Buddha said: "Vigilant is the path of immortality. Inattentive is the path of death. The vigilant never die. Those who don't are already like dead people." Isn't it the same thing Christ said when he said, "Let the dead bury the dead"?

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The deeper I got into spirituality and meditative practice, the more I studied the Bible and Abrahamic theology, the more it stuck out at me, not just the similarities between the teachings, but also exactly what the two were trying to do were virtually identical.

Jesus sought to reform a theology that had come to focus excessively on rule-following. Everybody focuses on Jesus’ message of peace and brotherhood, but few focus on just how iconoclastic it was. Jesus was a rebel. He exhorted his followers to reinterpret Jewish law along a set of principles we might call spiritual, or essential. The actual laws as written do not reflect God’s ongoing intent. Living according to God’s rules, rather than God’s intent, was declared by Jesus to be death, while living according to God’s intent grants life. Material riches were deemed inconsequential, and even harmful.

The Buddha did something similar. The Indian subcontinent was in the midst of a great transformation, the Vedic period was coming to an end, and industry was becoming more and more prevalent. The Vedas had identified the human condition as one of aimless, eternal drifting, and gave it a name, samsara. Breakaway spiritual movements, called sramanas, worked to identify and isolate the specific conditions under which one could obtain freedom from samsara.

These sramana movements mostly exhorted you into a lifestyle of mendicancy. Ignore Earthly matters, and focus on spiritual truth and practice. Many of these movements involved extreme physical disciplining, like starvation. After his awakening, he saw that the extremes led nowhere, and preached a “middle way” to liberation.

In a very important way, both the Buddha’s and Jesus’s professed methods were identical. Mindless carrying on of old rules leads nowhere, and going nowhere is analogous to death. Vigilance, vigilance in ensuring that one’s practice remains closely aligned with spiritual principle, is the only thing that grants life. The core essence of both faiths, rely on breaking with old tradition to focus on the basic essence of spiritual practice, anything else is just death while living.