The miracles of Jesus present the comparative religion scholar with a question that Christian tradition has consistently evaded: where did the miracle tradition come from? The Hebrew Bible contains miracles, certainly — the parting of the Red Sea, Elijah calling down fire from heaven, Elisha raising the dead. But the specific character of Jesus’s miracles — their concentration on healing, their explicit connection to the faith of the recipient, their demonstration of mastery over natural forces through personal spiritual power rather than divine intervention from outside — differs significantly from the Hebrew Bible’s miracle tradition. The Hebrew Bible’s miracles are divine acts performed through human instruments. Jesus’s miracles are presented as the direct expression of his own spiritual authority, often explicitly linked to the faith of the one healed.
This distinction matters. When Jesus says to the blind man, ‘Your faith has made you well,’ he is articulating a theory of miracle that is not derived from the Hebrew Bible. The God of the Hebrew Bible heals through his own sovereign power, on his own sovereign initiative, through human instruments who are channels of divine action. The formula ‘your faith has made you well’ — maketh thee whole, in the King James translation — locates the causal power in the recipient’s inner state, not in external divine intervention. This is a Buddhist theory of miracle: the internal state of consciousness — faith, concentration, clear seeing — produces changes in the material world because mind and matter are not as separate as ordinary experience suggests.
And then there is walking on water. This specific miracle — Jesus walking across the surface of the Sea of Galilee, and Peter briefly doing the same before losing faith and sinking — has been the subject of one of the most significant, if least known, scholarly investigations in the comparative study of Buddhism and Christianity. William Norman Brown, the founder of South Asian Studies in North America, published The Indian and Christian Miracles of Walking on the Water in 1928, arguing that the New Testament accounts derive from earlier Indian traditions. This chapter examines Brown’s argument, the Buddhist and Hindu antecedents he identified, and the broader theory of miracle that connects the Indian and Christian traditions.
12.1 W. Norman Brown: The Scholar and His Argument
William Norman Brown (1892-1975) was not a maverick. He was the Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Pennsylvania for most of his academic career, the founder of the first academic department of South Asian Studies in North America, the organizer of the American Oriental Society, and the president of the Association for Asian Studies. His Wikipedia entry describes him as ‘considered the founder of the field of South Asian Studies.’ When a scholar of this standing, whose entire career was devoted to the rigorous academic study of Indian texts, publishes a book arguing that a specific New Testament miracle derives from Indian antecedents, it deserves serious engagement. It has not received it, largely because the conclusion was uncomfortable.
Brown’s 1928 monograph — published by the Open Court Publishing Company, the leading American publisher of comparative religion and philosophy — examined the walking-on-water miracle across Indian, Buddhist, and Christian sources. His argument, as summarized in a 2018 Academia.edu paper that revisits and defends his thesis: ‘Brown’s 1928 work argues that Christian water-walking legends derive from earlier Indian accounts.’ The academic summary continues: ‘Both legends illustrate faith’s efficacy, although the Buddhist story allows for faith restoration, unlike the Christian version.’
The Tamil and Vedas blog, drawing on Brown’s research, notes: ‘Around 300 BCE we have some stories about Buddha flying over water to Sri Lanka or Buddhist disciples walking on water to reach the Buddha.’ The Tamil scholar further notes Brown’s own assessment: ‘William Norman Brown, who surveyed the ancient literature for water miracles says the earliest example of crossing water magic is found in Indian sources.’ The chronological priority of the Indian tradition — by at least three centuries — establishes the direction of the argument.
The German scholar Richard Garbe, cited in the Vridar research blog on water-walking sources, reached the same conclusion independently. The blog cites Garbe’s assessment: ‘Garbe thinks that the gospel story was borrowed from the Buddhist tradition.’ Garbe’s citation of Brown’s work as confirming evidence suggests a scholarly consensus building around the Indian origin of the walking-on-water narrative, a consensus that mainstream New Testament scholarship has chosen to ignore rather than refute.
