Many Japanese Buddhists seem to find in the life of Jesus a radiant model of all they have dreamed of, all they have sought after, because he lived the love that freely gives its life for others.

A learned old Buddhist once told me about his relationship to Jesus. As a young man, he had been sent to university. This period was intended to prepare him to take over his father's responsibilities as priest in the local temple, and he spent his days studying Buddhism and pondering religious questions. One day he came across a Bible and began to read it. Here he found something that both disturbed and attracted him--new ideas, new perspectives. Above all, the encounter with the Gospels shook him to the core of his being.

"After I had read all four Gospels attentively, I was obliged to say to myself: If this is Christianity, then I am a Christian!" He let these words hang in the air for a while, and then continued: "But then I traveled to Europe, and I no longer understood anything. . . ."

In my encounter with Japanese religion, I have seen a lot of this intuitive love for Jesus. He has shown people the path to what the Japanese call honmono, that which is unfailingly genuine.

But this love awakens a hope that often proves illusory: when the Japanese seek it in the church that is so proud to bear Jesus's name, they often turn away in disappointment. When my friend traveled to Europe, he could not make sense of what he saw there: where was the Jesus he had met in the Bible? The painful paradox is that many of Jesus's friends in Japan prefer to keep their distance from the Christian church. At best, they can see there a faint shadow of what they have met in the Gospels; at its worst, they see the church as a betrayal of Jesus.

What is it that they have seen in the Gospels? First and foremost, it is the sacrifice made by love. Christians often summarize the good news in well-known phrases such as "God is love," but I have often heard non-Christians point to Jesus's words about the love that lays down its life: "Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. The one who loves his life, loses it, and the one who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life" (John 12:24-25).

It is certainly not by sheer chance that precisely these words make such a strong appeal. Behind the facade of our competitive society, people dream and yearn for love and sacrifice--this feeling may be self-contradictory and unclear, vulnerable and fumbling, but it exists. Sometimes I have been privileged to meet people who showed me this sensitivity to the sacrifice love makes. When they came into contact with integrity and genuineness, they reacted spontaneously, like the needle of a compass when it enters a magnetic field.

One evening I sat in the simple rooms of a completely new religious movement and listened to the leader, a twenty-year-old woman. Outwardly she looked no different from other young people in Japan, but she had an inner radiance and extraordinary gifts. She could read people's thoughts, she spoke in tongues, and she had the charisma of healing; last but not least, she was a gifted speaker. I had then--and still have--many objections to the doctrine of this movement and to some of its activities, but I quickly understood that there was something more here than the typical appeal of new religious movements to happiness and success.

She spoke of love and sacrifice. She had no manuscript but spoke simply from heart to heart. Around her sat sixty or seventy leaders of the movement, young and old, most of them men. She knew that many of them were attracted by the things that happened around her, and she said: "If you have come here in order to experience strange things--ecstasies, prophecies, miracles, and exorcisms of demons--you can go back home again. It is not you that I need. The real miracle takes place when love creates a person anew. I need people who will give all they have, without expecting anything in return. True love will always involve pain. The one who loves others unreservedly will meet opposition."

She drew the listeners into her own magnetic field, and their faces opened up. She touched their deepest dreams: "Our love must not be like the flowers we use to decorate our lives. Our love must be like dandelions. They get trampled on and weeded out, but they do not complain. They just go on blooming and putting forth new shoots. You can cover them in asphalt, but they break open a path to the light. We cannot love without being trampled on. Love leads to renunciation and sacrifice. But we continue to bloom as if nothing has happened."

I had never heard a sermon like it. Her words were quiet and penetrating, shot through with light, and the listeners sat spellbound. They had been in contact with something they knew to be true.

I met another leader of the same movement, who had likewise been drawn into the magnetic field of love. We spoke about Jesus's love and sacrifice, and he affirmed: "It was impossible for anyone who loved so completely as Jesus to become old. He had to die--but then, what a fantastic resurrection he had!" This man had never set foot inside a Christian church.

We went on to speak about the path of faith. I admitted how difficult it was to follow Jesus and to love unreservedly. He looked at me and asked quietly: "But is not that the reason we were born? Did we not receive life in order to give it away?" I almost jumped out of my seat, and looked at him suspiciously. Was he putting on a hypocritical display of piety? Was he trying to impress me? But no, there was no pretense involved. I sat face-to-face with Nathanael, "an Israelite in whom there is no deceit" (cf. John 1:47). I felt that I myself was more like Nicodemus, who asked Jesus about the new birth and received the answer: "Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not know these things?" (John 3:10).

The dream of love's sacrifice has many variations. It is chiseled in stone and wood in sensitive lines on the faces of the popular saints and gods and buddhas. It is handed on in legends and fairy tales.

One ancient legend tells of the bodhisattva Kannon (Chinese, Kuan-yin), best known as the goddess of mercy, adored and loved by millions in the East. One woman adored Kannon with such a deep devotion that her husband became jealous. One day as she stood in prayer before the statue of Kannon, he struck her with his sword and left her there bleeding. After a while she came home as if nothing had happened. Her husband ran in perplexity back to the scene of his crime, and there he saw the statue of Kannon bleeding from a wound.

