Category of being in Buddhist and Christian cultures

The article considers the intercultural issues of Buddhist and Christian cultures in the context of a comparative analysis of understanding the category of “being” in these two cultures. We regard the most influential doctrine of Mahayana Buddhism about the nature of Buddha in every living being (the Tathagatagarbha doctrine) and the ontological identity of samsara and nirvana as the main factors determining the features of Buddhist civilization, and emthasize the importance of the Buddha's doctrine of anatta postulating the "dynamic" concept of personality, which is a continuously changing stream of consciousness "that does not have a static nature and therefore is capable of any changes in the way of its social activity. On the other hand, a Christian concept of personality is close in social consequences, and based on the adoption of Aristotelian ontology, which took place in Thomism and the mystical experience of some Catholic saints, who believed in the absence of an independent existence of the human person. This similarity of anthropological concepts of Buddhist and Christian doctrines shows that the intercivilizational interaction of Buddhist and Christian cultures it is not accidental.