12.2 The Indian Antecedents: Walking on Water Before Jesus
The Indian tradition of walking on water is documented in both Hindu and Buddhist sources, all predating the Gospel accounts by centuries. The Tamil and Vedas research identifies the tradition as rooted in the Rig Veda — the oldest text in any Indo-European language — where crossing water through sacred power is described as among the earliest examples of what Brown calls ‘crossing water magic.’ From this Vedic root, the tradition flows into both the Hindu devotional literature and the Buddhist narrative tradition.
The Buddhist Disciple Walking on Water
The most directly parallel Buddhist narrative to the Gospel account is the story of a Buddhist disciple walking across water to reach the Buddha. The story, present in multiple versions across the Buddhist narrative literature, follows a structural pattern identical to the Gospel account in Matthew 14:28-31. A disciple, motivated by devotion to the teacher and sustained by meditative concentration, walks on the water’s surface. As long as the concentration is maintained — as long as the mind is focused on the teacher and the Dharma — the walking continues. When the concentration falters, when doubt enters, when ordinary sensory consciousness reasserts itself over the concentrated meditative state, the disciple begins to sink.
The structural parallel with the Gospel account is exact. Peter walks on the water as long as his faith holds — as long as his gaze is fixed on Jesus, as long as the concentrated devotional state is maintained. ‘But when he saw the wind, he was afraid, and beginning to sink he cried out, Lord, save me’ (Matthew 14:30). The moment of distraction — ordinary sensory consciousness reasserting itself over the state of faith-concentration — is precisely the moment when the water-walking becomes water-sinking. Both traditions are describing the same phenomenon: the capacity of concentrated inner states to transcend ordinary limitations of material existence, and the loss of that capacity when the concentration breaks.
The Academia.edu paper’s observation that ‘the Buddhist story allows for faith restoration, unlike the Christian version’ is particularly interesting. In the Buddhist narrative, the disciple who loses concentration can re-concentrate and continue. In the Gospel account, Peter sinks and must be rescued by Jesus. The Buddhist version assumes a more developed theory of the meditative states involved — concentration can be re-established — while the Gospel version presents a more dramatic, less technically developed account of the same underlying principle. This is consistent with the transmission hypothesis: the source tradition (Buddhist) has the more technically developed account; the receiving tradition (Christian) has the simplified, narrative version.
Adi Shankara and Padmapada: The Lotus Feet
Among the most celebrated walking-on-water narratives in the Hindu tradition is the story of Padmapada — the great Advaita Vedanta philosopher, disciple of Adi Shankara in the eighth century CE. The Tamil and Vedas research describes the account: Padmapada was crossing a river to reach his teacher when Shankara called out to him. Rather than turning back or finding a ford, Padmapada simply walked toward his teacher across the surface of the river, a lotus flower appearing at each step to support his feet. Hence his name: Padmapada, lotus-feet. The devotional concentration that sustained his walking was the same concentration as the Buddhist disciple’s — complete absorption in the teacher, in the Dharma, in the spiritual principle that transcends ordinary material limitation.
This tradition is later than the Buddhist walking-on-water narratives and considerably later than Jesus, so it does not bear directly on the question of the direction of transmission. But it illustrates the continuity of the Indian tradition of walking on water as an expression of spiritual concentration — a tradition that was alive and actively elaborated in Indian culture long before, during, and after the period in which the Gospel accounts were written.
12.3 The Buddhist Theory of Miracle: Siddhis
The Indian antecedent for Jesus’s miracles goes beyond the specific narrative of walking on water. It encompasses a comprehensive theory of the relationship between mind and matter that explains why miracles are possible, how they are produced, and what they demonstrate. This theory has a name in Sanskrit: siddhi, often translated as supernormal power or spiritual attainment.
Siddhis are paranormal or supernatural capacities that arise through advanced meditative practice — through the sustained cultivation of concentration, insight, and the purification of the mind from the defilements that normally constrain ordinary human experience. The Wikipedia article on siddhi defines them as ‘material, paranormal, supernatural, or otherwise magical powers, abilities, and attainments that are the products of yogic advancement through sadhanas such as meditation and yoga.’ The Buddhist term is iddhi or iddhi-vidha, psychic power, listed in the Anguttara Nikaya and the Digha Nikaya as among the five higher knowledges attainable through meditative concentration.
