The Great Commission — the final instruction of the risen Jesus to his disciples in Matthew 28:19-20 — is the foundational mandate of Christian mission: ‘Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.’ Two thousand years of Christian missionary activity — the conversion of Europe, the colonization of the Americas, the evangelization of Africa and Asia, the global spread of Christianity to become the world’s largest religion — flow from this command. It is Christianity’s defining institutional impulse: go out, convert all nations, make the entire world Christian.
This impulse has no antecedent in Judaism. It has a precise, documented, and chronologically prior antecedent in Buddhism — specifically in the instruction the Buddha gave to his first sixty disciples at Sarnath, documented in the Vinaya’s Mahavagga, in approximately 528 BCE. The Buddha’s command predates the Great Commission by over five hundred years. It uses the same structure, the same universal scope, and the same logic of compassionate outreach to all beings without distinction. The Great Commission is the Buddha’s missionary mandate in the vocabulary of the risen Christ.
14.1 Judaism’s Non-Missionary Structure
The VoegelinView article on Noahide commandments states it plainly: ‘Although Judaism accepts converts, Jews are not directed to proselytize or convert other peoples. In this sense, Judaism is not a universal religion.’ The Times of Israel piece on Jewish proselytizing repeats it: ‘Unlike Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, Judaism does not have much of a missionary impulse.’ The Aish.com piece on Jewish proselytizing makes the theological basis explicit: ‘The idea of demanding that everyone convert is probably familiar to you as a Christian ideal. For example, a Baptist group in Florida recently spent over one million dollars to distribute a video to every household in Palm Beach County.’
The absence of a missionary impulse from Judaism is not incidental. It follows necessarily from the theological structure of the tradition. Judaism is the religion of a covenant between God and a specific people — the children of Israel. The Torah is Israel’s constitution, given to Israel, governing Israel’s relationship with its God. Gentiles are not obligated to become Jews. The Noahide laws — seven basic moral obligations believed to apply to all humanity — provide a path for Gentiles to live righteously before God without converting to Judaism. The Noahide framework is not a missionary program. It is a recognition that non-Jews have their own covenantal relationship with God that does not require them to become Jewish.
The prophetic vision of the end of days in Isaiah, Micah, and Zechariah imagines all nations flowing to Jerusalem, recognizing the God of Israel, and beating their swords into plowshares. But this eschatological gathering of the nations is God’s initiative, not Israel’s missionary campaign. The nations come to Jerusalem because God brings them. Israel does not go out to convert the nations. The prophets do not command Israel to send missionaries to Egypt, Babylon, or Rome to make them Jewish. The eschatological universalism of the Hebrew Bible is a vision of what God will do at the end of history — not a mandate for human missionary activity in the present.
The scholarly debate about whether Second Temple Judaism was missionary is noted in the Wikipedia article on the period: ‘The issue of conversion to Judaism and Jewish proselytism in Second Temple Judaism has occupied many scholars… Research has not yet yielded a consensus.’ The Bible Interp article is more precise: ‘Second Temple Judaism did attract proselytes and facilitate the conversion of Gentiles that wanted to convert to Judaism, but it was not self-conscious missionary since the role of Israel, the Torah, and the synagogue was never directed unequivocally towards Gentile recruitment.’ This is the correct assessment. Judaism attracted converts — it did not actively seek them. There is a categorical difference between welcoming those who come and going out to convert all nations. The Great Commission describes the latter. Judaism practiced the former.
14.2 The Buddha’s First Missionary Command
The Vinaya’s Mahavagga records one of the most consequential instructions in the history of religion. After the Sangha had grown to sixty members at Sarnath — after Yasa and his fifty-four friends had joined the original five disciples — the Buddha addressed the assembled community with what can only be described as the original Great Commission:
“Go forth, O monks, for the welfare of the many, for the happiness of the many, out of compassion for the world, for the benefit, welfare, and happiness of gods and humans. Let not two go by one way. Teach the Dhamma which is beautiful in the beginning, beautiful in the middle, and beautiful in the end. Proclaim the holy life in its fullness and purity. There are beings with little dust in their eyes who will be lost if they do not hear the Dhamma. There will be those who understand.” — Vinaya, Mahavagga 1.11.1, tr. I.B. Horner
This instruction was delivered approximately 528 BCE — more than five centuries before the Great Commission. Every structural element of the Great Commission is present in it. Go out — the movement imperative. To all — the universal scope. Teach — the content-transmission imperative. Out of compassion — the motivating principle. For the welfare and happiness of all beings, gods and humans — the explicit universalism, extending beyond any national or covenantal boundary. The instruction to go separately, not two by one way, mirrors Jesus’s sending of the disciples in pairs (Mark 6:7) — in both cases, the instruction is to maximize coverage by spreading out rather than traveling together.
