The previous chapter examined non-retaliation as a specific ethical instruction: when struck, do not strike back. This chapter examines the broader principle of which non-retaliation is one expression: ahimsa, non-violence, the refusal to harm any sentient being, as a foundational ethical commitment applicable universally, without exception, to all beings in all circumstances. Chapter 8 addressed what Jesus teaches about how to respond when attacked. This chapter addresses what he teaches about the use of violence itself as a means of achieving any end.
The difference is important. Non-retaliation might be understood as a specific tactical or psychological instruction — do not respond to violence with violence, because violence escalates. Non-violence as a universal principle goes further: do not use violence, period, not merely in response to being attacked, but as any means of achieving any goal. This is the teaching of ahimsa as the Buddha formulated it. It is also, on the evidence, the teaching of Jesus. And it is utterly alien to the ethical and theological framework of the Hebrew Bible.
9.1 Judaism and the Theology of Commanded Violence
This section will make a claim that Christian readers may find uncomfortable. The claim is not a criticism of Judaism as a religion or of the Jewish people. It is a historical and textual observation about the ethical structure of the Hebrew Bible: the God of the Hebrew Bible commands violence. This is not a fringe reading imposed by hostile critics. It is the plain text of multiple passages in the Torah, the Former Prophets, and the Deuteronomistic history.
The most explicit command to total violence in the Hebrew Bible is 1 Samuel 15:3, in which the prophet Samuel conveys God’s instruction to King Saul: ‘Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’ The Hebrew term underlying ‘totally destroy’ is the root haram — to devote to destruction, to consecrate to God through annihilation. This is not the language of regrettable military necessity. It is the language of sacred obligation. The destruction of the Amalekites is presented as an act of worship, an offering to God through the killing of every living thing including infants and animals.
This is not an isolated passage. Deuteronomy 20:16-17 commands the complete annihilation of the peoples of Canaan: ‘In the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall devote them to complete destruction.’ Numbers 31 records the slaughter of the Midianites and commands the killing of every male child and every non-virgin woman. Joshua describes the systematic annihilation of Canaanite cities as the fulfillment of divine command. These texts are not historical curiosities. They are canonical scripture, affirmed as the word of God by the same tradition that produced Jesus.
Beyond the genocide commands, the Hebrew Bible celebrates military victory and valorizes the warrior. The Psalms of ascent celebrate the destruction of enemies. The book of Judges presents military heroes — Samson, Gideon, Deborah — as divinely empowered champions. The Maccabean revolt, celebrated in Jewish tradition as a triumph of faithfulness, was a military insurrection fought with considerable violence. In the first century CE, the Zealots — one of the major Jewish sects of Jesus’s time — were committed to violent resistance against Roman occupation as a religious obligation.
None of this is meant to condemn Judaism. The covenant structure of the Hebrew Bible, in which God’s people are a specific nation with specific enemies in a specific land, necessarily involves violence as a political and theological category in a way that a universal ethical framework does not. The point is not that Judaism is violent but that Judaism’s ethical structure is particular and national, not universal and pacifist. The Hebrew Bible does not offer a principle of universal non-violence applicable to all beings in all circumstances. It offers a principle of covenant faithfulness that sometimes requires violence and sometimes prohibits it, depending on the situation and the divine command. Jesus’s teaching of universal non-violence has no basis in this framework.
9.2 Ahimsa: The Foundation of Buddhist Ethics
Buddhism offers precisely what the Hebrew Bible does not: a principle of universal non-violence applicable to all beings in all circumstances, grounded not in divine command but in the metaphysical recognition of the shared nature of all sentient life. Ahimsa — non-harming, non-violence — is the foundational ethical principle of Buddhism. It is the first of the Five Precepts binding on all practitioners: abstain from the taking of life. Its scope is universal — it applies to all sentient beings, from the lowest insect to the highest deity. And it applies regardless of the political, national, or religious identity of the being in question.
The Dhammapada: Empathy as the Ground of Non-Violence
The Dhammapada articulates the philosophical foundation of ahimsa with characteristic directness in Chapter 10, verse 129-130: ‘All tremble at violence; all fear death. Putting oneself in the place of another, one should neither kill nor cause another to kill. All tremble at violence; all are afraid of death. Seeing others as like oneself, one does not kill nor cause others to kill.’ The foundation of non-violence here is empathy — the recognition that every being shares the same vulnerability to pain, the same fear of death, that you yourself experience. Non-violence is not a rule imposed from outside. It is the logical consequence of genuinely recognizing the shared nature of all sentient existence.
This is a philosophical argument, not a divine command. The Buddha does not say: do not kill because God has forbidden it. He says: do not kill because all beings are like you — they tremble at violence, they fear death, just as you do. The universal scope of the principle follows directly from this philosophical foundation: if the ground of non-violence is the shared vulnerability of all sentient beings, then the principle admits of no exceptions based on species, nationality, religion, or relationship to the covenant community. Every being that trembles at violence is covered by ahimsa.
