User:Wingspeed/personal sandbox

In the same frame: Christ et Buddha, an 1880 painting by the French artist Paul Ranson

The possibility of a reciprocal but long lost relationship between what became known as Buddhism and Christianity exercised a small number of both scholars and popularisers in post-Enlightenment Europe, even before archaeological finds in the late 19th century confirmed the Buddha to be an historical personage rather than myth. The suggestion that Jesus and his pioneering followers may have been influenced indirectly by the sage of the Śākyas continues to cause controversy.

Less contentious, however, is that from the late 18th century onwards growing awareness in Europe and North America of the religious traditions of the Indian sub-continent had its impact among writers and artists - and among a few renegades from Christianity, some of whom went so far as to start calling themselves buddhists.

The effect Christian culture has had over the same period upon the Buddhist tradition's self-perception is less well known in the West. Some scholars now go so far as to contend that the very category "Buddhism,” is largely a European construct of comparatively recent origin.

Meantime, christian monastics such as Thomas Merton, Wayne Teasdale, David Steindl-Rast and the former nun Karen Armstrong have put energy into Buddhist/Christian dialogue - as have, for their part, buddhist monastics such as Ajahn Buddhadasa of Thailand, Thich Nhat Hanh from Vietnam and, most notably, the present Dalai Lama. They each see in the otherwise disparate teachings of Jesus and the Buddha a basic commonality of insight and purpose which offers the possibility, they say, of profound remedy to an ailing world. The historian of world culture Arnold Toynbee has speculated that in centuries to come the encounter between Christianity and Buddhism may come to be seen as the momentous event of the 20th century.