Check out McEvilley's The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies. I think you'll find it fascinating. It's about cultural transmission, particularly of religious ideas, between the Mediterranean and India, across West Asia. Some parts verge on crackpotted, but others seem totally solid.

Before reading this, it was obvious that there must have been significant influence of Greek philosophy on Buddhism. The same pattern of five elements, for example, could not possibly have been a coincidence. Some of Nagarjuna's proofs are way too similar to Zeno's for that to be a coincidence either.

The most solid part of McEvilley's story is strong documentation for extensive contact between Greece and India (overland via Persia and through the Red Sea) from roughly 500 BCE to 500 CE. There was extensive material trade throughout, and solid evidence for non-religious cultural exchange.

What's not totally clear is which bits of culture went in which direction and exactly when. Generally, my reading is that it's mostly Greece->India.

Unrelatedly, I have found no strong evidence against the null hypothesis that Buddhism began in the place and time where there's first unambiguous evidence for it, which is Gandhara (Afghanistan) in the 1st century (i.e. vastly later than almost all scholars think). I haven't read enough history of early Buddhism to have any confidence in such a late date, but so far whenever I've suggested it I just get "that's absurd" rather than "that can't be true because X."

So if the null hypothesis is correct, the Buddha myth could have been based on the Christ myth. Or both of them could have been based on a diffuse collection of heroic myths that were circulating in the Greco-Persian world.

My extremely tentative guess about the Buddha myth was that it was invented in the 1st century as propaganda for one of several shramana cults, was wildly successful because it's so appealing, and then was adopted by several other, rather different ones. In other words, there was no "pre-sectarian Buddhism"; the Buddha myth actually tended to draw together what eventually became Mahayana and Hinayana, which arose fairly independently.

All Buddhist scholars would say that this is utterly idiotic; discount accordingly.

On the other hand, if you think about the Buddha myth as propaganda for shrama cults, it almost falls out deterministically. I mean, it's exactly what you'd invent if you set out to produce an origin myth. That makes me suspicious :-)

I neither know nor care anything about early Christianity, so I've no idea how this relates to that.

Forgot to mention that Gandhara was a more-or-less Greek kingdom at the time. Check out the Wikipedia article on "Indo-Greeks".

So, Buddhism might be best understood as Greek philosophy/religion continued in a different cultural context.

Interesting. Updated my reading list (ugh).

From a Christian perspective, the strongest evidence for Buddhism -> Christianity is Lindtner's theory of narrative similarities and puns between various important sutras and gospels, which I naively (not being able to read either Greek or Sanskrit yet) judge as "plausible, because Marcionite / Gnostic texts are full of puns and Greek / Indian culture certainly overlapped" and "dude, you're seeing patterns because of universal salvation tropes and because both languages are closely related anyway". (And from what I've read, his reason to conclude the causality goes B->C is because Buddhism is older, duh, Buddhists say so, which, well...)

(And of course Gnostics and various Buddhists share a lot of concepts, but not to such a specific degree that it would beat the prior of independent reinvention, I think. Lots of that stuff just is really easy to come up with to begin with, for the right kind of mind.)

I haven't cared much about Christianity -> Buddhism and Christianity -> Islam, mostly because I find Christian origins hard enough to think about already, and they're better documented than the rest. However, I'll have to look at them eventually to calibrate my prior of various minimalist / mythicist ideas. If Islam had a very influential pillars (Sunni) vs. mystic (Shia) split and it's reflected in its scripture, then postulating a similar Peter/12 Apostles vs. Paul split is far more plausible, and so on. And the more examples of priests making up their back story whole cloth I have, the less crackpot my version of OT and NT minimalism will be. :)

What's somewhat troubling to me is that many such "late" origin theories don't seem to be discussed much in the mainstream and have to be tediously argued for piece by piece, even though we have many unambiguous examples of cult leaders inventing ancient narratives from scratch, which are then accepted as common background and independently developed by their descendants, sometimes as elaborate fanfic, sometimes as ideology. Joseph Smith, Himmler's witch research, Blavatsky and all the other occultists, virtually all early nationalists, etc. did just that. Maybe it's just my experience of having spent way way too much time with Thule-style occultists and how they invent sources (and then forget they invented them) on a daily basis, but "well the text says it's about some old kingdoms and shit, who'd make that up just to make a point about contemporary politics or some dude they don't like?" just doesn't impress me much.

But if I try to update on that, I end up putting more and more stuff late, and I'm not sure if that won't end up as radical source skepticism - i.e. never trust a written history about anything, stick to archeology, genomes, economics etc. instead for what happened. But maybe that's just the right position...