The Buddhist scholar Alan Wallace, cited in the Medium article on siddhis, articulates the Indian philosophical framework: ‘In Buddhism, these are not miracles in the sense of being supernatural events, any more than the discovery and amazing uses of lasers are miraculous — however they may appear to those ignorant of the nature and potentials of light. Such contemplatives claim to have realized the nature and potentials of consciousness far beyond anything known in contemporary science. What may appear supernatural to a scientist or a layperson may seem perfectly natural to an advanced contemplative.’
This is the framework within which Buddhist walking-on-water narratives make sense. Walking on water is not a divine intervention from outside the laws of nature. It is a demonstration of mastery over the ordinary limitations of material existence through the cultivation of a specific quality of consciousness. The practitioner who has developed sufficient concentration — sufficient iddhi — transcends the ordinary relationship between mind and matter in which sensory experience is taken as the definitive account of what is possible. The water yields not because God commands it to but because the practitioner’s consciousness has been refined to a state that ordinary material constraints cannot hold.
12.4 The Gospel Miracles and the Buddhist Logic of Faith
When this Indian framework is brought to bear on the Gospel miracle narratives, what was puzzling becomes coherent. The specific character of Jesus’s miracles — their link to the faith of the recipient, the formula ‘your faith has made you well,’ the explicit correlation between absence of faith and absence of miraculous healing — is not derived from the Hebrew Bible. It is derived from the Indian theory of siddhi.
‘Your Faith Has Made You Well’
The formula appears repeatedly in the Gospel healing narratives. To the woman with the hemorrhage: ‘Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace’ (Luke 8:48). To blind Bartimaeus: ‘Go your way; your faith has made you well’ (Mark 10:52). To the ten lepers: ‘Rise and go; your faith has made you well’ (Luke 17:19). To the woman who anointed his feet: ‘Your faith has saved you; go in peace’ (Luke 7:50). The formula is not incidental. It is Jesus’s consistent explanation of what produced the healing: not his own divine power acting unilaterally, but the faith of the recipient activating a capacity latent in their own being.
This is the Buddhist theory of miracle. The Buddhist practitioner’s iddhi arises from the practitioner’s own cultivation of concentration and insight. The faith of the healed person in the Gospel accounts similarly activates a healing capacity that the healer’s presence makes available. The healer is not a pipeline of external divine power. He is a teacher whose presence catalyzes the recipient’s own latent capacity for transformation — a capacity that faith makes active and doubt suppresses.
The corollary — that absence of faith prevents miracles — appears explicitly in Matthew 13:58: ‘And he did not do many miracles there because of their lack of faith.’ This is not the God of the Hebrew Bible being limited by human doubt. The God of the Hebrew Bible is not constrained by human unbelief. His miracles — the parting of the Red Sea, the fire on Carmel — are sovereign divine acts performed on his own initiative regardless of human faith or lack of it. The formula ‘he could not do many miracles because of their lack of faith’ has no parallel in Jewish miracle theology. It has a precise parallel in the Indian theory that supernormal capacities depend on the practitioner’s inner state — and, by extension, on the inner state of those in whose presence the practice occurs.
[CHRISTIAN] “And he could do no mighty work there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them. And he marveled because of their unbelief.” (Mark 6:5-6)
[BUDDHIST] “The five higher knowledges — including psychic power — arise when the mind is purified of the five impediments: covetousness, ill will, sloth, restlessness, and doubt.” (Majjhima Nikaya 1.181 / Anguttara Nikaya 3.6)
The Transfiguration as Siddhi
The Transfiguration narrative in Matthew 17:1-2 — ‘And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light’ — is among the most striking miracle accounts in the Gospel tradition. The luminous body that Jesus displays on Mount Tabor has no parallel in the Hebrew Bible. Moses’s face shone after speaking with God (Exodus 34:29-35), but this is a reflected divine glory, not an intrinsic luminosity of the person themselves. Jesus’s transfiguration is presented as his own intrinsic luminosity breaking through the ordinary appearance of his physical form.
