There is no evidence and virtually no historical possibility that Jesus travelled to India, Nepal or Tibet. And the idea that he learned Eastern philosophy there, Hinduism or Buddhism, is problematic on other grounds. First, there are the obvious and fundamental contradictions between the teachings of Hinduism and Buddhism and what Jesus ended up teaching. Central to Hinduism is the belief that our soul is trapped in a cycle of reincarnations in this world, until we can escape this physical creation and merge with the impersonal life principle of the universe known as Brahman. By contrast, Jesus clearly taught that we have just one existence in this world, in which we’re obliged to worship a personal creator God, who at the climax of history will raise the dead bodily and renew the physical cosmos. That ain’t Hinduism.

The differences with Buddhism are equally real. The Buddha taught that there is no continuing self, no soul of any kind. Central to the Buddha’s philosophy is the insistence that existence is basically illusory. The goal of life therefore isn’t to merge with Brahman or worship God, not even to be reincarnated or resurrected, it is to remove all desire for self. Only then can the Buddhist be liberated from this fleeting, changing existence and enter into Nirvana, the unbinding of all physical, mental, and emotional processes. What Jesus taught about our eternal existence in God’s coming kingdom would have been anathema to the Buddha.

Now, Jesus would have agreed with at least four of the five basic commandments of Buddhism, these are the Pancasilais. So the first four are: refrain from taking life, refrain from stealing, refrain from sexual immorality, and refrain from lying. Like most Jews of the day, Jesus would’ve accepted this. Famously, he didn’t accept the fifth Buddhist commandment, to refrain from alcohol. So there are a few ethical similarities, but I can’t see any major theoretical agreements between the Buddha and Jesus, not on the topic of God or suffering or the afterlife, or pretty much anything else.

My point is that if Jesus did travel to the East, he obviously returned to Galilee having rejected pretty much everything he learned there. And there’s an almost humorous problem with the story of Nicholas Notovitch that Jesus went to Tibet to learn Buddhism. Buddhism didn’t reach Tibet until the time of King Songtsän Gampo in the 600s AD. Any earlier than that and it wouldn’t have been Buddhism that the intrepid Jesus learnt, it would’ve been the traditions of Bon, the animistic and shamanistic indigenous religion of Tibet. The whole thing is nuts.

By John Dickson