Some have argued that the teachings of Christ are a Middle-Eastern-ized Buddhist psychology. The evidence is fascinating, but since that flies in the face of the divinity, these discussions never get very far. Christians balk.
Jesus was the Son of God! He spoke the revealed word of God! That is a fact!
It’s a shame that these conversations can’t seem to get started. When laid side by side, the words of Siddhartha the Buddha and Jesus the Christ are almost identical, and Jesus was—at the very least–a genius on the level of Einstein. That’s indisputable.
So, in my estimation, Jesus was a master philosopher—a working class master philosopher, by the way. This blue color Da Vinci managed to strip down Buddhism for export. He rarefied it to it’s essence.
Be loving and compassionate towards all beings.
If every individual commits to that, we will create heaven.
But first, you have to get over your self.
Jesus used this simple message, this logic, to save the Western World from its own violent nature. He died on the cross—he got over his own sense of individual importance—as a demonstration of the true nature of his violent culture. It was a genius stroke of gesture politics. The message is alarming, even to an enslaved biblical era mentality.
This enslaved man of poverty preached a message of love–just basic love–and the wealthy and powerful crucified him for it.
The Roman Empire—the world—was never the same after that enlightenment. The story spread like wild fire, and it was a story with a moral: One peaceful man gets crucified. Six billion peaceful people end all human war. Be fruitful. Multiply.
A peaceful community is required. Buddha called this the Sangha–the spiritual community he created to deal with his violent culture. A place to live in the world, but not of the world. It is one of the three “refuges” of the Buddhist mind — the support of other kindred thinkers.
In the Buddhist community, it is often said that Jesus was an enlightened being who saw the evil of an empire, and could not stomach it. He resolved to sacrifice his life to make a point. He decided to be the political face of the countless, the faceless, the slaughtered. He made the world take a hard look at itself, and the masses shuddered in disgust. That disgusted mass realization was enough. The world started changing.
Privately, as a Buddhist, I feel deeply for the crucified Christ. The crucifixion is one of my most enduring — and unsettling — personal symbols. It is a symbol of an individual sacrifice to a great ideal, for the betterment of all; and it is a reminder of a Herculean effort—an attempt to slightly pacify a race of barbarians. It only took the five hundred year old teachings of a warrior prince, turned homeless monk, re-envisioned by a working-class citizen of a tyrannical world government. The fact that Jesus went on to martyr himself, after achieving such an implausible intellectual leap, is purely humbling for me. Jesus, as a human being, astounds me.
[And he may have really been the Son of God. What do I know?]
(I doubt it, though…)
{…then again…}
:::nah:::
♥om♥
The Writer's Notebook 