The Strange Phenomenon of Religious Practices Developing Simultaneously in Remote Cultures and an Example from Buddhism and Christianity

I am often intrigued by the way in which religions that have had no historical or intellectual contact in the developing of their traditions nonetheless develop their traditions along similar lines and arrive at similar conclusions. Anthropologists and philosophers who study cultural movements and glance bigger picture dynamics have commented on the way scientific, social, ethical, and religious movements trend to develop synchronically over periods. One can point narrowly to the rise of new religious movements in the 18^th century when new scientific discoveries challenged traditional orthodoxies as a key contributor to the emergence of new religions from North America to the Far East against a period directly prior where there was mostly stagnation and status quo expressions.

Or one can point to the broader historic pictures of a Bronze Age or Karl Jasper’s famous term “Axial Age” which reinforced the teleological notion that history had a goal from the suggestion that new ways of religious thinking and ethical behavior corresponded to a relatively small window from the 8^th to 3^rd Century BCE.

Oftentimes, these similarities are not limited to a broad ethos towards progress, but remain eerily myopic in scope despite the fact that they are treated at best as generic placeholders meant for context, even while they do not suggest a conclusive scientific worldview.

Most of the books written in the past century about Christianity and Buddhism that reflect positively on the two as conversation partners often take the view that similarity cannot be overstated. From those with deeper comprehension to those with minimal interest, Western thinkers from Karl von Hase to Marcus Borg have engaged the topic of similarity, often without reference to Jasper’s Axial Age theory. My examples here are one directional, primarily because the rigid dogmatism of Christian thinkers in the past has often detracted from their ability to be open to Buddhism. Conversely, Buddhists historically have often been open to syncretic treatments of their religion and giving honor to other religious leaders standing outside. In particular, Japan Buddhists who operated under the tradition of honji suijaku have lived comfortably within a Shinto-Buddhist worldview that has only temporarily been challenged in modern times.

One similarity comes from the writing of Rennyo Shonin, a Japanese Buddhist monk writing in the 15^th century. Speaking on the topic of entrusting oneself to Amida Buddha as a means of salvation in his Pure Land sect, Rennyo notes how his message of shinjin (trust) is open to all peoples both male and female, young and old. Feudal Japan’s legacy as a patriarchal society, a fact common in most societies around the global, meant that the place of women was often structured to a more subservient role. The declaration that women had the same rights to salvation as men was radical and “foreign” to such a culture, and its development was unprovoked by Christianity and the work of St. Paul who also made pivotal and radical statements about the social standing of Greeks, Jews, men, and women in Christ Jesus. Christianity did not touch the Japanese mainland until the 16^th century, and for about 200 more years its contact was limited to the extreme South in Kyushu. Like Christianity, these changes were not preempted by social change in the culture (e.g., from a broader push for equal rights) but seem to come directly from within the workings of the religious writing of which they were a part.

There are hundreds, maybe thousands of similar stories of “axial” phenomena, and I am not offering a thesis as to why this happens. The fact that it does happen should be taken at face value until some better theory arises. We cannot appeal to supernaturalism despite its attraction. Any such appeals are tacitly appeals about greater meaning. And one might challenge any such attempt at meaning by introducing a reductio ad absurdum in which two movies with similar themes are released one after another despite the fact that in prior years, public interest and consumption of such topics is nowhere to be found. Why does this occur? We can posit reasons. We can suggest “studio espionage” in such cases with no proof since conspiracy theories help us cope when information is limited. But in such cases, we would be cautious to attribute cause to supernatural forces. The temptation towards meaning reminds me of a scholarly debate I once watched between historian Bart Ehrman and theologian William Lane Craig, in which the latter noted that despite what we cannot say in the academy without committing career suicide (a riposte against Ehrman), what we think and do in the privacy of our homes is quite different. And so it is.

Yet the problem persists as cultures with no contact, one with another, progress to views that often seem borrowed from each other. While the topic is not popular in academic circles today, it remains one of those “energies” found beneath the current of anthropology and philosophy, for which we, as post-moderns, are either too quick or too slow to attribute causation and develop meaning.