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Imagine the Life of Buddha
By Jay Tolson
Posted 6/17/07

Combining western scientific knowledge with eastern spiritual wisdom, Deepak Chopra has developed his own unique form of complementary, mind-body medicine. A hugely successful one-man industry with his own California-based Chopra Center for Wellbeing, the Indian-born physician has also made time to write some 49 books ranging from spiritual and medical advice to fiction. The most recent, Buddha, is a novel about the early life of the great spiritual leader, taking the Indian prince Siddhartha from his palace upbringing through his years as a seeker to his transformative enlightenment.

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Do you consider yourself a Buddhist?
No, I don't. What I find among Buddhists now are schisms, schools of thought, often with a lot of rigidity. So I don't consider myself Buddhist because I don't think Buddha himself believed in ideology or dogma. He would say that he was showing us very practical ways to get the same insights ourselves.

You have just finished a book about Jesus. How are the fundamental teachings of Jesus and Buddha similar and different?
They are similar in relation to the golden rule—do unto others as you would have them do unto you—and in the total embodiment of nonviolence. You must turn the other cheek and love your enemies. Buddha says when you look deep enough into your enemy, you will see that he is yourself. But what Jesus calls sin, Buddha calls ignorance, lack of awareness. The God question is also very different. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, God created the universe, whereas in the Buddhist tradition, God, or the intelligence that is at the source of creation, is not some outside intelligence but is inherent in the consciousness that conceives, governs, and becomes the universe.
Is there a fundamental tension between spirituality and religion?
I think spirituality is a domain of awareness where we all experience our universality and where we experience universal truth. It has very little to do with religious dogma, ideology, or even self-righteous morality. The novel Buddha deals with the experience of a person and I hope shows that this is an experience that is open to all of us.