The Sacred Destinations account of Sarnath confirms the immediate implementation: ‘The Sangha having grown to 60 in number, the Buddha sent them out in all directions to travel alone and teach the Dharma, with each to go a separate way.’ This is the first recorded instance of an organized, universal missionary campaign in the history of religion. It precedes Paul’s missionary journeys by five centuries. It precedes the Great Commission by five centuries. It is the prototype of the Christian missionary enterprise, as this essay argues it is the prototype of so much else in the Christian tradition.
14.3 The Great Commission as Translation
Matthew 28:19-20 reads: ‘Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.’
The structural analysis of this passage against Mahavagga 1.11.1 reveals correspondences so precise that the term translation is not metaphorical but technically apt. Both texts: a teacher addresses his community after a period of intensive formation. He commands them to go out — movement imperative, departure from the gathered community into the wider world. The scope is universal: all nations in Matthew, all beings in Mahavagga. The content is specified: teach what I have taught you in Matthew, teach the Dhamma in Mahavagga. The motivation is compassionate: the implicit motivation in Matthew is love for those who will hear, the explicit motivation in Mahavagga is compassion for the world. The teacher assures the disciples of continued presence: I am with you always in Matthew, the Dhamma itself will be the teacher in the Mahaparinibbana Sutta’s equivalent.
[CHRISTIAN] “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” (Matthew 28:19-20)
[BUDDHIST] “Go forth, O monks, for the welfare of the many, for the happiness of the many, out of compassion for the world. Let not two go by one way. Teach the Dhamma which is beautiful in the beginning, beautiful in the middle, and beautiful in the end.” (Vinaya, Mahavagga 1.11.1)
The parallel is so precise that the hypothesis of coincidental independent invention stretches credulity past the breaking point. Two teachers, separated by five centuries, issue commands of identical structure to communities of identical organizational type, with identical universal scope, identical emphasis on teaching as the content of the mission, and identical compassionate motivation. The Buddhist command is the older. The Buddhist Sangha was the institutional model. The Buddhist missionary enterprise was the historical reality that preceded the Christian one by five centuries and provided both the precedent and, through Ashoka’s documented missions, the actual presence of Buddhist missionaries in the Mediterranean world that Jesus’s community inhabited.
14.4 Masuzawa and the Two World Religions
Tomoko Masuzawa’s The Invention of World Religions (University of Chicago Press, 2005) provides an important scholarly framework for understanding why the Buddhist-Christian missionary parallel has been suppressed or minimized in Western scholarship. Masuzawa’s argument, as described in the Goodreads summary of the book, is that Buddhism was the first tradition to be recognized as a genuine parallel to Christianity in its universal character: ‘Buddhism was often likened to Christianity since both traditions were said to break away from their parent national religions. In other words, both were examples of how a world religion emerged from the inferior national religion.’
Masuzawa’s analysis of nineteenth-century European religious scholarship reveals that scholars of that period, despite their Christian supremacist assumptions, were forced to acknowledge that Buddhism and Christianity shared a feature that distinguished them from every other major religious tradition: they were both missionary religions of universal scope that had actively spread beyond their cultures of origin to become genuinely transnational. The Yazid Haroun analysis of Masuzawa’s argument notes one of her key sub-theses: ‘Buddhism first propelled the notion of world religion into a pluralistic context.’
What Masuzawa documents is the suppression of the logical next question. If Buddhism and Christianity are both missionary religions that broke from their parent national traditions to address all of humanity without ethnic or cultural distinction — and if Buddhism is five centuries older — then the most parsimonious explanation for Christianity’s missionary character is that it derived from Buddhism’s. Nineteenth-century European scholars, operating within a framework of Christian supremacy, were not equipped to draw this conclusion even when their own evidence pointed toward it. Masuzawa’s work exposes the ideological framework that prevented the conclusion. This essay draws it.
14.5 The Logic of Universal Mission: Why Judaism Cannot Generate It
The missionary imperative is not merely a tactical or organizational feature of a tradition. It follows necessarily from specific theological commitments about the nature of the truth being taught and the scope of its application. A tradition will be missionary in proportion to how universal it believes its truth to be and how urgent it believes its transmission to be.
Judaism’s non-missionary character follows necessarily from its theological structure. The covenant is particular. The Torah is given to Israel. Gentiles have their own path through the Noahide laws. The God of Israel is the God of all — but the Torah is not for all. In this framework, there is no imperative to go out to all nations. The nations have their own relationship with God. Israel’s task is to maintain its own covenant faithfulness, not to convert the world.
