Buddha and Salvation as Spiritual Euthanasia

One time Buddha took some leaves from a tree. Looking at the monks standing by he asked, “Which is more, these leaves in my hands, or all the leaves in the forest?” The monks answered, “The leaves in the forest.” Buddha replied, “It is just as what I have come to know and yet not told you. Why have I not told you these things? Because they would do you no good . . . they would not lead you to nirvana.”

Buddhism in many ways is a profoundly simple religion. There is one driving quest the Buddha sought: to free oneself from suffering. I think I never grasped this until recently. I had always been informed that Buddhism was some religious system competing against Christianity. I had assumed that Buddha had in some ways set himself up as godlike. I had assumed that Buddhism and Christianity were truly and completely incompatible. I now see that though they have strong differences that don’t yield easily to any synthesis, they are not in essence set up against each other.

The Buddha was first a “Hindu”. He was raised in a largely pantheistic culture. This was a culture in which gods existed, but only as extensions of the existence that all share. Ultimately the gods, or even God himself, were contained in the same cycle of existence, called samsara. God too was to repeat the cycle of being. This was the outgrowth of a thousand years of Indian philosophy. Their reflection had revealed that even God who dwelled in a state of joy, suffered from the endlessness of his reality. In this philosophy also, it is not impossible for a human achieving redemption through good karma to ascend to be a god, or one of the great gods, possibly even the God above all. Yet, they do not see this as being ultimately good. Even the gods at some point are reabsorbed into the ocean only to be reborn in the next cycle of existence.

For some time, the idea was that the origin of this cycle was Brahman, the super-personal Divine substance of experience (and different from Brahma, the highest of the gods). To “Hindu” thought, salvation was to return to this ocean. Salvation was being reunited with this source. This is still, more or less, the case today.

Yet, Buddha saw even in this the grim reality that returning to the ocean was not permanent. Eventually the cycle would start anew. Eventually Brahman would again be fragmented and the cycle of karma would start again. Or, if not, Brahman would still exist, and therefore in some way we exist too. Endlessness continues.

Buddha could not separate existence from suffering. He had no true category for endless joy. The laws of existence did not allow anything to remain truly permanent. Therefore all joy was temporary, and thus a short respite before one returned to suffering. Even in the “highs” of existence we experience a degree of anticipatory loss. Brahma himself in his absolute freedom and unending joy suffered the fact that the only way to experience the joy of “being full” was to first be emptied for a time. The cycle of existence propagated because Brahma could not rest content with an eternal joy of fullness, that left nothing to be awaited. The climax of "salvation" left an emptiness of their being nothing left to look forward to, but only to start the whole process over again.

So, to Buddha, a return to Brahman was not the answer. "Heaven" was only another of many temporary highs, that did not solve the problem that to exist is to suffer. So, what was the answer?

To not exist: Nirvana.

In essence all beings are stricken with the disease (read dis – ease, in essence: to suffer) of existing. To Buddha the ultimate salvation was to be euthanized, spiritually speaking. And his whole goal was to share this with humanity. Typically Buddhists believe that when Buddha was enlightened he became omniscient. Thus, we have the quote at the beginning where Buddha says that his knowledge is like the leaves of the forest, but he is only sharing with us the handful which he finds important. To him the only information that mattered was that which allowed one to escape from suffering. Questions of God, of epistemology, of what it all means for the world, of justice or truth, of society were all superfluous. All that matters is entering into nirvana, and escaping this cycle of pain. Buddha offered no explanation for nirvana. One can speak with a Buddhist and hear then speak of it as a continuing in discontinuity. It is a paradoxical place, and Buddha left it vague. And, even if our most pessimistic attitudes toward nirvana are true, in Buddha's opinion, it is still better than the harsh reality we live in where the only joy we have is seeking temporary highs to numb our misery.

And in understanding his point of view, I can at least empathize with his desire. If one sees no other way than to suffer, then a spiritual euthanasia is in the least understandable as a concept of salvation.

Yet, what of Jesus? In him we find that salvation is not just a freedom from suffering. Of the millions of saints who have followed him, all have suffered. Jesus’ path is not one of escaping suffering. It is one of enduring, even embracing, the world’s curse to achieve a salvation that is greater than a spiritual euthanasia.

Perhaps, Christianity has at least a partial synthesis between Buddhism’s options of suffering (existence) and non-suffering (nirvana): love. Not love as a temporary high. Love as a choice that chooses purposely to suffer because good is born of it. We hold that love is not just a precursor to further suffering, but instead is permanent. This idea is one I have no question a Buddhist would reject, but nonetheless would provide an interesting topic for dialogue.