TotD: Bodhisattva

This blog post is a follow on post from TotD: Christian. If you have not read that one I suggest you peruse it in the first instance and after such has been accomplished come back to this post as it continues the thoughts of the previously mentioned post.

I don't think I have ever used ideas from a non-Yahweh worshipping religion to talk about an idea in Christianity before. I believe this is the first time. All that education is finally paying off ha.

For those of you who don't have a notion what the titular term is could you have a guess which religion it comes from?

Buddhism is the answer. Not all forms of Buddhism have Bodhisattva's (pronounced Bud-tiss-sat-vah) [there are more variations between the 'denominations' of Buddhism than there are between denominations of Christianity, this has prompted some scholars of religion to call for terming them individually and not putting them all under the umbrella term of Buddhism.]
Anyway, in Theravada Buddhism (the main one you would learn about in school) Buddha refers to himself in his previous incarnations as the Bodhisattva. The term is more commonly associated with Mahayana Buddhism though. In this religion a person training to be a Buddha is known as a Bodhisattva.

The Bodhisattva is someone who, over successive lifetimes, commits themselves to learning and living the example of the Buddha in order that, one day in one lifetime sometime, they too may become enlightened as the Buddha was and thus become a Buddha themselves.

Similarly to this as Christians we are like Bodhisattva's to Christ. The analogy has a lot of falling down points of course: Jesus is alive and active in the affairs of the Earth, the Holy Spirit lives in us while the Buddha is distant and we don't turn into another Jesus at the end (but we do become one with Him) nor of course do we have many lifetimes to work on allowing ourselves to be transformed to be like Jesus.

However, there are similarities that are worth noting: the Buddha, like Jesus, left teachings about how to be like Him; both Christianity and Bodhisattva have the idea of learning from the teacher and training to be like Him and both have an idea of what it means to do this successfully. Also both have a finality and a hope for the future about what happens when we train to be like the teacher.

I am in no way saying Buddhism and Christianity are alike, they are not, but it is interesting to look to the Bodhisattva in particular to understand a little bit more what it means to be Christ-like and what it means to be Christian.
Of course all I have mentioned is found in the Bible, and if we took that as seriously as we say we do there would be no need for my mind to think about practically living like Jesus in the world and what it would look like (because all Christians would do it) and happen across the idea of the Bodhisattva and how they live out the teachings of their religion's founder and train themselves to be like him in order to accomplish the things he accomplished.

I think it's an interesting idea to try and reclaim the word Christian from either being Christ followers only, or even just mere spectators in a church, to the idea that we are to be like little Christs living in our individual and unique situations, in the same way that a Bodhisattva is like a little Buddha in their situation.

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