Buddhism and Christianity: Compared and Contrasted

Abstract

In October, 1911, Rudolf Otto began a journey that was to last until the end of July, 1912. In India, he came into contact with Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and Parsees, and he was impressed by the Buddhist traditions of Burma and Thailand. But it was Japanese Buddhism that he found particularly attractive. In fact, he was the first modern German scholar of the study of religion to engage in dialogue with Buddhist teachers and scholars, and to practice meditation, in Japan. This journey gave to Otto's subsequent writings a breadth and depth beyond that of most of his contemporaries. And from this time on, his work gives the impression of a Religionswissenschaftler as much as of a Lutheran theologian and idealist philosopher. The lecture translated below, and previously unpublished in German or English, is Otto's first major writing in the comparative study of religion, and remains his most substantial analysis of the relationship between Buddhism and Christianity. It was delivered on the fourteenth ofJanuary, 1913, only some six months after his return from the East, to a Pflichtfortbildungschule in Berlin. Prior to his journey to the East in 1911 and 1912, Otto had done little work in the comparative study of religions, although, as early as 1910, he maintained that Christianity could only be understood against a background of comparative religion and the history of religion. Library records from Gottingen show that from 1913 onwards he was reading voraciously in the area of the comparative study of religion. But the impression created by the lecture below is that, at this stage, he was primarily dependent for his knowledge of Buddhism on what he had learnt from conversations with Buddhists. The problems of translation and interpretation inherent in this probably account for some of the more obvious mistakes of detail that he makes. On the other hand, his encounter with the living context of Buddhism