Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
A statue of Siddartha Gautama preaching. Since the arrival of Christian missionaries in India in the 1st century (traces of Christians in Kerala from 1st-century Saint Thomas Christians), followed by the arrival of Buddhism in Western Europe in the 4th and 5th centuries, similarities have been perceived between the practices of Buddhism and Christianity.
[5] [30] While some variations of Buddhism believe in an impersonal eternal Buddha or trikaya, in general Buddhism sees empty space as eternal and without a starting point of creation. [ 31 ] [ 32 ] According to the Dalai Lama, belief in a Creator could be associated with the understanding of emptiness, but "once a certain degree of realization ...
Most scholars believe there is no historical evidence of any influence by Buddhism on Christianity, [verification needed] Leslie Houlden states that although modern parallels between the teachings of Jesus and Buddha have been drawn, these comparisons emerged after missionary contacts in the 19th century and there is no historically reliable evidence of contacts between Buddhism and Jesus. [28]
In the 19th century, some scholars began to perceive similarities between Buddhist and Christian practices. For example, in 1878, T.W. Rhys Davids wrote that the earliest missionaries to Tibet observed that similarities have been seen in Christianity and Buddhism since the first known contact was made between adherents of the two religions. [5]
This fusion became so heavy that when Emperor Wuzong of the Tang dynasty began persecuting Buddhists in the 9th century, he claimed that Christianity was merely a heresy of Buddhism rather than its own religion. [44] This equation of the two led to the collapse of Nestorian Christianity in China alongside the persecution of Buddhism. [43]
Main page; Contents; Current events; Random article; About Wikipedia; Contact us
The list of religious populations article provides a comprehensive overview of the distribution and size of religious groups around the world. This article aims to present statistical information on the number of adherents to various religions, including major faiths such as Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and others, as well as smaller religious communities.
The various denominations of Christianity fall into several large families, shaped both by culture and history. Christianity arose in the first century AD after Rome had conquered much of the western parts of the fragmented Hellenistic empire created by Alexander the Great. The linguistic and cultural divisions of the first century AD Roman ...