TPOLJ: Comparing the three great philosophies of Jesus, Mohammad and Buddha

Jesus taught a message of "Turn the other cheek":

"You have learnt how it was said: Eye for eye and tooth for tooth.  But I say this to you: offer the wicked man no resistance.  On the contrary, if anyone hits you on the right cheek, offer him the other as well."
— Matthew 5:38–39, Jerusalem Bible

This is a brilliant strategy for staying alive in an environment where your enemy is overwhelmingly more powerful than you, which would have been the case in Jesus's time during the Roman occupation of Israel.  But I'd like to contrast this with the messages (as I understand them, which is probably pretty poorly) of Mohammad and Buddha.

I don't want to simplify Mohammad's message too much, since I'm sure there's a lot more there than I would give him credit for, but I would like to contrast the concept of an external Jihad with Jesus's message of "turn the other cheek".  The Quran states:

“Permission [to fight] has been given to those who are being fought, because they were wronged.” (Qur'an 22:39)

Jesus's message of "turn the other cheek" is a great way to escape death if your enemy is far more powerful than you, but it still leaves you in a much worse position than if you had fought back and won.  If you have a decent chance of success, however, following Mohammad's strategy could leave you in a much better state.

The real key here is in choosing the right strategy for your situation.  It's easy to say that Mohammad was right in following his strategy and that the Zealots should have followed Jesus's strategy because, with the benefit of hindsight, we know that Mohammad won and the Zealots lost.  It's much harder to make that determination when the outcomes are unknown.

Buddha taught a message of peace, very similar to Jesus's, but the situation with Buddhism is very different.  Buddhism really caught on about 200 years after his death with the adoption of Buddhism by Ashoka the Great.  After about 7 or 8 years of bloody conquest, Ashoka adopted Buddhism, which proved a very effective way to rule over his newly united kingdom.

History relates that he chose it because he was troubled by the violence of his war of conquest, but such an obvious, and well publicized ethical transformation doubtless contributed to his ability to hold onto the territories that he had conquered without much trouble.

So we have two, maybe three, different philosophies (the messages of Buddha and Jesus being fairly similar).  Which one is "right"?  Clearly different philosophies are appropriate in different situations, and this ties in very neatly with the third tenet of the Path of Truth:

3. We don't claim to know the truth, but we do claim that no one else knows the truth either

Each religion thinks that their philosophy is universal, but the reality is that each philosophy owes it's popularity to it's effectiveness in handling a specific situation.  Okay, sure, and to its adaptability to help in handling a lot of later situations throughout history, but no one philosophy is best for handling all situations.