Buddhism’s missionary character follows necessarily from its theological structure. The Four Noble Truths describe the universal condition of all sentient beings: all suffer, all suffer because of craving, all can be freed from suffering, and there is a path to that freedom. These are not truths about one people’s covenantal relationship with their God. They are claims about the universal condition of all conscious beings. If this teaching is true, then every being who has not heard it is suffering unnecessarily, and the compassionate response is to bring it to them. The Buddha’s instruction — there are beings with little dust in their eyes who will be lost if they do not hear the Dhamma — articulates this logic with precision. The missionary imperative follows necessarily from the universality of the truth and the compassion of the teacher.
Jesus’s Great Commission adopts exactly this logic. It is addressed to all nations, not to Israel alone. It commands the making of disciples from every people, not the re-gathering of the Jewish diaspora. It is premised on the universality of the salvation offered — whoever believes shall be saved — which is a Buddhist claim about the universal availability of liberation, not a Jewish claim about the particular covenant of Israel. The Great Commission is theologically Buddhist. Its scope, its logic, its motivating principle of compassion, and its institutional form all derive from the tradition that had been operating on these principles for five hundred years.
14.6 Ashoka’s Mission and the Great Commission: Historical Connection
The argument of this chapter is not merely structural — that the Great Commission and the Buddha’s missionary mandate share an identical logical structure. It is also historical: the Buddhist missionary enterprise had been operating in the Mediterranean world for over two centuries before the Great Commission was issued. Ashoka’s edicts, documented in Chapter 2, sent Buddhist missionaries explicitly to Syria, Egypt, Macedonia, Cyrene, and mainland Greece in the third century BCE. Medical missionaries were established in the territories of the Syrian Greek king whose lands bordered Palestine. Buddhist teaching was propagated in Greek and Aramaic — the languages of the Mediterranean world and of Jesus himself — from at least 260 BCE.
The Jewish world in which Jesus taught was not isolated from this Buddhist missionary presence. The Therapeutae of Alexandria were a product of it. The Essene community may have been shaped by it. The intellectual atmosphere of first-century Palestine was permeated by ideas that had been carried westward by Ashokan missionaries for two centuries. When Jesus issued his missionary mandate — go out to all nations — he was not inventing a new impulse. He was translating into his own cultural vocabulary an institutional form and a theological logic that the Buddhist tradition had been embodying for five hundred years.
This is what transmission looks like. The receiving tradition does not copy the source. It absorbs the structural logic, adapts it to its own vocabulary and theological framework, and expresses it in forms that make sense in its own cultural context. The Great Commission is not a copy of Mahavagga 1.11.1. It is the same institutional imperative, expressed in the vocabulary of the risen Christ rather than the Awakened One, addressed to the nations of the Roman Mediterranean rather than the kingdoms of India and the Hellenistic world. The content is the same. The form is adapted. The origin is Buddhist.
14.7 The Two Historically Missionary Religions
The historical record supports a conclusion that comparative religion has been reluctant to state plainly: of all the major religious traditions of the ancient world, only two were constitutively missionary — only two made the active conversion of all humanity a foundational institutional imperative rather than a welcome byproduct of example and attraction. Those two traditions are Buddhism and Christianity.
Judaism, as documented above, was not missionary in this sense. Hinduism is not missionary — it has no institutional mechanism for converting non-Hindus and no theological imperative to do so. Zoroastrianism actively discouraged conversion of outsiders. The mystery religions of the Greco-Roman world spread through attraction and initiation, not through organized campaigns to convert all nations. Chinese religious traditions — Daoism, Confucianism — had no universal missionary mandate.
Only Buddhism and Christianity share the constitutive missionary imperative: go out to all beings, teach what you have learned, work for the liberation of all without distinction of nation, ethnicity, or prior religious affiliation. Only Buddhism and Christianity produced transnational missionary enterprises that successfully spread their teachings across multiple continents and cultures. Only Buddhism and Christianity generated the institutional infrastructure — the Sangha of traveling monks, the network of early Christian missionaries — for sustained, organized, universal outreach.
The natural explanation for why two traditions share this unique institutional feature is that one derived it from the other. Buddhism is five centuries older. Buddhism had been actively missionary for three centuries before Christianity existed. Buddhism was present in the Mediterranean world through documented channels before Jesus taught. The Great Commission is Buddhism’s first great institutional export, translated into the vocabulary of the risen Christ and the commission of the Eleven on a mountain in Galilee. The mission that followed changed the world. The source that generated it was five centuries old before it began.
— End of Chapter 14 —