My Buddhist friend: “Christians believes in the absolute. Buddhism believes in awareness.”
I like a Buddhist friend’s very precise and accurate description of Buddhism and Christianity: “Christians believes in the absolute. Buddhism believes in awareness.”.
Please allow me to elaborate a bit – Buddhism is about self-awareness in the universe to achieve various levels of saints, but Christianity begins with reconciling a relationship, via revelation from God, with the absolute (i.e. God Himself), and through accepting Christ as personal saviour is the only way to be saint.
For Christianity besides absolute faith to begin with, spiritual growth should follow - transformation of mind to explore and practice God's will, which is again referring back to the "absolute" God, to bear fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patient, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. (More detail can be found in Galatians 5:22-23)
Unfortunately, many Christianity disciplines helping spiritual growth have been despised by the western culture (western culture here refers to contemporary western European and North American European immigrants' cultures, Jews considers as eastern culture). For example, inward disciplines such as fasting and meditation/contemplation often mentioned in the Bible were almost totally ignored/ abrogated by western-Christianity-culture-flaovoured practice.
Christianity meditation, different from Buddhism meditation, is that there's again an absolute target (i.e. God) on Christianity meditation – releasing to God, praise His creation, allow God to commune with our sprit and to love us.
Recently, I have read a book named "Celebration of Discipline" written by Richard J. Foster, which I found he had given a more objective (lessen western culture favouritism) overview of spiritual growth practices with Bible references.
In terms of prayers, "More-mature" Christianity prayers should be "diminishing-oneself-desire" but "increasing-of-God's-will and assignments". In fact, I can see the Lord's Prayer in the Bible (often being used as a guideline in terms of prayer content) that the only self-need would be the "daily bread" (by the way it implied not to pray for left over but trust that daily necessity be looked after by God), the rest of the prayer is all about our mind to be part of God's mind and protect us from evilness.
In terms of suffering, Christianity views the source of suffering is from the separation of man and God due to sin (sometimes may refer as selfish-desire). This is why the root of Christianity faith is base on salvation from Christ bearing people's sin to free mankind from being slaves to sin (sin leads to eternity death) but to rebuild the relationship of man and God leading to eternity life. With faith in Christ as one's personal saviour, then the normal response of a Christian would be spiritual growth through praise, prayers and studying scripture to learn and understand God's character and communicate with Him in order to live out our purpose of creation.
Please allow me to elaborate a bit – Buddhism is about self-awareness in the universe to achieve various levels of saints, but Christianity begins with reconciling a relationship, via revelation from God, with the absolute (i.e. God Himself), and through accepting Christ as personal saviour is the only way to be saint.
For Christianity besides absolute faith to begin with, spiritual growth should follow - transformation of mind to explore and practice God's will, which is again referring back to the "absolute" God, to bear fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patient, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. (More detail can be found in Galatians 5:22-23)
Unfortunately, many Christianity disciplines helping spiritual growth have been despised by the western culture (western culture here refers to contemporary western European and North American European immigrants' cultures, Jews considers as eastern culture). For example, inward disciplines such as fasting and meditation/contemplation often mentioned in the Bible were almost totally ignored/ abrogated by western-Christianity-culture-flaovoured practice.
Christianity meditation, different from Buddhism meditation, is that there's again an absolute target (i.e. God) on Christianity meditation – releasing to God, praise His creation, allow God to commune with our sprit and to love us.
Recently, I have read a book named "Celebration of Discipline" written by Richard J. Foster, which I found he had given a more objective (lessen western culture favouritism) overview of spiritual growth practices with Bible references.
In terms of prayers, "More-mature" Christianity prayers should be "diminishing-oneself-desire" but "increasing-of-God's-will and assignments". In fact, I can see the Lord's Prayer in the Bible (often being used as a guideline in terms of prayer content) that the only self-need would be the "daily bread" (by the way it implied not to pray for left over but trust that daily necessity be looked after by God), the rest of the prayer is all about our mind to be part of God's mind and protect us from evilness.
In terms of suffering, Christianity views the source of suffering is from the separation of man and God due to sin (sometimes may refer as selfish-desire). This is why the root of Christianity faith is base on salvation from Christ bearing people's sin to free mankind from being slaves to sin (sin leads to eternity death) but to rebuild the relationship of man and God leading to eternity life. With faith in Christ as one's personal saviour, then the normal response of a Christian would be spiritual growth through praise, prayers and studying scripture to learn and understand God's character and communicate with Him in order to live out our purpose of creation.
posted by Clara Yeung at
2:19 PM
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