Siddhartha invented the slave religion. Buddhism is just a coping mechanism for powerlessness—live in the moment and desire nothing. It’s really effective. The Chinese had such solid control over their peasants that they didn’t even need to invent the gun. Without outside intervention, they’d still be stagnated where they were a thousand years ago.
The Romans were explorers, and like any colonial power took the useful ideas from discovered people. They saw what the Chinese had done and adapted it to their world. They didn’t want to turn their entire society to slaves, but their Jews were a real pain in the ass. The Jews had been in bondage for most of the past couple millennia and had mastered the art of being crappy slaves. To get the Jews working harder and more docilely, the Romans gave them their savior, but made him a pussy. A slave god. The Jesus you know never even existed. He was just a name of one of thousands of crazy ranters they crucified that the Romans pulled out of their records. As far as I know, the actual personality attributed to Jesus is a construct of the most slavish parts of the messaging of half a dozen ranters from two hundred years prior to when the Romans compiled the bible in about 200CE. Jesus’ message can be summed up as, “be a good slave while you’re alive and you’ll get to be a Roman when you’re dead”.
After getting their asses kicked by the Christians for a couple hundred years, Mohamed studied the reason why and concluded it was the religion. He took the self hatred and utter subservience that made for such vicious infantry and refined it well enough to fend off the Christians in the days before firearms, but he made his system too controlling, too inflexible, and the Muslims eventually came under the Christian boot. There’s an interesting postscript to this story I learned when I was talking to Turkish dissidents in the 90s. Mustafa Kemal, the man named Ataturk (literally “Father of the Turks”), looked around the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire after WWI and figured out why his people lost—their overly controlling religion. His solution was to quietly round up about 70,000 of the most fundamentalist preachers and make them not be. That kept Turkey a secular nation for 70 years, but eventually we paid the Saudis enough they were able to spread that Wahhabism shit even to relatively prosperous Turkey.