Interesting parallel between Jesus and the Buddha #4

Those who want to save their life shall lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake shall find it.
— Jesus, Mark 8.35

With relinquishing all thought and egotism, the enlightened one is liberated through not clinging.
— Siddhartha Gautama, Majjhima Nikaya 72.15

Traditional Christians would not consider these sayings parallel because to them, Jesus' importance lies not so much in the wisdom he taught as in their notion that Jesus is their "redeemer" — i.e., that they are mysteriously absolved of personal responsibility for their own unwise, erroneous thoughts and behavior by Jesus' dying to absolve them from their sins.

In the quote of Jesus above, what did he mean by "my sake"? The underlying, implicit question that determines one's interpretation is this: How did Jesus see himself — as an essentially ego-defined entity, or as an ego-less exemplar of a way of being? Traditional Christians believe the former, I the latter.

The ramifications of this matter of interpretation are hugely consequential. The road to hell in human experience has, over the centuries, been paved with the notion that God has (or is) an ego. Is this not the fuel behind every act of cruelty or violence perpetrated "for the sake of" religion?

It seems to me that Jesus' thought of himself not in terms of an ego-bound "I" but as the embodiment of a way of being. If anything, he seems to have come to liberate those of his own Jewish faith from the notion of a dictatorial, egocentric god.

Perhaps the verse that traditional Christians point to most in order to "prove" that Jesus thought of himself in egoistic terms is John 14.6: "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me."

I understand. The claim does sound pretty egotistical — unless the key to interpretation is to understand that Jesus was not referring to himself in the typical way (as an ego entity) but as the embodiment (the manifestation) of a more godly way of being.