There was one similarity which tends to get overlooked. If we look at what Jesus was aiming to achieve, he appears to be trying to form something akin to a monastic order among his disciples. He exhorts them to leave their wealth and possessions, adopt celibacy etc. It really didn't have the feeling of a lay doctrinal religion in the making, more a path to gnosis.
You raise an excellent point that does tend to get overlooked.
Jesus said:
Luke 14:33
So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.
This is very clear.
The "
ideal" lifestyle promoted by Jesus himself in the Synoptics, unvarnished by the exigencies of later periods, consisted of a simple itinerant (wandering) existence and the complete renunciation of all personal possessions. This is inimical to the condition and mores of a "
householder", which is why the New Testament also tells us that he had a mass of "sympathizers" who patronized him while remaining in a domestic, family life.
Compare this with the Buddhist monks of the Theravada tradition who also own nothing and depend on laypeople for food and clothing. The Pali term for a monk (
Bhikkhu) literally means "beggar", I think - please correct me if wrong.
Roy C. Amore, a member of the Department of Religious Studies of the University of Windsor, noted in relation to this in a study:
"Lord, let me first go and bury my father." But Jesus said to him, "Follow me, and leave the dead to bury their own dead." From an Indian point of view, Jesus is speaking to two men who have asked to be monks, full-time followers of the wandering master, who have not severed their ties to home and relatives. What would be obligatory for a householder — burying one's father — becomes unthinkable for a monk. What the householder takes for granted — the minimum security of having a roof over one's head — is not available to the wandering monk. There are many passages in Buddhism that make these points in various ways
New Testament scholars including Gerd Theissen, Dale Allison and Dominic Crossan have long noted that an "itinerant/householder" division was established by Jesus himself. To quote one 2011 study by Philip L. Tite:
The itinerant life required a lack of family. The one who responds to the call is to abandon his wife, children, and broader household. Mark 10:28–31 and Luke 14:26 defines discipleship as a status in opposition to family, and thereby reject the family structure. The tensions between Jesus and his own family in all four New Testament gospels again present him as the exemplar of itinerancy. Third, a charismatic wanderer must lack possessions.
And yet another study:
From Jesus to his First Followers: Continuity and Discontinuity
Only itinerant followers, in Luke's view, are supposed to sell everything, whereas sympathizers may adopt a less radical attitude. This is consistent with the image of a movement that is based, at the same time, on its active members who abandon their household and on householders who guarantee hospitality.
Jesus literally instructed his disciples to leave behind "
everything" - their homes, lands, trades and families:
Mark 10:28-30
28 Peter began to say to him, “Look, we have left everything and followed you.” 29 Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news,[a] 30 who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields, with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life.
What he is saying above, is that you are to "leave" your own house and family to be received into the company of your "brothers and sisters" in the Jesus movement, who share everything in common and go about on foot without private possessions, thus acting as your surrogate family. This radical outlook (in a first century Jewish context) is typified by a set of very brisk statements that are somewhat shocking in their blunt endorsement of the itinerant life above the householder one:
Luke 9:57-62
57 As they were going along the road, someone said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.” 58 And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” 59 To another he said, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” 60 But Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” 61 Another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home.” 62 Jesus said to him, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”
The meaning above is plain as the eye to see: Jesus is telling would-be followers that if they
truly want to be among his inner core of disciples then they must be absolutely
dedicated and
single-minded in their commitment to apostolic poverty (no personal possessions) and the itinerant, travelling lifestyle reliant on the beneficence of "householder" disciples (for want of a better word) whose charitable donations and offering of their homes for temporary lodging would bankroll their way of life, so that they could be free to roam around Galilee and "
carry no purse, no bag, no sandals" (
Luke 10:4), wholly dependant upon the charity of townsfolk whom they encounter on their travels: "
Whenever you enter a town and its people welcome you, eat what is set before you" (
Luke 10:8).
It's my belief that the Orthodox Desert Fathers live as Jesus had instructed. Householder Christianity is a watered-down version lacking in the deeper meditative elements mentioned in the
Philokalia.
In essence that's correct but there was one important difference: while Jesus was itinerant, the Desert Fathers tended to remain fixed in one place: either a monastery with other monks or in a hermitage by themselves.
It's actually the mendicant orders of Catholic Europe, like the Franciscans and the Dominicans (known as "friars") who are the most akin to Jesus' way of life and to that of the Buddhist
Bhikkhus.
This is why the great Pali scholar (and Buddhist covert) Maurice O'Connell Walshe (1911-1998), former Vice-President of the Buddhist Society and Chair of the English Sangha Trust, once noted in an article that I quoted on the other thread:
Wheel No:275/276, Buddhism and Christianity
An essential feature of medieval Christianity is the importance of monasticism...It is significant that two different cultures should have developed such an institution, which seems to go so much against the grain of human nature.
Those who have grown up against a background of Protestantism often scarcely realize the extent to which monasticism still plays a living role not only in the Roman Catholic but also in the Orthodox Church. The ideal of ascetic self-restraint as a way of purification was a fundamental one in early Christianity, and often led to excesses of self- mortification.
But in Western Christendom the wise rule established by St. Benedict (529) was a model for all subsequent monastic orders. Here, despite all theoretical differences, Christian and Buddhist practice approached each other closely, though it was the mendicant orders (‘friars’ not ‘monks’) founded in the early 13th century by St. Dominic and St. Francis of Assisi that came nearest to the Bhikkhu Sangha. And something of the same ascetic spirit outside the monastic orders is seen in the rule of celibacy for all clergy in the Roman Catholic Church, and for bishops in the Orthodox Church
See also:
Encyclopedia of Community
Mendicant monasticism, instituted by Gautama Buddha (586–483 BCE), the founder of Buddhism, is a variation of the cenobitic form. Mendicants originally lived in communities of beggars and, as a discipline of humility, were forbidden to own either communal or personal property. Mendicantism, the original ideal for Franciscan and Dominican communities, was developed independently in Christianity. The Roman Catholic Church does not consider mendicants as monastic, and mendicantism does not exist in Orthodox (Eastern) Christianity.
Encyclopedia of Religious and Spiritual Development
Mendicant, in this sense, refers to begging. The Franciscans were known as a begging order in that they begged for their daily sustenance and that of the impoverished they lived with. Mendicants did not believe in owning property and so they did not live in a monastery as such. Instead they lived out in the world and were known as friars rather than monks.
The followers of St. Francis - the mendicant friars of his Franciscan order - wandered freely through the world known as little poor men, holy 'beggars', yet sought detachment from its lusts and follies, while being reliant upon the charity of householders in the towns and villages they traveled through.
At their foundation these mendicant orders rejected the previously established monastic model which foresaw living in one stable, isolated community where members worked at a trade and
owned property in common. Monks sought actual physical seclusion from the world either in the desert or in enclosed or cloistered monasteries.
Jesus was a "mendicant" in his ministry (i.e. eschewing all possessions and property rather than simply sharing it in common) and instructed his disciples to be the same - as opposed to a cenobitic monk, like all Orthodox Christian monastics are (as well as non-mendicant Catholic monastics). So Jesus's way of life was actually more similar to Buddhist Bhikkhus (except that Bhikkhus live in monasteries as well as being mendicants, but crucially aren't cloistered) and Franciscans than the monks who wrote the
Philokalia.