The Dhammapada extends the principle even further in Chapter 26: ‘Him I call a brahmin who has put aside weapons and renounced violence toward all creatures. He neither kills nor helps others to kill.’ This verse demolishes not merely personal violence but complicity in violence — he neither kills nor helps others to kill. The scope is total. The brahmin — the spiritually realized person — is defined precisely by the renunciation of all violence and all complicity in violence toward all creatures without exception.
The First Precept and Its Universal Scope
The First Precept of Buddhism — panatipata veramani, abstaining from the taking of life — is the most fundamental ethical commitment in the tradition. Unlike the Hebrew Bible’s prohibition on killing, which applies within the covenant community and admits of numerous exceptions mandated by divine command, the First Precept admits of no exceptions. It applies to all living beings. The scope of this precept is what distinguishes Buddhist non-violence from any merely intra-communal prohibition on killing. It is not ‘do not kill Israelites.’ It is ‘do not kill any being that possesses sentience and the capacity to suffer.’
This universal scope has no parallel in Jewish ethical thought. The Hebrew Bible’s commandment ‘You shall not murder’ — lo tirtzach — applies within the covenant community and does not prohibit the killing of enemies or the execution of criminals by divine command. The First Precept applies to all beings without exception, and while Buddhist teaching has accommodated various practical exceptions across different traditions and cultural contexts, the principle itself is universal in a way that the Hebrew Bible’s prohibitions on killing are not.
9.3 Jesus’s Teaching: Love Your Enemies
Jesus’s teaching on non-violence is concentrated most powerfully in Luke 6:27-36, the Sermon on the Plain’s equivalent of the Sermon on the Mount’s antitheses. The passage is among the most radical ethical statements in any religious tradition:
“Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. If someone strikes you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them. Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back.” — Luke 6:27-30
The scope of this teaching — love your enemies — is universal in the Buddhist sense. It does not distinguish between enemies of Israel and enemies of Rome, between religious insiders and outsiders, between members of the covenant community and Gentiles. The enemy is simply the enemy — the person who hates, curses, and mistreats you — and the response is love, blessing, and prayer. This is not a Jewish teaching. The academic commentary on Luke 6:27-36 consistently notes that this command ‘reflects a radical shift from Old Testament interpretations limiting love to fellow Israelites.’ The shift is radical because it imports into a Jewish ethical framework a universal scope of compassion that has no antecedent in that framework.
The universality of Jesus’s non-violence is further underscored by his response in Matthew 26:52 when one of his disciples draws a sword to defend him at the Garden of Gethsemane: ‘Put your sword back in its place, for all who draw the sword will die by the sword.’ This is not a situational response to a specific tactical problem. It is a statement of general principle: violence perpetuates itself. Those who live by the sword die by it. The Digha Nikaya (1.1.8), identified in the parallel citation table as matching this passage, contains a structurally identical argument: the one who takes up weapons brings weapons upon himself in return. The cycle of violence is self-perpetuating. The only escape is to refuse to participate.
[CHRISTIAN] “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.” (Luke 6:27-28)
[BUDDHIST] “Overcome anger by love, overcome evil by good, overcome the miser by giving, overcome the liar by truth.” (Dhammapada 1.5 / 17.3)
The verbal parallel between Luke 6:27-28 and Dhammapada 17.3 is among the most precise in the entire corpus. The Dhammapada’s four-part instruction — overcome anger by love, overcome evil by good, overcome the miser by giving, overcome the liar by truth — is structurally identical to Jesus’s four-part instruction in Luke 6:27-28: love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. Both texts present non-violence not as passive submission but as active positive response: overcome, do good, bless, pray. The response to harm is not merely the absence of counter-harm but the presence of its opposite. This is ahimsa in its fullest sense.
9.4 The Political Context: Zealots, Maccabees, and the Road Not Taken
To appreciate the full radicalism of Jesus’s teaching of non-violence, one must situate it in its specific historical context. Jesus was teaching in Roman-occupied Judaea, a land seething with resentment of foreign domination, under constant pressure from multiple Jewish movements that advocated armed resistance as the appropriate religious response to oppression. The Zealots, active during Jesus’s lifetime, were committed to violent insurrection against Rome as a divinely mandated obligation. The Maccabees, celebrated in Jewish tradition as heroes of faith, had won religious freedom through armed revolt. The memory of those heroes was alive and politically charged in first-century Palestine.
In this context, Jesus’s teaching of universal non-violence — love your enemies, which in that context meant the Romans — was not a mild spiritual counsel. It was a direct political statement that aligned him against every armed resistance movement in his world. It alienated him from the Zealots, who regarded violent resistance as religious duty. It alienated him from the nationalist wing of the Pharisees. It was sufficiently radical that the disciples themselves did not fully grasp it — one of them carried a sword to Gethsemane and used it, and Jesus repudiated the act on principle.
Where did this teaching come from? It did not come from the Hebrew Bible, which gives no basis for universal non-violence toward all enemies. It did not come from any available Jewish source. It came from a tradition that had been teaching ahimsa as a universal principle for five centuries — a tradition that the Buddha had founded at Sarnath around 500 BCE, and that had been propagating itself throughout the Mediterranean world since Ashoka’s missions in the third century BCE. Jesus’s non-violence is not a uniquely Christian invention. It is ahimsa in Aramaic dress.
