The Rudolf Steiner Archive

15. Theosophy in Relation to Buddhism and Christianity

[ 1 ] [Beginning missing.] We are [today] once again at a turning point, just as we were back then when Giordano Bruno, so to speak, broke through the heavens. It was a momentous event when Giordano Bruno drew attention to the fact that the cosmos extends infinitely and [that] countless worlds exist within its expanse. In a similar way, with regard to spiritual life, we stand before [that which is] in the present age, which appears to us as a kind of firmament: the birth and death of the human being, [and before that], the fact that spiritual science will break through this firmament [of human consciousness], just as [once] Giordano Bruno broke through the [outer] firmament. The spiritual researcher also seeks to point beyond this, just as human life extends beyond birth and death.

[ 2 ] If one takes a closer look at this [humanistic] worldview, one immediately notices that the questions at issue [today] are quite different from those of the time when the natural sciences were first developing. Natural science has had a significant impact on our entire external life, but it cannot provide answers to questions [about] fate and [about] death, [or rather about] immortality. One person is born into a good environment, another into a bad one… why [is that so]? It is the noble souls who wish to sacrifice what they have earned, who wish to give it to humanity; it is precisely these noble souls who conceive of this kind of immortality. But the very best within us is so closely bound up with our individuality that we could not possibly give it up to humanity. That would contradict the law of the world economy.

[ 3 ] The soul [of modern man] has been shaped by the natural sciences; this has given rise [within him] to a longing for a spiritual science structured along the lines of the natural sciences. However, the sources of spiritual science are not to be found where the sources of natural science originate; they are to be found where the spirit reigns, where it has its sole instrument: in the soul itself. The doctrine of reincarnation; Buddhism.

[ 4 ] What is the most important thing [in] the science of the mind? That it emphasizes the personal self. Buddhism does not do this; it speaks of Nirvana, of letting go, of the extinction of the personal [in Nirvana]. B[uddhism]: [There is a parable—a] conversation between [the sage] Nagasena and [the king] Milinda. [Using the example of a chariot, Nagasena explains:] The individual parts of the chariot can be observed and named. The collective name “chariot” is merely a name, a form. So [too] is the soul. – Buddhism does not perceive a real self that passes from life to life; only name and form are shared.

[ 5 ] Christianity: According to Christian thought, how would the greatest minds—such as Goethe—have spoken? He would have said something like this: Look at the car; although it consists of individual parts, can you drive it using the name or [the] form that unites them?

[ 6 ] The Buddha says: Birth is suffering, life is suffering, the death of a loved one is suffering—whatever one sees is suffering. But suffering exists in the world only because the soul thirsts for existence. Existence, however, is suffering, and true salvation can consist only in liberation from existence. The Buddha is infinitely great in his one-sidedness. Peace radiates from the person of the Buddha. He died at the age of eighty on October 13, 483 B.C.

[ 7 ] Christ: His entire work of redemption is condensed into three years of his life. He suffers on the Mount of Olives; he surrenders himself to suffering. Christ does not give his disciples his teaching, but himself. Surrendering to suffering is what it means to follow Christ; fleeing from suffering is the way of the Buddha. The Buddha shows us what a human being can become—the disciple is to become like the Buddha. Christ shows us how the divine enters into the development of the earth. One becomes a Buddha through the powers of the human soul—one encounters Christ.

[ 8 ] One of the Buddha’s disciples asks: Is there life after death? — Another asks: Does a person enter a spiritual existence after death? — The Buddha replies: Where Nirvana begins, human thought and knowledge must cease to assert themselves. The self is annihilated; it is nothingness. – One senses that the Buddha is a final stage [of a development], an end. Christ is a beginning! The Buddha is the twilight of an era; Christ is the dawn. The Buddha turns away from the corpse as an image of revulsion and suffering. Six hundred years later, the cross bearing the corpse is the image of life, the victory of life over death.

[ 9 ] Buddha says: The world is an illusion, a maya, a deception. The world is to blame for our imperfections. – The Christian worldview [on the other hand] knows full well: What surrounds us is a revelation of spiritual and soul forces; if a person views the world solely as material, this stems only from his imperfect capacity for understanding. Man himself is an expression of divine forces; if he sins, he sins because he has fallen. – The Christian seeks to be freed from what he has brought upon himself.

[ 10 ] It is not the world that paints this [limited] firmament for us, [but] our imperfect understanding that shows it to us this way. We do not have to overcome the world; we have to overcome ourselves. That is the meaning of development: to overcome oneself, so that one no longer sees external existence as limited by ourselves, but [will] perceive the spiritual world everywhere beyond it.

[ 11 ] Buddhism is fear of existence; the realization that all imperfection stems from one’s own self is what matters in Christianity. Christ did not despise the earth; he chose it as his sphere of activity:

I will be with you always, even to the end of the age. (Mt 28:20)

[ 11 ] Great and liberated is the soul that contemplates the existence of the external world and sees it as the foaming waves of the sea coming and going, sees it as mirages that flash and vanish—whoever views existence in this way will never be found by the Prince of Death.

From the violence that binds all beings,
a person who overcomes themselves is set free.