But Imm .... Buddhism and Hinduism are basically the very same thing, just
presented in different ways, and suggesting different approaches to the same
end. In essense that is, of course there are any number of texts that would
contradict what I just said, but still, I'm right here.

As is Zoroastrism, Sikhism, Islam, Taoism, and Christianty ...... all tarred
with the same brush, and equally confusing and the true meanings lost in the
midst of time and semantics and individuals beliefs and socialisation. :-)

"Immortalist" yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:cde611af-df44-4842-950e-15dcb1662a85@j1g2000prb.googlegroups.com...
The kind of world the Buddha was born into was magical. Everything
seemed to be alive. The trees, mountains, lakes, and sky were living
and breathing with a variety of gods in charge. If you needed rain you
asked one god, if you needed it to stop raining you asked another. The
priests of India did all the religious work, and got paid for it.

In India at the time of the Buddha you became a priest if you were
born into the right family, and not because of the school you went to,
or the grades you got.

There were other kinds of religious people as well.

Mendicants were men who left their family, friends, and jobs to find
the answers to life. They did not live in homes or apartments, but
lived under trees and in caves, and would practice meditation all day
long. They wanted to really be uncomfortable, so they could understand
what suffering was all about.

Many kinds of meditation were practiced by these mendicants. In
Tranquility Meditation for instance, you think about just one thing,
like looking at a candle or saying a word over and over. When the mind
becomes focused in oneness, you experience a great peacefulness.

Even if the mendicants were sitting in the rain on a cold day, they
were still content. They found in their meditation practice the
essence of happiness.

Renunciation is when you give up all the things that make your life
pleasant. Sometimes the people with money and power in India would buy
a lot of stuff to make themselves happy and their lives more
comfortable, thinking that happiness and comfort depended on what they
owned.

When the mendicants could see their own suffering clearly, after many
years of renunciation, they understood that happiness was not
dependent on the things they owned, but the kind of life they lived.

Even all the gods in India could not end the suffering of one human
being.

At the age of 29, the Buddha stopped praying to the gods to end his
suffering and the suffering of others. He left his family and friends,
went to the edge of the forest, took off all his clothes and jewelry,
covered his naked body with rags of cloth, cut off his hair and
started to meditate.

He became a mendicant, and It took him six years of hard work and much
suffering, but in the end he was able to stop his suffering forever
(Nirvana) and help others stop their suffering as well.

Did the Buddha believe in God, the One God of the desert, the God of
the Christians, Jews and Muslims?

Well... No... He didn't... Monotheism (only one God) was a foreign
concept to the Buddha, his world was filled with many gods. The
creator god Brahma being the most important one.

At the time of the Buddha, the only people practicing the religion of
the One God of the desert, were the Jews. Remember, it was still 500
years before Christ came into the world.

The Buddha never left India. The Buddha walked from village to
village... In his entire lifetime he never went any further than 200
miles from his birthplace.

The Buddha never met a Jew... And because of this, he never said
anything about the One God of the desert.

There is also nothing in the teachings of the Buddha that suggest how
to find God or worship the god's of India, although the Buddha himself
was a theist (believed in gods), his teachings are non-theistic....

http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma3/budgod.html

Hinduism is a diverse system of thought with beliefs spanning
monotheism, polytheism, panentheism, pantheism, monism and atheism. It
is sometimes referred to as henotheistic (devotion to a single god
while accepting the existence of others), but any such term is an
oversimplification of the complexities and variations of belief.

Most Hindus believe that the spirit or sou