9.5 The Scope of Ahimsa: Jesus Versus Jainism and Buddhism
A careful reader might note that ahimsa, as a concept, predates Buddhism — it is present in Jainism and in the Upanishadic tradition before the Buddha. This is correct and does not weaken the argument. The Buddha inherited ahimsa from the broader Indian ethical tradition and made it central to his own teaching in a way that was specifically consonant with his metaphysical framework: the recognition of suffering as the universal condition of all sentient beings grounds the obligation of non-violence not in divine command but in empathy. It is this empathically grounded, philosophically developed, universally applicable form of ahimsa that appears in Jesus’s teaching.
It is also worth noting the specific scope of ahimsa in Buddhism as compared to Jainism. Jainism takes ahimsa to its logical extreme — Jain monks strain water before drinking it to avoid killing microorganisms, and some wear masks to avoid inhaling insects. Buddhism accepts a more moderate scope: the First Precept prohibits intentional killing of sentient beings, but accidental killing does not incur the same moral weight, and the distinction between sentient and non-sentient life matters. Jesus’s teaching maps precisely onto the Buddhist scope — the prohibition is on deliberate harm to sentient beings, particularly persons, expressed as the positive command to love — not onto the Jain extreme. This is further evidence that the Buddhism-Jesus connection is the relevant parallel, not a generic Indian tradition.
9.6 Non-Violence and Compassion: The Shared Root
Both Buddhist ahimsa and Jesus’s non-violence teaching are grounded in the same fundamental orientation: compassion for the suffering of others. The Buddha’s formulation in the Dhammapada — putting oneself in the place of another, seeing others as like oneself — is an injunction to empathic imagination. The capacity to recognize that the being before you experiences suffering and fear of death as you do is the capacity that makes non-violence rationally inevitable, not merely morally required.
Jesus’s formulation in Luke 6:31 — ‘Do to others as you would have them do to you’ — is the same injunction from the same philosophical root. The Golden Rule in this formulation is an empathic command: imagine yourself in the other’s position. What would you want done to you? Do that. This is the reverse formulation of the Dhammapada’s logic: the Dhammapada says, seeing others as like yourself, do not harm them. Jesus says, imagining yourself in their position, do for them what you would want. Both formulations derive non-violence from the same source: the recognition of the other’s shared humanity and shared vulnerability.
The parallel citation table identifies Dhammapada 10.1 as matching Luke 6:31: the Buddha’s formulation of the Golden Rule as the direct antecedent of Jesus’s. The specific verse — ‘Consider others as yourself’ — is the compressed form of the same argument. The empathic imagination that grounds universal non-violence is articulated in both texts in precisely parallel terms. This is not coincidence. It is transmission.
[CHRISTIAN] “All tremble at violence; all fear death. Putting oneself in the place of another, one should neither kill nor cause another to kill.” (Dhammapada 10.129-130)
[BUDDHIST] “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.” (Luke 6:27-28)
9.7 The Historical Trajectory: Ahimsa Translated Into Aramaic
The argument of this chapter is not that Jesus was a pacifist in every possible sense, or that his teaching of non-violence resolves all the complexities of political ethics and just war theory that subsequent Christian tradition has wrestled with. It is the simpler and more fundamental argument: the principle of universal non-violence that Jesus teaches — applicable to all people, including enemies, Roman occupiers, and those who curse and abuse — has no antecedent in Judaism, and has a direct antecedent in Buddhism, where it had been systematically articulated and institutionally practiced for five centuries.
The metaphysical ground of the Buddhist principle — empathy for all suffering beings — produces exactly the ethical scope that Jesus’s teaching exhibits: universal, non-conditional, not limited by covenant membership or national identity. The Hebrew Bible’s prohibition on murder is not universal in this sense. It is bounded by covenant, by divine command, and by national identity. Jesus’s non-violence crosses all those boundaries. It does so because it draws on a philosophical tradition that never acknowledged those boundaries as ethically relevant.
Gruber and Kersten in The Original Jesus argue that the Therapeutae — the Buddhist-influenced community near Alexandria — were in active contact with communities in Judaea, and that the Jesus movement absorbed their ethical teaching precisely through these channels. Roy Amore in Two Masters, One Message documents the structural parallelism between the Buddha’s ethical teaching and Jesus’s in systematic detail. Michael Lockwood in Buddhism’s Relation to Christianity identifies the specific textual parallels that connect ahimsa with the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain.
The conclusion of this chapter is the same as the conclusion of the previous one, with wider scope. Non-retaliation — turning the other cheek — is one expression of ahimsa. Love of enemies is another. The refusal to draw the sword is another. Compassion for all beings without exception is the comprehensive form. All of these expressions are present in Jesus’s teaching. All of them are absent from the Judaism of his time. All of them are present in Buddhism, where they had been systematically taught and institutionally practiced for five centuries. The transmission thesis is not merely plausible. It is the most rational conclusion available.
— End of Chapter 9 —