.Buddha & Jesus .Time tells all It is plainly not fair to put anyone on the same bill with Jesus. It is not fair to the other individual. This point is so obvious that it is generally considered impolite even to mention it, but it is far from clear who benefits from the silence.
If it were not for the fact that the charisma of Jesus was so badly misappropriated and exploited by people who forgot that they owed their lives to it, Buddha would have been forgotten long ago. That historical fact remains to be corrected.
It is not clear that anyone who has been exposed to that raw imago, without some great cultural buffer, has ever been less than profoundly affected. Certainly no other image comes close.
An army of experts might present arguments to the contrary, but common sense argues that much of what passes for modern reality hangs from that peg. That the owner of the peg might fail to rendezvous would seem most improbable, regardless of any professional opinion. Even the concept of professionalism, when it has ever been more than mandarin, could not be disentangled from that imago. How long a shadow can even a Hippocrates cast in such a light?
That we have not all already been infused with the light is an unsurpassed cosmic joke. In fact we have been, but the realization of it is not an event from which we are expected to recover anything that resembles ordinary life. There is still time to wait for the realization, and that is all the time there will ever be.
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rev. 11/29/99