The 9th avatar of Lord Vishnu??? (Page 9)

One reason I don't support the 22 avatar theory is that you have too many clones of Vishnu operating @ the same time.  Incidentally, who was Dhanvantari?

If one goes by the Dasha avatar theory, no 2 avatars of Vishnu were active @ any one time.  Kurma ended and then Mohini started, and so there was no overlap.  As for Rama & Parashurama, I've read 2 theories about that.  One is that when Parashurama accosted Rama after the latter's marriage while they were returning from Mithila to Ayodhya and Rama strung Vishnu's bow as requested, Vishnu's avatar ended in Parashurama and got transferred completely to Rama.  The other one I've read is that when Kashyap ordered Parashurama to stop his massacre of Kshatriyas, that was when his incarnation ended.  If one believes that Rama was born the avatar of Vishnu, then the latter explanation covers how Vishnu's incarnation could have ended in Parashurama & begun w/ Rama.  Yet, another school of thought speculates that Parashurama was not a complete avatar the way any of the others were.

And if RLBS and KB are considered parts of the same avatar, then there is no case of multiple avatars co-existing.  That only becomes the scenario under the 22 avatar case.

One thing that Varaali mentioned above about Buddhism - if his followers have changed the color of his teachings to make it a different religion completely different from Hinduism...  Question - are they the ones 'guilty' of doing it, or was that how it started and was meant to be?  On one hand, in countries like Nepal, Buddhism is virtually indistinguishable from Hinduism, and the respect of Hindu deities is even seen to a lesser extent in Thailand and Cambodia.  Whereas in Tibet, Bhutan, Mongolia, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, the Buddhism that they follow is by no stretch of imagination Hindu.  And like I pointed out, unlike Christianity, which has a place of honor for the Old Testament but rejects Jewish books like the Torah and Talmud, Buddhism doesn't accord any importance to Hindu scriptures at all, be they Vedas or Puranas, and by most modern definitions, would qualify as being a completely different religion from Hinduism just like Sikhism is (the modern definition look @ whether 2 religions respect the same scriptures to determine and define whether one is a derivative or variation of the other)

Of course, if Hindu scriptures predicted that Buddha would come and do what he did, then he would indeed fall under the definition of an avatar.  Then the question we'd have here would be whether the Buddha that was predicted and the one that actually surfaced were one and the same?