You'd be surprised by the diversity in Buddhism. Once I got a book on Buddhism and was reading it in front of my Indian Muslim parents. They gave me a strange l

You'd be surprised by the diversity in Buddhism. Once I got a book on Buddhism and was reading it in front of my Indian Muslim parents. They gave me a strange look and asked me if I was going to convert. I laughed and explained, as a western educated person does, that Buddhism is more like a philosophy than a religion and that they don't actually pray to the Buddha. My mom laughed and said the Buddhists in her village would pray to the Buddha every day and give sacraments to the statue. This is when I realized that everyday folk religion is very different from what you find in books and summaries. No one goes around telling Buddhists in obscure small villages that they're not supposed to pray to the Buddha. If anything, the idea that the Buddha isn't a god like figure comes more from a western understanding of Buddhism that tries to summarize the global collection of practices into a single ethos