The Christ and the Buddha lived in two very different times and places, and offered solutions to two differrent problems caused by aspects of evolution.

The God-anointed Christ lived where there were tribal city-states that were only kept from warring on each other by the Roman occupation's Pax Romana. It was a society of the rich and powerful and the poor and oppressed, and of an intolerant, self-serving religious elite.

Prince Siddartha Gautama, the self-enlighteded Buddha, a secular, self-help instructor, lived in Northern India in a time without war, with town merchants and land-owning family farms. There was a welcoming freedom of religion with a flourishing of teachers of many philosophies. Monasteries were donated by the wealthy and royal for the Buddha's followers, when this teachings became very popular. The Buddha lived into old age, welcomed everywhere.

For Siddartha, the Buddha, the goal was achieving personal inner tranquility in a world with sickness, old age and death, and the suffering that comes from cravings we cannot satisfy and clinging to things that cannot last

For Jesus, the Christ, the goal was a world with peace and justice for everyone that could only come with love of God and each another. Jesus condemned the injustics in the legal and economic systems, and mocked the hypocracy of the religious elite.

The ordinary people wanted a warrior massiah to end Roman occupation and oppression by their own people.

The Christ's teachings were repressed in his own country, and after they became established as Christianity abroad, became warring sects, warring philosophies and warring churches.

The Buddha's teachings spread throughout Asia and became many philosophies and religions that lived together peacefully. Statues were made of the Buddha that became places of pilgrimage. Community temples were built. Small images were household objects for reverance and prayer.

There is a continual struggle of humankind against the genocidal extinctions that occur when evolution's dictates are in control of our destiny.

We seek freedom from this slavery to evolution's dictates in our religions, philosphies, governments and multi-national organizations, but no solutions are permanent; we revert to the epigenetics of our ancestors that have us programmed for competition to the death, winner take all.

But in the next world war, there will be no winner, because there will be no survivors.

Evolution is a competition to survive and multip[y between individuals and species. In some species it is a competition between individuals, in othet species it is a compeititon between groups within which cooperation is essential to win.

Humans compete against each other indivisually, and in cooperating groups . .

We have more instincts for cooperation, competition and combat than any other species, and our continually adjusting epigenetic programming selects which to use. 

Our epigenetic programming which is inherited from our parents has been adjusted for their lives, as it will be during our lives. But the foundation programming to which we can revert, is that of our distant ancestors, cave-dwelling hunter-gatherers who lived simple, isolated repetitive lives.

Except in things like playing sports and driving cars, our lives do not repeat the same things over and over. as they did when we were isolated families of hunter-gatherers,  

Our preconscious spontaneously responds to the onset of an emotion with preprogrammed actions, words and thoughts appropriate to our survival and reproduction. But these are not always appropriate to situation and can get us in trouble, and can set up unconsidered self-reinforcing loops of thoughts.

Twenty-four hundred years ago, the self-enlightened Buddha gave us as individuals a way to control our preconscious responses and reprogram our epigenetics (which in his time was called our karma).

Following the Buddha's secular self-help instructions, individuals could end the self-inficted suffering that comes from cravings that cannot be satisfied and clinging to what cannot last. Living in peace would come from self-control over our emotions and creating good karma, in our lives and for the futuer of the world, by living compassionate lives

Two thousand years ago, Jesus, the God-anointed Christ, addressed us as people living in communities, and the only way to end injustice and live in peace, was to love God and one another

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The Buddha said  our mindfulness must be done constantly over a lifetime, and is a continual learning process about our emotional response to situations and our thoughts.

Our natural temperament and our situation in life influence how difficult it is to achieve Mindful awareness and control over our emotional responses.

The Buddha said all his teaching are secular self-help instructions given by an ordinary man to ordinary individuals to achieve the enlightened inner peace he had.

In the tolerant environment of the independent teachers of Hinduism in northern India in the 400's BCE, the Buddha was able to attract a large number of followers and for them wealthy patrons built monasteries. Within his life of 82 years, the Buddha was able to guide the evolution of large communities of mendicant monks, for whom he left guidelines. (This was some thousand years before there were Christian monastic orders of monks.)


Most people reading this will be living in the world with all its responsibilities and troubles, joys and sorrows. But try to find some time alone to study and think about one of the paths to inner peace that has been given to us down through the ages.

Mindfulness is just one part of the Buddha's secular, self-help instructions for the way to inner peace.

In another essay, I will have a brief, simple outline of the Buddha's secular, self-help instructions to find enlightenment and have inner peace. 

Over the centuries, the Buddha's teachings were turned into various philosophies like Zen and into different religions with temples and rituals. The Buddha himself came to be portrayed in statues to which people make offerings and pray.

SIDE NOTE Those curls on the Buddha's head in images are exactly the way hair grows naturally on the heads of the nomadic hunter-gatherer San people of the Kalahari Desert in southwest Africa, and is not seen in southern Nepal where Siddhartha Gautama of the Sakya clan was born, nor in northern India where The Enlightened One,
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Buddha-founder-of-Buddhism

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