72 Ancient Ideals
extraneous to the work of Jesus. The paradox lies at the center of
his achievement.
And there is more complexity to Jesus and his teachings. Once
the Buddha makes his breakthrough under the Bo tree he never
turns back, at least as far as we know. We do not commonly hear of
him expressing doubts about the four noble truths or the eightfold
path. Confucius famously said that as he grew older his fundamental
desires— his basic set of wants— became fully consonant with his
teachings. There was no gap for him between is and ought. He had
no tendency to waver. But Jesus struggles. At certain key moments
the Gospels dramatize his diffi culty in living out the compassionate
ideal. His own provincialism and lack of imagination seem to get in
his way. And Jesus—at least Mark’s Jesus—is affl icted with doubts.
He wavers about who (and what) he truly is.
Like the Eastern sages, Jesus is a prophet of compassion— the
ideal is at the core of any number of the events that orthodox Chris-
tian take to be his miracles. The famous story of the loaves and
fi shes, as it occurs early in the gospel of Mark, is a salient example. A
crowd has been following Jesus for days, listening to his teachings.
Jesus calls his disciples to him and says, “I have compassion for the
crowd, because they have been with me now for three days and
have nothing to eat. If I send them away hungry to their homes, they
will faint on the way— and some of them have come from a great dis-
tance” (Mark 8.2–3). His disciples are puzzled, as his disciples fre-
quently are. How can they feed so many people out here in the desert
where nothing is growing? Jesus asks them what food they have with
them. It turns out that they have only seven loaves of bread. Jesus
gathers the loaves and blesses them and asks his disciples to dis-
tribute them to the crowd. There are also a few fi sh on hand and
Jesus blesses those and gets his disciples to pass them out too. The
members of the crowd, which Mark tells us numbered about four
thousand, eat their fi ll. When the disciples gather what’s left over,