One source of my interest in this question (as to how Christianity and Buddhism compare) derives from some time spent as a volunteer English teacher to the Catholic novices in training at a nearby church. As mine is a very Hispanic area of southern Colorado, they were all Mexican. Fine young men, I thought, good humored and, of course, serious about their spiritual growth.

One of them spoke English pretty well, and in conversation one day, as I made no secret of my Buddhism, he brought up the idea that our religions were the same in so far, at least, as they both believed in the soul. To this I had to reply that I thought there might be a problem with this since I thought the Buddhist doctrine of Anatman was both an important one to Buddhism and a direct denial of the existence of the soul.

His English and the demands on his time made it more or less impossible to continue our discussion at an appropriate depth, but this fired my interest in just what our religions might have in common. It was clear to me that much separated them, of course, beginning with Buddhism’s actual explicit denial of the existence of a creator god external to the universe, the one god so very central to the Abramaic religions of the book.

But is belief the core of similarity between religions?

For instance when the novices talked about the amount of time they spent in prayer, and said that most of that prayer was a kind of rote chanting, it occurred to me to wonder if this was not somewhat like the chanting I had heard in most formal Buddhist settings. Like the ceremonies of high mass in churches and cathedrals, these group events generally produce in me a very mellow state of mind, a sense of harmonious being among all the people there that brings a kind of peace and tranquility but that also has some larger dimension that is difficult to specify in words. Part of me wants to call it the presence of the holy or the sacred, but the part that is from the usual skeptical college-trained background is highly resistant to that language.

I leave to the side (>>>) the question of whether both Buddhism and Christianity – not as a matter of belief, but of experience – may legitimately be said to pursue the presence of the sacred in their religious practices. Certainly that pursuit is not something I generally associate with the practice of meditation as it is described, for instance, by Thich Nhat Hahn or others I have read or the few teachers by whom I have been instructed.  Instead, one goes to what they call practice first as a matter of spiritual discipline and second as a means, perhaps, of dealing with troubled states of mind. And in this regard, practice is much like prayer as it is usually conducted by Christians as well.

Such at least is  the understanding that I take from a classic work of Christian devotion that the novices put me in touch with – Spiritual Combat by Lorenzo Scupoli, a priest of the order of Theatines from the time of the Counter-Reformation, the order to which the novices’ spiritual leader, Father “Pat” Valdez, belonged. Scupoli lived from 1530 to 1610. His book was published in 1589. Scupoli’s Wikipedia entry states that it was a significant best-seller of its time, and it is evidently still of much importance to especially the Roman Catholic religious. The novices were surprised that I had not heard of it.

I am, in fact, working from an abridged and somewhat “freshened” version published by the Sophia Institute Press in 2002. The work contains two main parts the names of which indicate the ties to Buddhism as it is generally conceived today –

Spiritual Combat, how to win your spiritual battles and attain inner peace.

Interior Peace, the path to paradise.

A random opening of this book brings up a typical instance of Scupoli’s attention to the minutest perturbations of one’s consciousness. If those of us who do not happen to believe in “the Evil One” as responsible for the arising of feelings like impatience or jealousy in the human heart and consciousness will just put that distraction aside for a moment, we can see that Scupoli is looking at a mental state with which we can easily enough identify.  This is from page 87, a photo:

This is not the troubled mind of a criminal Scupoli is concerned with, but “a sick person struggling to maintain a patient will.” How am I, in my advancing age, to deal with this infirmity or that? I might easily accept that I myself must retire from the scene for awhile or for good (as we interestingly say), but what about my wife? What about the help I might otherwise be to my grandchildren and their parents? What about the imposition on those who must care for me?  (Scupoli is explicit about that concern a page or so later.)

Let’s compare Scupoli’s advice on calming the mind with Buddhist. The Christian has three quick pieces of advice right here and one later, more or less standing  piece.

First,

This is the way to guard against and resist this snare. When in the state of trial, be very careful not to allow any desires or projects that you cannot at once carry into effect, and which on that account are likely to disturb you.

This tells the practitioner to guard against the entry into mind of distress-producing thoughts. Admonitions on this order are common in Buddhist thought. (Go to this page for some particulars.)