Jesus the Buddha and the rest :)

[Mr Cheese]

Not at all!
Jesus taught keeping the God as the central figure.
While Buddha had distanced himself from the concept of God & essentially taught ways to understand & improve human condition.

And if you happen to read the lives & teachings of these two people, you will find very little common ground. With respect, I'd even say that the Buddha was a million miles ahead of Jesus.

actually it depends....

if one sees the mystics view of God, one found incidentally within christianity also
we find God is the same as in Buddhism

If one examines the overall story of Buddha we can also see it is the same as Christ's... moving from a state of perfection, to doubt and forgetfulness and wandering, to a return home.

it all depends upon how you examine things.

......

Reflection for February 26, 2010: Ranting about Eden « Prayers and Reflections

Good one you can’t have your cake and eat it…
You are either drawing from Gnostic views or you aren’t…
As you rightly point out, mixing Gnostic views of the Eden tale and then turning around and incorporating those which you opposed in the first place is rather ludicrous
the classical Gnostics of course liked to turn things on their head and smash things down. Much like the Buddhists do. However the idea was that through tearing down conventions and smashing things apart, it forced a person to THINK. It was about getting beyond the detritus and superfluous garbage, like how big Adam’s toe nails were and his age when he grew his first set of nostril hairs.
Eden then as everyone probably knows, became a tale of being trapped in a place of ignorance, by a false God. Sophia then humbled herself and acting as a syzgy (spelling Nazi please) making the serpent Sophia and Christ…informed Adam and Eve they were in ignorance… thus the fall becomes an act to escape ignorance and to return to Gnosis.
Of course in the end if you compare the standard story versus the Gnostic story of Eden we really have the same thing. It is a story about how mankind has to return to a former state of being. Or arguably it is about remembering….
But whatever your language and take, we can arguably see that the Eden tale has the same “resulting pattern.” We see this same pattern in the life of Christ and the Buddha of course. We see this in the Western Occult story of the life of Christian Rosenkreutz. For Gnostics we see this in the apocryphal tale (used to this day in India by Christians) found in the acts of Thomas, known as the Hymn of the Pearl or the Hymn of the robe of glory.
This cycle is three fold. Creation destruction redemption.
Again, depending on what tradition and what angle you are looking at, this three fold pattern is the same….For the hymn of the pearl we can summarize:
creation
a child is born into a special family
destruction
the child is restless and seeks adventure, he leaves the comfort and confines of his family. In so doing he forgets his family and who he is. He faces many trials and temptations.
Redemption
The child having faced trials, renounced temptation…returns home with his prize. His prize is to remember who he truly is…he has gained the Pearl.
…..
This is then, the story of Christ, Buddha and Christian Rosenkreutz, Aladdin and his magic lamp! And I am sure a great many others. Thus the Eden tale is far more than just a mere creation story, it is a universal motif than can be seen to be the very story of mankind itself and what we were, are and will be. Of course there are many ways to see the Eden tale.
Gnostics of course tended to not take their cosmology all that seriously. They understood that Edenic tales, such as “Hypostasis of the Archons” or “On the Origin of the World” etc were all ways of seeing things…in effect ways to understand things, not the things themselves. Gnostics tended to not be literalists. Mar Mani for example, the founder of the 1000 yr long running Heresy, the Manichaeans, refused to actually commit to answering the big questions. Despite what is stated online at the likes of WIKI websites, if one digs deep enough we find that Mani had no grand plan or cosmological picture. When pressed about the nature of the Universe, what is God’s nature, how many toe nails does Satan have…questions such as these, Mani refused to answer. As a Gnostic Mani knew such questions were unanswerable, any answer would merely be stating the position of an opinion, a stance, a model..A cosmological map. Maps and models after all are not the things they are portraying.
Seth of course was a rather important figure for many Gnostic groups, not just the so called Sethians.
It is I who am you, it is you who are me. Wherever you are, I am there. I am sown in all; you collect me from wherever you wish. And when you collect me, it is your own self that you collect.

 

[Mr Cheese]

Isnt creationism a fundamental concept in jesus's teachings??

no....

Jesus' teachings are the golden rule and all that springs from it...
but then so are buddha's...relieve suffering

 

[Mr Cheese]

Sometimes, but not always. That's my guess.

For them to be saying the same thing, they would need to have the same experiences and the same insights into those experiences, and the same interpretations of those experiences.

It's possible that some mystical experiences, such as satori, are everywhere the same. That is, everyone's experience of, say, satori is the same as everyone else's experience of satori -- at least in a very general or fundamental way.

Now, there is some evidence for the notion that some mystical experiences are everywhere the same. Aldous Huxley talks about such things in various books, especially his book, The Perennial Philosophy. There are cases where something said by a Chinese sage who lived circa 500 BC is remarkably similar to something said by a Spainish monk who lived circa 1250 AD. And such cases seem to imply that maybe those people were talking about the same thing.

But the evidence for the notion that mystical experiences are everywhere the same is not conclusive. Especially given such disagreements between sages such that one might be a theist and another a non theist. Or, if both are theists, one might be a pantheist while the other is not. So I don't think you can conclude that sages or holy people or whatever you want to call them are everywhere saying the same thing except to different audiences.

I would argue experiences are the same, conceptualisation of said experiences differ.

Although of course like a house, there are different rooms in the invisible worlds...

 

[Mr Cheese]

Yes some of their basic principles are similar.

But it does not mean that they were saying the same thing. I mean, does it?

If you are thirsty and I give you apple juice and your thirsty friend orange juice

does what I have done differ or have I quenched both of your thirsts?

 

[logician]

no....

Jesus' teachings are the golden rule and all that springs from it...
but then so are buddha's...relieve suffering

The "golden rule" has problems, as many people don't care how they are treated, and what if you are a masochist?

 

[Rainbow Mage]

Yes, Buddhism isn't traditionally atheistic.

 

[Mr Cheese]

The "golden rule" has problems, as many people don't care how they are treated, and what if you are a masochist?

if a person is a masochist...then the other person should be accomidating to that.

The golden rule works at all times..even with sadists and masochists. Because it is how a person would like to be treated... if the other person is not a willing participant in the S&M equation then the golden rule is not being applied.

The golden rule of course is supremely complex and actually speaks of mystical union, all wrapped up in a simple "formula"... which really is why the Beatles had it correct: "All you need is love"

 

[Thief]

I would argue experiences are the same, conceptualisation of said experiences differ.

Although of course like a house, there are different rooms in the invisible worlds...

Is this the same as...'there are many houses in my Father's mansion'....?

 

[Mr Cheese]

Is this the same as...'there are many houses in my Father's mansion'....?

maybe...

 

[Rainbow Mage]

Yes, the fact of the matter is, Jesus and the Buddha were addressing different times and societies. They were also two different people, as we're all different, so their teaching style may not have been exactly the same, but they were teaching something very similar. See, I read Jesus very differently then a Christian would. The stuff Jesus said can mean something very different from an eastern philosophical view. The stuff Jesus said is a lot like what Buddha, Krishna, Confucius, etc. said.