How do Christians respond to eastern systems of thought such as Buddhism and Hinduism?

Neither Hinduism nor Buddhism is a single thing, and any Christian answer that treats them as one vague “Eastern thought” has already failed to take them seriously. What follows is an argument, not a dismissal.

1. Respect means describing them accurately. There are six orthodox schools of Hindu philosophy, and Buddhism divides into Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana with genuinely different metaphysics. Advaita Vedanta and devotional Vaishnavism disagree with each other as much as either disagrees with Christianity. Any response has to begin by getting the tradition right.

2. Christians can affirm real insight where it exists. Both traditions see clearly that craving and attachment produce suffering, and that the material world is not the whole story. Paul says Gentiles who lack the law still show the work of the law written on their hearts (Romans 2:14-15). Common grace means truth is not the private property of Christians.

3. The deepest divide is personal versus impersonal. Christianity speaks of a God who knows, loves, and acts — “God is love” (1 John 4:8). Advaita speaks of an impersonal absolute with which the self is finally identical. These cannot both be true, and the difference is not academic: it decides whether prayer is a conversation, whether sin is an offense, and whether forgiveness is possible.

4. No-self creates a problem for karma. If “I” am only a momentary bundle of aggregates, as anatta teaches, then who accumulates karma, and who is reborn? Without an enduring subject, continuity across lives is hard to ground. Buddhist schools have sophisticated answers to this, and they should be heard — but the difficulty is real and it is internal to the system, not imposed from outside.

5. Karma leaves little room for grace. If suffering is always the just fruit of past deeds, the system can be pitiless, and liberation depends on one's own accumulated effort across countless lives. The gospel announces something karma cannot: forgiveness as a gift, “not a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9). That is either the best news in the world or it is false. It is not a minor variation on karma.

6. If evil is finally illusion, moral reform becomes hard to state. In some monist readings the distinction between good and evil belongs to the realm of ignorance, which makes it difficult to say why cruelty is really wrong rather than merely unenlightened. Christianity keeps the distinction and locates its resolution in God himself, who judges evil and bears its cost.

7. The incarnation answers what karma cannot. Rather than watching the wheel turn from outside, God enters the cycle of suffering himself, taking the form of a servant and becoming obedient to death (Philippians 2:5-8), bearing our sins in his body (1 Peter 2:24). That is a different kind of answer to suffering: not an explanation of the balance, but a participation in the debt.

8. Christians have to own their history. Missions to Asia were sometimes entangled with colonial power, and Christians should say so without qualification. That is a failure of obedience, not a fruit of the teaching — but it is a real failure, and pretending otherwise makes everything else sound like a sales pitch.

9. The turn: “all paths up one mountain” is itself an exclusive claim. The popular pluralism is not taught by Hinduism or Buddhism; it is a modern Western construct that flattens both. It also excludes anyone who thinks truth matters — including the Hindu who believes the Vedas are authoritative and the Christian who believes the tomb was empty. The objection presents itself as humility while making a universal claim about every tradition on earth.

Christians can honor the depth of these traditions while disagreeing with them at the point that matters most: whether ultimate reality is a person who speaks, forgives, and suffers, or an impersonal order to be escaped. That is a disagreement worth having honestly, and it cannot be settled by declaring all paths equal.

Sources: John Lennox, Gunning for God; Nabeel Qureshi, Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus; Lesslie Newbigin.

Related challenges:
• So I’m to believe in a God who is one and three at the same time, with one of the three killing another of the three and then sending another of the three to console humans about how to go on in the absence of the other two!? Why not just Allah instead?
• If I were raised in India, I’d most likely be a Hindu. You would be a Muslim if raised in Saudi Arabia. Is it ‘fair and just’ of God to have billions of people’s eternal destinies determined by “God’s Divinely ordained” place of birth?
• Truth is relative. Only narrow-minded bigots believe in absolute truth!