Anthony Clark speaks Mandarin fluently, studied in Beijing, and taught tai chi and kung fu for more than 15 years. Students can pop into the Whitworth University professor's office anytime to practice Chinese calligraphy. As a historian of Chinese-Western exchange, Clark has dedicated his professional career and much of his personal life to learning Chinese culture.

But the key to his cross-cultural success? Acknowledging the differences between people, he says, in order to see them as they truly are.

This is the underlying motivation beneath Clark's recent work, Catholicism and Buddhism: The Contrasting Lives and Teachings of Jesus and Buddha. Unlike some of his other scholarly works, it is a short book for the general public that parses the deep-rooted differences between Catholicism and Buddhism.

Though outward expressions of each religion might look similar, the inward motivations of the two practices are separate and, at times, contradictory. While Christians seek to live aligned with a good, loving creator forever, Buddhists hope their kindness will eventually earn them the peace of extinction. Instead of conflating the two belief systems, understanding their differences is a way to respect our neighbors and their worldview, he says.

"Virginia Woolf once said something like, 'If you can't be honest about yourself, how can you be honest about others?'" Clark says. "This idea of being genuinely honest about what one thinks and believes, and what one's identity is, helps us to be more sympathetic."

Clark is a Catholic who teaches classes on China and Buddhism at a Protestant university. He knows what it is to sit in, and even seek out, disagreement. It's a lesson in patience and compassion that is not only helpful in religious discussions, but in any setting where disagreement could be uncomfortable.

"All of my Buddhist friends, especially Buddhist friends outside of the United States, were very adamant that we will understand each other better if we actually write down what we think, so that we can confront these differences and collaboratively work together," Clark says. "So it came about from this strong commitment to be honest, and then secondly, a strong commitment to how much we need to be together with that honesty."

You don't have to be a religious scholar to read Clark's book. It starts with a basic question that almost everyone asks at some point in their life: Is there a God?

"The fundamental difference between Christianity and Buddhism is the God question," Clark says. "The God question is an important one, no matter what religious tradition you're in. In terms of Christianity, we have this idea of a God, then we have this trinity with Jesus and this whole idea of redemption and being given grace and forgiveness. In Buddhism, there is no theology because there's no 'theos,' there's no God. That's crucially different."

Christianity is based on a relationship with the creator, Clark says, in which the human knows that they are loved. Buddhism doesn't worship a deity but is reliant on an impersonal justice system known as karma, where personal actions dictate future incarnations until one reaches the state called "nirvana."

"I like to think of Buddhism as an idea that we have something like a soul, and that soul could go through trillions or zillions of reincarnations," Clark says. "But at the end of one's reincarnated cycle, your soul ends. Now, what that end means is a debate within Buddhism. But you have multiple lives and an end of the soul. Christianity is the opposite. You have one life, but a soul that is eternal. That distinction inspires us to think differently about how we live."

Even though both religions value charity, compassion, peacefulness and self-understanding, the motivations for those virtues are different.

Clark says that Christians ought to live in the secure knowledge that everyone is loved by a creator God who knows and suffers with them. The end goal is for everyone to live together forever.

Buddhists, Clark says, see in every person the possibility that they are a spouse, friend or relative from a past or future life. Therefore, they must be treated respectfully in order to finally achieve the ultimate peace that is oblivion or annihilation.

There are other secondary distinctions that Clark discusses, but they can pretty much all be traced back to these separate foundations.

"The Dalai Lama once said, 'When people say that Christianity and Buddhism are the same, it's like putting a sheep's head on a yak's body,'" Clark says. "My research wants to tease those differences out so that someone doesn't go to Kmart and buy a Buddha statue but not understand the message of Buddhism, which is a beautiful, loving message. But it's good to know what that means. We talk so much in modern academics today about respecting and honoring the other part of that is actually listening to the other. That's part of the project. Celebrating the other requires knowing the other."

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Whitworth historian Anthony Clark's recent book helps Buddhists and Christians acknowledge their differences in order ... - The Inlander