We feel intensely and care deeply. We are immersed in life and its passions and projects, its loves and its hates. But wisdom counsels detachment and withdrawal, mentally if not physically: one does not have to haul off to a monastery to cultivate detachment. Retreat into the serene and ataraxic can however be protracted unto nirvanic oblivion, and it is in Buddhism. That might be taking it too far.
Renunciation and world-flight in Christianity, by contrast, are for the sake of a higher life in which finite personhood is, in an Hegelian trope, aufgehoben, simultaneously cancelled and preserved. "I came that you may have life and have it more abundantly." (John 10:10) Jesus did not preach extinction. He preached personal transformation. Buddhism is radical: the renunciation is total. This aligns it with metaphysical pessimism and indeed nihilism, whereas Christianity is full of hope and promise.
One thing is clear: to seek the final fulfillment of desire in this life is a mistake. But could desire itself be a mistake, as the Second Noble Truth has it? If desire itself is a mistake, then life is a mistake.
But you and I have been through that
And this is not our fate;
Let us not talk falsely now
The hour is getting late.
Bob Dylan, All Along the Watchtower
Analysis here.
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