From Buddha to Jesus: An Insider’s View of Buddhism and Christianity (Steve Cioccolanti, 2007)

When reviewers write for Amazon.com, they’re invited to give a book one to five stars. [1]

Forgive me for being contrary, but sometimes I can’t give just one grade to a book. This one gets perhaps three stars for its easy-to-read unpacking of some unsatisfactory elements in Asian (especially Thai) folk-Buddhism and how a simple faith in Jesus is the answer.

But it deserves only one star for scholarship – both about Buddhism and Christianity.

There are about 350 million people in the world who call themselves Buddhists. [2] My hunch is that a greater number of thoughtful Westerners convert to Buddhism from Christianity, than vice versa. The ones I’ve met have said something like this: ‘Buddhism offers me inner peace, encourages me to live contemplatively, but Christianity is too aggressive/Western/rational’.

The aim of Steve’s book (I can’t spell his surname) is laudable. He was brought up in Buddhist Thailand, and writes with some authority about how ordinary people practise their Buddhist religion. Examples: most Buddhists can’t recite the Eightfold Path. Do they talk much about reincarnation? No, but rather about going to heaven or hell – and in fact many Buddhists believe *both* in reincarnation and heaven/hell (which might surprise many!). Did you know that Buddhist notions of reincarnation are sexist? It’s better to be reincarnated a man than a woman. Few Buddhists practise meditation. Buddha opposed laughter: one of his 227 rules for monks says it’s a sin to laugh if others hear you. Another (also for men): ‘No urinating while standing!’ (Why did I not know that? How many Buddhist monks have always obeyed that one?). And much else: I found these sorts of insights the most interesting aspect of the book.

When you begin a conversation with someone and call yourself a Christian, and they respond ‘But I’m a Buddhist’ where do you go from there? Steve’s approach is to ask questions about how they live up to Buddha’s ‘Five Commandments’ – don’t kill, don’t steal, no sexual immorality, don’t lie or speak any evil, don’t use any addictive substance.

Can you see where this is going? Take the first one: don’t kill. That refers to any living organism, right? So do you brush your teeth? Are you sure you’ve never killed an ant while walking? Do you know what anti-biotics do? Etc. And about not stealing: ever downloaded any music on your computer without paying for it? Addictive substances: how about coffee, or even tea?

Net result: the person being ‘witnessed to’ has to agree that they are wretched sinners, creating future ‘bad karma’. But, responds our evangelist-author, Jesus offers grace to cover all our sins, through his ‘blood atonement’ which annuls ‘karmic revenge’.

Which brings me to the least satisfactory aspect of our author’s approach – his fundamentalism. There are plenty of references in the book to ‘end-time prophecies’, heaven and hell, the error of believing in evolution, Abraham Lincoln being a born-again Bible-believing Christian (he wasn’t – at least not in the sense American fundamentalists understand those terms. And if he was Bible-believing, why did he never attend churches?). And so on.

So is the book valuable? Perhaps, but only for pre-College young people from conservative backgrounds. Once they start getting a better education, they’ll be challenging a lot of the theology here: for example, Steve’s too-close equating of sin with karma and heaven with Nirvana. One of the Amazon.com critics writes: ‘This “worldview confusion,” as James Sire labeled it, is rampant and destroys Cioccolanti’s presentation for anyone who knows what these words mean. It is like reading a mirror image of Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh’s books on Christianity, which suffer from the same problem to the same insufferable degree, but in the opposite direction.’

Two better books from a Christian perspective written respectively by a professional anthropologist and two professors of philosophy of religion are “The Spirit of Buddhism: a Christian Perspective on Buddhist Thought,” by Burnett, and “Buddhism: A Christian Exploration and Appraisal,” by Yandell and Netland.

[1] See Amazon.com reviews here – http://books.google.com/books?id=gsoT1m_y6PcC&sitesec=reviews

[2] http://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/history/bud_statwrld.htm

A critical book review by a western Buddhist monk –
http://www.scribd.com/doc/13296079/Book-Review-by-Ven-S-Dhammika-From-Buddha-to-Jesus

Steve’s Website: http://www.buddhabook.org/

Rowland Croucher

September 22, 2010

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