Comparison of Buddhism and Islam

The longer I stay in Thailand, the more I learn about Buddhism, the more shocked I am to find such close comparisons between Buddhism and Islam.

To begin with, when I was back at University I spoke to a professor of Sufi Islam. He told me that the Prophet Muhammad was looked up to as a man who had attained spiritual greatness. 'Like the Buddha', I said. He had answered that he had never before made that comparison, which I was very shocked by since he said that before becoming a Muslim he had been greatly interested in Buddhism.

During my retreat the monk told us that we had to step with our right feet first when doing sitting meditation, and put the right hand over the left on when doing sitting meditation - just-like-Islam! He gave us a vague explanation that it had something to do with the left and right brain co-ordination but I was not completely convinced.

Moderation of food is very important in Buddhism. Monks don't eat after 12 and they should eat only to nourish their bodies, nothing more. Lay people are also encouraged to adopt this controlled approach to eating.

In Islam the Prophet Muhammad said that people should eat until they fill a third of their stomach with food, another third with water and leave the final third for air. Ramadan is also a holy month in Islam where Muslims fast during daylight hours, to remind them, amongst other things, of the need to eat only as much as you need to sustain yourself, and not over-indulge (although Ramadan these days is definitely more about over-indulgence than restraint with many Muslims flipping their days round so that they sleep during the day - the fasting hours- then feast at sunset - definitely not healthy!).

In Islam, during prayer, Muslims prostrate until their heads touch down onto the floor, to show the utmost respect for God. They do that in Buddhism as well. They both also use the lunar calendar to chart their religious holidays.

Of course there are also differences. The ideal Buddhist diet is vegetarian, however Muslims have to kill a sheep or a goat during their major festival Eid-el-Adha (Festival of sacrifice, which symbolises how out of his love fro God, Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his only and hard-begotten son).

Buddhist temples are adorned with statues and images of the Buddha and other highly spiritually-developed people, whereas Islam forbids images and statues in its mosques so that no claims to pagan/idol worship can be made.

In general men and women in Buddhism are treated equally, however nuns are definitely inferior to monks. One rule to be a nun is that 'if a nun has been ordained for even 100 years she must bow to a monk who has been ordained for even a day'.