Essay, Research Paper: Egypt & Ancient Tibet

Per 5
1/10/01
The religions of contemporary Tibet and the ancient Egyptians are similar in a few ways and different in others. What were their thoughts about gods, sacrifice, and their beliefs after death?
The religion of Tibetan people is Buddhism. The goal of Buddhists is to reach what they call nirvana (http://www.tibet.org.za/buddhism.htm): total enlightenment. Reaching enlightenment was like having a total peace with yourself and everybody else and everything around you.
The person the Buddhist people followed around back then was a person who called himself Buddha (http://www.tibet.org.za/buddhism.htm) he was like a god to all of his followers because he was so spiritually enlightened. And people still do because of his great knowledge. The people worshiped him and wanted to become him.
As for the Egyptians, their religion had many gods (http://guardians.net/egypt) so they were polytheistic. They believed in many different gods for many different reasons and things. An example would be that they had a god that they would pray for good crops, peace, Health, and many many different things. They didn't believe in reincarnation unlike the Buddhist people.
The Tibetans thought your afterlife depended on how good of a person you were in life. Basically this determined how you spent eternity in reincarnation. Your dharma and karma is how good you were in life and how nice you were to other people and if you did or do good things for other people. (Tibet-Patricia Levy)
By contrast, the Egyptian belief's after death were higher people who had more authority were buried with all their belonging s and were mummified (http://guardians.net/egypt). They thought that after someone died that they would go into the afterlife and exist according to what rank or how good of position or power they had on earth.
The Buddhist people never sacrificed anyone or anything because their religion was more humble they were just trying to reach nirvana to be perfect to be enlightened these people had no need for sacrifice and by their religion they didn't.
On the other hand the Egyptian's would sacrifice people every once in a while to the gods because supposedly the Egyptian gods liked blood that was what the people thought about them anyway. Therefor, whenever things would go bad they would sacrifice someone to the gods (http://guardians.net/egypt). The person who was sacrificed thought it was a great honor to be a sacrifice to the gods.
All in all, these two religions are similar in some ways but they are different in many many ways, by one religion doing sacrifice and one religion not doing it. These two religion's are really interesting and something new to look at.