Why has Kannon appealed so strongly to people in the East? The two characters for her name mean "the one who sees the cries of the world." Her gentle features reveal an infinite compassion. Sometimes Kannon is portrayed with eleven faces looking in all directions, or with a thousand arms stretched out to touch the whole world's suffering. Does not the people's devotion to Kannon show their abiding awareness of the mystery of grace and mercy?

A few years ago I was present at the performance of a play in the headquarters of one of the new religions. Five thousand of its adherents were present, and we were fascinated by the simple message of the drama. A princess, fleeing from her enemy, was given shelter by poor peasants in a remote mountain village. It was winter, and they waited in vain for spring--it seemed that it would never come. They shared the food they had, but at last all their stocks were exhausted, and they faced hunger and death. The village was under the curse of the spirit of the lake, who prevented the ice and snow and cold from giving way to spring.

Finally the princess made the great decision: without telling the villagers what she planned to do, she sacrificed herself to the spirit of the lake. All we heard was her voice offstage as she was lost to sight in the frozen landscape. And suddenly, miraculously, the landscape was transformed into green fields and meadows with flowers and trees and birds.

The story was simple, but it evoked strong and deep feelings. And this was popular Buddhism at its best.

Many have the impression that Buddhism is a self-centered religion, a higher form of cultivation of the self, which does not care whether the world goes to ruin, provided only that the self can attain inner peace and enlightenment. It is of course true that a religion that seeks the innermost nature of the human person can immure its adherents in an isolated obsession with the self, and Christians too continually yield to the temptation to make the little world of their ego the center of all things: my experiences, my relationship to God, my eternal bliss. But a self-centered Christianity is a denial of the Gospel; in the same way, a self-seeking Buddhism is a distortion of Buddhism.

One of Buddhism's primary concerns is to unmask the illusion of an immutable core in the ego. All suffering is generated by a blinded clinging to the false ego. The true human being is the one who has seen through the false world we build up around ourselves. The world of the ego is smashed to pieces, and one discovers oneself as part of a larger universe.

We can make the point with another metaphor: the ego person is a note that enjoys its own self in isolation from the music, but the true human persons discover themselves and their meaning as single notes in a great symphony that dies as an ego note and rises to new life in the totality of the symphony. It possesses its life only thanks to others and in connection with others.

This is why the highest ideal in Eastern Buddhism is not the ascetic who has attained his goal and then enjoys an untroubled peace outside the cycle of transmigrating souls. The ideal is the one who has attained enlightenment but is willing to renounce the peace of his own soul and chooses to return to the world, with its desires and its pain. How can one enjoy bliss for oneself when the condemned of the earth are blinded and wander around in suffering and darkness?

A bodhisattva is such a person, who gives up his or her own salvation in order to help the helpless. In the world of mythology, these are the saints who have achieved perfection after immensely lengthy periods of asceticism and self-discipline but like Kannon then choose to embrace the distress of the world with ears and eyes open. They are worshiped throughout the East as divine helpers. But the same is true in the world of reality, where some of the great masters leave their distant monasteries and turn up on streets and in market squares, sitting among the homeless and poor, playing with children, and sharing their insights with those they meet. There are also nameless popular "saints" who themselves are not aware that they are putting into practice the bodhisattva ideal. They are nuggets of gold in the dirt of the streets, lotuses in a muddy puddle.

Perhaps it is not so surprising, then, that so many intuitively grasp the heart of the Gospel: God's love, which leads him to offer his life. Many find Jesus's life a radiant model of all they have dreamed of, all they have sought. He is the grain of wheat that bears fruit because it fell into the earth and died. He lived the love that freely gives its life for others. His work was fulfilled when he died on a cross. The Christian church and everything connected with it--church buildings and dogmas, ecclesiastical structures and rituals--is experienced as an imported religion with a foreign, alien taste and smell, but Jesus walks directly out of the pages of the Gospel, across the boundaries of the church, and into the religious reality of the East.

One of the great Buddhist reformers in the modern period offers a very dramatic expression of this intuitive love for Jesus. Enryo Inoue began his reforming work in the 1880s, in a period when Japan was almost drowning in a wave of Europeanization. The West was the model in every field, from technology and the army and education to cooking, fashions, and social conventions. Christianity was admired as the spiritual basis of the superior West and was acclaimed as the future religion of Japan; people streamed to the churches. It was at this period that the word ribaibaru entered the Japanese language, from the English religious term revival. But those who were conscious of their Japanese identity were afraid that Japan would perish and lose its own specific nature if it "sold itself" to the West.

Inoue threw himself into the struggle for the soul of Japan. He proclaimed that Buddhism was the only spiritual force that could save Japan from cultural and religious destruction. He turned his strongest weapons on Christianity, in book after book and pamphlet after pamphlet, claiming that Christianity not only was in conflict with science and sound reason but it had allied itself with the great powers in the West in order to undermine the traditions of the East. Christianity was a wicked religion that must be extirpated if Japan and the East were to survive.

