There are so many parallels between Mormon spiritual conception and foundational Buddhist tenants.
Which kind of connects Mormonism and Christian Gnosticism, because the Gnostic schools were also similarly Buddhist in their view that the goal of all this is to evolve through or emerge from a state of ignorance / sin to a "natural" state of Oneness with Divinity / the Source of Life / the Universal Soul.
I think some mainline Christians still talk about Mormons being revived Gnostics (those of them who have any idea what Gnostics actually believed, of course. It's also just an old slur for so-called heretics).
What's interesting is that mainline Christianity - with it's militant focus on inherent human failure, Jesus's special-case divinity, and the absolute spiritual need for Jesus's "permission" through his sacrifice for us to interface with God at all - is the new kid on the block, with the weird ideas. Especially since all that wasn't even a part of the Jewish Jesus movement until like 100 years or more after it started. Like Paul and whoever wrote Mark were not interested in Jesus's origins outside of "God chose him and sent him to suffer the blood-price for all sin, so we can nod in the direction of that and be good in God's eyes now." They didn't care how that worked or what it really meant, because they were laser-focused on Jesus coming back immediately to be King of Earth. It's only when he didn't that later generations had to explain why that wasn't anything to worry about, he fixed it all for us before he left, just tell God you're with him and try to follow these rules and you're covered.
That really removes any personal responsibility for spiritual growth from everyone. You can't do anything anyway, just accept the Jesus Insurance Policy, and yell at the Devil if he messes with you.
That's a cheat code to what was clearly supposed to be more of a "follow Jesus's example of how to be of God" thing. Because why else did he have to live here in the first place? God could have just killed him in Heaven and shrugged (or not bothered with this odd demand for the death of himself to "cure" sin, which we did to him...?).
Buddhism says seek inner connections to the Divine through spiritual purification / maturation. Gnosticism says learn the true nature of what sin is and what the rules of the universe are, and you can overcome all obstacles to "plug back in" to God. Mormonism says godhood itself is just the final form human souls attain, by a similar process of learning complex truths about reality, like namely who Heavenly Father and Jesus and Lucifer actually are. All of these don't offer cheat codes (or at least aren't supposed to), it's each individual person's choice to work on themselves to attain a restoration to an "original" spiritual state (following certain revealed methods / rituals, of course).
I need to understand more about how specifically Mormons conceive of 'sin' and how it relates to who and where we are in our lives on Earth. I'm also not terribly clear how they think of Lucifer's role, because isn't rebellion against the Divine Source more of a PART of its plan to raise us up, than an inherent evil or filthy thing? Like it seems a little muddled. Sin is still bad but also maybe just a test you pass to get to the next level? It seems kind of both and I'm not sure what they're really doing with it.
But LDS God / Jesus are simultaneously far larger and intimately smaller than in mainline Christianity, at any rate, because they are both demonstrations that humans are just an extension of universal life and power. The divine in Mormonism isn't an alien force that blames you for being a screw-up that owes it for taking pity on you. It knows what you are because it was and IS you, over and over again. The connection isn't ever broken, so much as forgotten about, the rediscovered and revitalized. It gives us greater spiritual agency. It makes us more responsible and therefore we can feel like we really have a project to work on. It's not just being the lucky peasant who was born into the kingdom with the mightiest / nicest king, which is what all mainline Christianity basically does with it now (with Protestant Jesus being the prince who is your VIP wizard buddy who tells his dad you're cool / Catholic Jesus being the prince who got his dad to adopt you by making you of one flesh with him via the Crucifixion / Eucharist). Because the whole point of all that is that I didn't and can't do anything about it, besides say "yeah okay."
And what kind of cheap-ass spiritual journey is that? I am literally just hanging out, waiting to get invited in. Which is supposed to be soothing. But it kind of just makes it all feel goofy and random and pointless.
Mormon God / Jesus is the fountain. But you gotta drink from it. That looks more like the Primitive Christianity of the Jewish Jesus Movement that is in the actual Bible than whatever Evangelicals and Catholics plucked out of wherever Christianity ended up as in the 400s AD.
And the Book of Mormon would seem an unnecessary addition to all this on the face of it, given what the New Testament already has. But by the 1830s, the American Protestant thing about "well some people are in, some aren't, there's no way to know, just hope you are because God likes you" was in full force. They had cheapened the spiritual walk to what amounted to an exclusive club you had to act like you were a part of, even if hey, maybe you're just not. God / Jesus was the distant, petty owner of that club, throwing fits about how gross you were. That's not timeless or majestic or joyful or worth pursuing.
The BoM tells the story of a God who arranged a very big and complicated adventure for a group of people, and then stuck with them, no matter what they did, for like 500 years or whatever. On a totally different continent. Yes, that mirrors the Old Testament story of his relationship with the Jews. But by adding to it, it "proves" his power over the whole Earth, and history, and how he still cares about our tiny little lives. It tries to reinvigorate the concept of God as both an enormous, and delicately small and knowable, thing.
Now how effectively it does that is up for debate. But that was the objective. Or, at least, that's what Smith and others seem to have taken from it, along with other, perhaps less savory, things. But that new old concept of God and how we connect to him comes out of that second testament. Mormon Jesus steps out of that, free from all the centuries of trinitarian baggage weighing down the New Testament (even though NONE OF THAT is actually in those books. But that didn't stop anyone).
Mormonism reconnects Christianity to an older and more globally popular version of spirituality that Christianity lost along the way. A lot of Christians think that's a feature, but that 'feature' also means they are off the hook for their own spiritual walk. And letting people come to that conclusion isn't helping them do anything, whether that was the intention or not.
I don't know. All of this is interesting.