The Buddhist parallel is direct. The Anguttara Nikaya (6.24) — cited in the parallel citation table as matching Matthew 17:2 — describes the luminous body of the advanced practitioner, the pabhassara citta, the luminous mind, which is the intrinsic nature of consciousness when purified of defilements. The Sambhogakaya — the bliss-body in the Trikaya doctrine — is described in Buddhist texts as a body of luminous light, visible in meditation and at high levels of contemplative attainment. The transfiguration of Jesus is, in Buddhist terms, the temporary visibility of the Sambhogakaya — the luminous body — breaking through the ordinary Nirmanakaya appearance that his disciples normally perceive.
The parallel citation table identifies Anguttara Nikaya 3.6 as matching both Mark 6:48 (Jesus walking on the sea) and John 20:26 (Jesus appearing in the locked room). The capacity to transcend ordinary physical limitations — walking on water, passing through walls, appearing and disappearing at will — is consistently described in Buddhist sources as a consequence of advanced meditative attainment, of iddhi developed through the cultivation of samadhi. Jesus’s miracle repertoire maps precisely onto the Buddhist catalogue of siddhis available to the advanced practitioner.
12.5 Both Teachers Disclaim Personal Credit
One of the most consistent features of both the Buddhist and Christian miracle traditions is the teacher’s consistent refusal to take personal credit for the miracles performed in their presence. The formula ‘your faith has made you well’ is itself a disclaimer: it is not I who healed you, but your own faith. Jesus in John 14:10 goes further: ‘The Father who dwells in me does his works.’ The works are not Jesus’s own, performed through his personal divine power. They are the Father’s works, performed through a channel that Jesus provides.
The Buddha, in the Pali Canon, is consistently cautious about the display of supernormal powers and consistently redirects attention from the miraculous to the Dharma. The Kevatta Sutta in the Digha Nikaya has the Buddha explicitly discouraging the display of miracles as a means of demonstrating the teaching, preferring the ‘miracle of instruction’ — the direct teaching of the Dharma — over the ‘miracle of psychic power.’ Both teachers consistently point beyond the miracle to the teaching, beyond the extraordinary display to the ordinary practice that makes transformation possible.
This shared caution about miraculous display is itself significant. A tradition that invented miracle stories to attract followers would not simultaneously emphasize the relative unimportance of miraculous display. The fact that both traditions — Buddhist and Christian — contain both miracle narratives and cautionary statements about over-emphasis on miracles suggests that both are drawing on the same philosophical framework: miracles are real, they are products of inner cultivation, and they are not the point. The point is the Dharma. The point is the teaching. The miracles are the inevitable byproduct of a level of inner development whose primary fruit is wisdom, not wonder.
12.6 The Argument from Brown
W. Norman Brown’s 1928 argument — that the New Testament walking-on-water narrative derives from Indian antecedents — was challenged in the 1990s by J. Duncan M. Derrett, who argued that Old Testament and Greek sources provided sufficient models for the Gospel miracle. The Academia.edu paper that revisits this debate in 2018 sides with Brown: ‘I was convinced by Brown’s arguments that the New Testament accounts of Jesus and his disciple walking on water were indeed indebted to earlier Indian accounts… Brown’s view was somehow right, and was being unfairly critiqued.’
The argument for Brown’s position rests on two points that Derrett’s alternative sources cannot address. First, the Old Testament crossing of the Red Sea is a collective miracle performed by God’s sovereign act, not a demonstration of individual meditative power sustained by faith. It shares the water-crossing theme but not the specific mechanism — faith-sustained concentration — that characterizes both the Buddhist and Gospel accounts. Second, the specific structural feature that the two traditions share and that distinguishes them from all other water-crossing narratives is the faith-failure element: the practitioner begins to cross, loses faith or concentration, and begins to sink. This is not present in the Old Testament, not in the Greek sources, and not in any antecedent tradition other than the Buddhist one.
The faith-failure element is the key. Walking on water as a display of divine power can be invented independently. Walking on water that stops when faith fails, because faith and concentration are the mechanism that makes it possible — this is a specific theory of the relationship between mind and matter that has its systematic home in the Indian siddhi tradition and nowhere else. Brown was right. The New Testament walking-on-water narrative is indebted to Indian accounts. The debt is not merely narrative but philosophical: the entire theory of how the miracle works is Indian.
— End of Chapter 12 —