Purely by chance, I came upon a number of photographs of the Buddha’s birthday festivities in a number of countries, and I felt outright disheartened by what I saw. All the festivities reeked of the religious. Piety was at their core. They struck me as festivities I had witnessed in a number of Christian countries I was familiar with. But the Buddha I knew was nowhere in sight. The photographs thus simply stunned me, for Buddhism and religion have nothing in common in my own mind. Crestfallen, I started staring into the distance. “Poor Buddha,” is all I could say to myself. Not even he could escape his followers. Forever in search of the religious, they converted their sagacious teacher into a divinity.