As Jesus and Buddha have been remembered, they both had a common starting point for their preaching: the sufferings that all humans have to face. Both teachers began their missions out of a concern for the sufferings of their fellow human beings. If suffering might serve as the shared starting point in the practice and reflections of a Buddhist-Christian double-belonger, it leads to what seems to be a further shared diagnosis of the fundamental source of human suffering. For Christians, the diagnosis of humanity's fundamental problem has traditionally been linked with original sin. For both Buddhists and Christians, the cause of suffering has to do with a misunderstanding or a malfunctioning of what people really are. Buddha's remedy for the ignorance at the root of suffering is contained in the Mahayana ideal of the bodhisattva. Jesus' remedy for confined and fearful selves was rooted in his experience of the God of Israel as Abba.