The Lotus and the Cross: Jesus Talks With Buddha by Ravi Zacharias

Author:Ravi Zacharias
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Religion, Philosophy, Spirituality
ISBN: 9781576738542
Publisher: Multnomah
Published: 2001-09-30T22:00:00+00:00

EPILOGUE

But it is not imaginary that both Buddha and Jesus have left their words with us. Buddhism is a well-thought-through belief that is bereft of God. More accurately, it's a philosophy of how one can be good without God, pulling oneself up by one's own moral bootstraps. Its allurement is obvious. In a very subtle way it is the ultimate crowning of the individual with total autonomy, while at the same time it declares that the self is an illusion.

It argues for impermanence with the force of a permanent injunction.

It encourages thought and contemplation, but the final destination is thoughtlessness and oblivion.

It is a religion without God, without a final word, and without even a final existence.

Why has it gained such a following? For the very reason that Adam and Eve broke their fellowship with God: They wanted to be independent of Him and to define their own reality even though God had told them that in the day they broke His command, they would surely die. In a similar manner, Buddha claimed to be more enlightened than God, and death was his inevitable end.

But there's a more subtle attraction to Buddhism-the sense of being in control and fully insulated from the world of care. If you break off all attachments, you cease to worry. If you have no loves, you will never have a broken heart. If you cease to love, you cease to suffer. If you do not desire, you can never lose. That is it in a nutshell.

Suppose you were waiting to check in for a flight to a particular destination and had your suitcase beside you. If you were to step away for a few minutes, leaving your luggage unguarded, what recourse would you have should that bag be stolen? You certainly couldn't go to the airline counter and demand it back, because it was in your care when you lost it. You were in control, no one else. But if it was lost after you had already checked it in, it's the responsibility of the airline to find it for you. You had committed it to their care.

In Buddhism, everything is in your care. All losses are yours. There is no "other" to whom you can go. But the message or Jesus Christ is a very different story. The apostle Paul came to realize how hollow his impeccable credentials were, though he had once boasted of them as his claim to perfection. There came a moment of surrender when he laid them all at the feet of Jesus and said, "I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him for that day" (2 Timothy 1:12).

Turn all your loves, your attachments, your affections over to Jesus Christ, and He guards for you what He wants to bless you with. By delivering into His keeping all that is important to you, you will find that He preserves for you the beauty of your loves and protects you from the illusion of autonomy.

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