self-immolation. In early Indian Buddhism, self-immolation was an ascetic practice where someone would end their life by setting themselves on fire. In Buddhist literature, it was portrayed as a heroic act by a person seeking enlightenment. In China, self-immolation was seen as a way to turn death's negative effects into positive power. Imagine that! What deception the evil one has. Essentially, Buddhism teaches that it is our attachment to impermanent things which leads to suffering, so they aim to get rid of all attachments - including eventually our bodies which we are very much attached to! These teachings most obviously fall short of having any wisdom because as we become attached to other people through love, which is a good thing, when the going gets tough we may believe that we need to rid ourselves of that attachment and therefore the love that binds us.
The more and more I practiced the principles of the 8-fold path, including mindfulness and meditation throughout every day, the more I became so absorbed in its principles that I lived with nearly constant total focus on whatever task I was performing. For example, when driving to work I would force myself to focus only on driving and push out all other thoughts that wanted to come into my mind. This is very difficult but it becomes easier the more one works on it. As stated above, I almost totally stopped caring about other people because I became like a task-oriented robot and all I wanted was to achieve my objectives which were to get through the day and the work day in a peaceful state of mind and focus my free time mainly on studying to get into Physician Assistant school and also focus on getting better at meditation and following the 8-fold path. When I started realizing that I was becoming highly antisocial – very focused and efficient at doing anything I set my mind to, yet very uncaring towards others and even surprisingly harsh, terse, and cold with my words and actions toward them – I then realized that I was becoming psychopathic.
Psychopathy in a nutshell is a chronic mental disorder with abnormal or violent social behavior. Wikipedia says that it “is a personality construct characterized by impaired empathy and remorse, and bold, disinhibited and egocentric traits (which I had), masked by superficial charm (which I did not have) and the outward appearance of apparent normalcy (which I also did have). When a person starts to see everything as simply a task to complete, and your own feelings and desires as well as other people’s feelings and desires simply appear as unnecessary complications, you can see how this could lead to destructive, antisocial, psychopathic behaviors.
I had an epiphany as I was going deeper and deeper into becoming a mostly cold-hearted task-oriented, fully focused robot – I realized that I was getting colder and colder regarding my cares and feelings towards others, and the potential for me hurting them was becoming greater and greater. I believe God gave me this epiphany in order to start leading me to Him. It was at that time that I stopped going further down the road of Buddhism, and I started heading back towards caring for my fellow human beings. As I allowed myself to divert more attention towards caring about other people, I became a little less task-oriented and more and more loving. Fortunately, I still had great focus due to all that time spent working on improving mindfulness and meditation, but I was thankfully heading back towards becoming a warm human being again.
I still to this day believe that having awareness of one’s thoughts and actions throughout the day, as well as practicing some form of meditation (which could simply be prayer and/or meditating on God’s word) on a regular basis can greatly help to improve our focus. So many people are struggling to have good focus nowadays and it is complex as to the causes of poor focus, but I believe a few main reasons are high degrees of anxiety and all the constant stimulation around us. We can forget (or never really learn) that having good focus is like a muscle that needs exercise to function well. We could all take some wisdom from Buddhism and practice more mindfulness and meditation. But as stated, even wiser yet would be to spend daily time in prayer and meditation on God’s word. The Bible also discusses these things to some degree. For example, God tells us to “Be still, and know that I am God.” (Psalm 46:10) Two of my favorite ways to meditate on God is to sit or stand and focus on how amazing God is and all the wonderful things He has done in my life, and to take a few favorite scriptures and meditate and soak in them for a while.
