I. HUMAN RIGHTS & RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
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Finally, it may be noted that there is no traditional parochial organization in Buddhism. Monks have no pastoral obligations. Although in recent decades, some monks have sometimes taken up educational tasks or worked for social welfare, their traditional concerns have always been primarily if not exclusively with their own salvation, and not with community service or pastoral care of the laity. They afford the laity opportunities to make merit, and hence to create good karma, solely by providing laymen with the opportunity to provide alms for monks by replenishing the begging-bowl which each of them carries and which symbolizes their poverty and dependence.
This overview of Theravada Buddhist teaching makes clear the sharp contrast between this religion and Christianity. There is no creator-god, and hence worship is of a radically different kind from that prevailing in the Christian churches. There is no conception of original sin, no idea of a personal saviour or of divine intercession. The idea of an immortal soul with continuity of consciousness is absent, and Nirvana or unending rebirths contrast sharply with the traditional Christian idea of glory or eternal punishment. There is no dualism of flesh and spirit. By no means least important, the conception of history is not of the linear variety, such as is found in the Christian scheme of primeval happiness, the fall of man, the vicarious self-sacrifice of deity, global apocalypse, and an eventual resurrection of the saved elite to heavenly glory. The cyclical scheme of rebirths is an orientation which has profound implications for other facets of the Buddhist worldview, and one which differs from the western conceptions of time, progress, work, and material achievement. Although, in the past, often condemned as an atheistic system, regarding an impersonal law as the ultimate power in the universe, and remote from traditional western preconceptions of what "true religion" should resemble, none the less, Buddhism is today universally recognized as a religion.
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