As you can tell … I’m not versed in Buddhist religion … I was just ignorantly noting the classical images of Buddhism (or at least what I know about it) and comparing them to Christian ones.

I still prefer a peaceful image of a happy religious figure than a bloody naked saviour dying on a cross.

I’m Indigenous Canadian … I’m full blooded Ojibway/Cree from northern Ontario and I fluently speak my language. One of the strangest things I learned from my language was the descriptive word we use to identify Europeans, or white people … we call them ‘Mishtik-ooshoo’ … it’s a contraction of two words - ‘mishtik’ which refers to wood or sticks … and adding the ‘ooshoo’ at the end denotes that it is describing a person or people … the whole word literally means ‘people or person with a stick’ … when we first saw Europeans the most notable thing about them was that they honoured this little wooden stick that they wore and prayed to everywhere … later on they showed us how they decorated this little stick with a corpse and told us how wonderful and loving their religion was.