And yet this fanatical anti-Christian rabble-rouser had a strange fondness for Jesus. He fought with tooth and nail to destroy Christianity, but at the same time he confessed that he not only respected Jesus but loved him: "Oh, I feel myself one with Jesus! Oh, Jesus is my brother. . . . Oh, Jesus is my faithful friend!"

The words in this brief declaration of love are extraordinarily powerful. It is not a matter of course for a Japanese to admit that he loves anything at all, and it is exceedingly surprising that a Buddhist who wishes to eradicate Christianity should "love" Jesus!

Many Buddhists share Inoue's feelings. The aggressive campaign against Christianity has virtually disappeared by now, but most Buddhists have little appreciation of traditional Christianity and its preaching; they find it incomprehensible that intellectually gifted persons should base their lives on Christianity. These reservations vanish in the case of Jesus, however: he challenges them and disturbs them. He touches something they think they recognize in their own visions. He draws on springs of water from which they themselves have drunk. In Jesus they encounter a master who shows the path to a true and genuine life. Jesus is detached from the Christian church, walks out of the Gospels, and becomes one of their own masters. He becomes a bodhisattva. "We Buddhists are ready to accept Christianity," wrote Masaharu Anezaki, one of the pioneers of the science of religion in Japan. "Indeed, our belief in [the] Buddha is belief in Christ. We see Christ, because we see [the] Buddha!"

Anezaki called Christianity the religion of hope. Even Jesus's last words on the cross--"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"--were borne up by his absolute faith in God. Christ came to lead us away from the desire that makes us cling to ourselves and to set us free to love God.

One of the most prominent Buddhist poets in the twentieth century, Hyakuzo Kurata (1891-1943), was deeply inspired by Christ. His well-known novel The Priest and His Disciples tells of Shinran Shonin, the thirteenth-century Buddhist reformer who is sometimes called Buddhism's Luther. Although there can be no doubt that the book has a Buddhist message, it also shows clear traces of the author's love of Christ. This love finds its clearest expression in the letters he wrote in 1915, the year before he published the famous novel. His words about love and sacrifice still retain something of the naked vulnerability that made such a strong appeal when they were written:

"I have understood how senseless it is to speak of love, if one does not know that love necessarily becomes a cross." Most people believe that they can love without renouncing their own selves. But how can one receive the Holy Spirit without sacrificing one's selfish wishes? "If I do not sacrifice all my own wishes on God's altar, all my actions are mere imperfect halves. This is what Christ's cross means. You cannot love others unless you yourself first die."

Kurata's interpretation of love and the cross can be found in many variations in modern Buddhist thinkers who see Jesus's life as the realization of the Buddhist idea that true life arises where the ego dies. They read the hymn in praise of Christ in the letter to the Philippians (2:6-8) as a poetic description of the path God took when he renounced his own self:

Though he was in the form of God,
he did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness . . .
He humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death--
even to death on a cross.

The Greek word kenoun, employed in this text, means literally to "empty out"; from this comes the word kenosis, a radical expression for the self-lowering in which Jesus "emptied himself" of his divine status. Modern Buddhists see Christ's "emptying out" as the deepest expression of God's innermost being. This selfless love is the emptying out of his divinity.

Accordingly, Jesus really does have some close friends among Buddhists in Japan. Some think of themselves as travelers who are en route to the Christian faith but can never become Christians. To "become Christians" in the traditional understanding of this term would imprison them in a system where Christ himself is held captive, that is, the Christian church with its foreign forms of worship, organization, and doctrine. They prefer to remain en route. They are Christ's non-Christian friends, who seek him outside the church.

From the church's perspective, one is of course entitled to query their interpretation of Christ. He is their friend and master, one who has attained enlightenment, a bodhisattva, but they have no sympathy with the church's teaching. The incarnation and Jesus's life, his death and resurrection, are not regarded as salvific events but as unique models of the sacrifice love requires. The path that Jesus took becomes meaningful only when one follows him.

If one adheres to the church's doctrine, such a position is doubtless inadequate. And yet we cannot doubt that Jesus's non-Christian friends remind the church of something it has often forgotten, namely the summons to follow Jesus. The hymn in praise of Christ is not an isolated block without relation to the rest of the letter to the Philippians: it is quoted precisely in order to call the Christian community to have "the same mind" as Christ himself.

Let us add one further point. By making Jesus their friend and master, Buddhists have taken him out of the church and the context that made him an alien Western import. They have discovered that he also belongs to the East--or rather, that his life and death break through all borders and call to everyone who belongs to the truth.

Notto R. Thelle, D.Th., is a professor in the Faculty of Theology, the University of Oslo, Norway. Having studied Buddhism at Otani University in Kyoto, he acted as associate director of the NCC (National Christian Council) Center for the Study of Japanese Religions in Kyoto from 1974 to 1985. He was also a visiting scholar at the center in 1999 and 2000.

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