In the case of Buddhism, it's unambiguous that everything OTHER than some, contested subset of the Pali scriptures was back-dated. I mean there's hundreds of different later authors who unarguably back-dated. It was just standard procedure, not something that required any initiative. And that's apparently true for much/most of the Pali stuff. (Apparently no one seriously thinks Abhidharma is "authentic", e.g.) So my null hypothesis is that ALL of the Pali stuff is also back-dated.

B->C seems to me more likely than C->B, yes. But A->{B,C} would be my actual guess, where A is a collection of Greco-Persian sources, probably including Zoroaster.

Also, that basic narrative of Buddhism sounds very much like early Christianity, which (IMO, tentatively) arose as initially independent lines of Hellenized Judaism around 50-70AD (from which we get all the crucifixion and angel stuff), mostly-Marcionite Paulinism around 130AD (which invented(?) all the uniquely Christian stuff as clever theological evolutions of Greek philosophy, mostly Platonism) and various local "this is why this church is important and needs money" cults, which all eventually get forced into the same imperial religion of Catholicism (until the barbarians break it), which ingeniously merges and historicizes it mid-to-late 2nd century.

The main problem, I think, is that some of the arguments for that are somewhat circular (even though they make the existing texts much more coherent), because we typically only have one side's story (and dating), so for example we don't have any unambiguous Marcionite texts, only polemics against them, and so claims like "the core narrative of Mark reads exactly like what you'd expect a Marcionite to write" depends on the reconstruction of what Marcionites believed, which we derive from what plausible forms the texts their critics are responding to might've had, which depends in part on what sections look like later interpolations, and we have to ask what would someone have to believe to want to change them...

So we end up with a situation in which most serious scholars think at least *some* Pauline letters are late interpolations, but no one agrees on which, or who did the interpolating. I agree with RMP that this is just evidence that they *all* are fake, but I'd still like to know who wrote them, and why.

Stupid postmodernism. Dudes should've cryptographically signed their epistles...

(drunk commenting on Greek theology...)

Well clearly Zoroaster doesn't make any sense as an /Ur-Mythos/, his name doesn't even start with A! So for A->{B,C} to be true, the origin must be Akkadian. This fits well with Gmirkin's recent work, arguing that the Pentateuch was written ~3rd century BC based on Babylonian sources.

And we all know that the Akkadians just got *their* ideas from the Sumerians (and fortunately, no other contemporary or early cultures managed to write stuff down, so the buck stops there).

It has been argued that John the Baptist is, even etymologically, based on Ea, so Jesus is Buddha is the usurper of Enki, i.e. Marduk. That makes Satan into Maya into Tiamat, and Ea the Whore of Babylon, riding on Tiamat.

I like where this is going.

Something I don't know is whether there is some "core" of Pali stuff that is universally agreed to be "authentic", or if there is nothing that everyone in the field agrees on (as you say goes for the Pauline letters). I don't really care enough about early Buddhism to get into this. However, I've read several books, and my impression is that (1) there is no serious historical method in Pali studies; "scholars" just make stuff up, and (2) there's probably nothing that they agree on except that SOMETHING in there MUST be authentic, because otherwise they'd be wasting their time, wouldn't they?

Interestingly, this seems now to be becoming embarrassing for Western Theravadins. For the past hundred years, they assumed that the "scholars" were right that the Pali material was "authentic", but that's now starting to look increasingly shaky.

Bikkhu Sujato, a white former punk musician whom I like a lot (while sharing zero overlap in religious views), has started an "Authenticity Project" to sort this out. (Can google for this; I'm not sure I can put links in here without Disqus choking.)

I found that interesting because he clearly thinks the Pali stuff MUST be authentic (because otherwise he's wasting his time, right?) but also that it's enough in doubt, in terms of public perception, that he has to do something about it. And what's interesting is that he's found he can't point to academic scholarship to verify authenticity. Obviously he's done a lot more reading than I have, and apparently he can't find anything that makes a good case. So, as a non-academic, he has to go and do his own research to make a case.

Given that the academic work in the area seems to be shoddy, he may be able to do a better job. He's a really smart and dedicated guy. Still, I kinda feel that if academics couldn't make a case after more than a century of trying, maybe ...

Well, as it happens, McEvilley's book traces the major themes of Greek thought back through Egypt (that's mostly non-controversial, Plato said that himself), Akkadia, and to Sumer. So obviously you HAVE to read him.

(And, by the way, were the Sumerians actually the same people as the Harrapans? Maybe...)

Well, the alternative is Bultmann's demythologizing of theology, i.e. "the lessons are true and valuable, but the narrative is bullshit and all that woo really pisses me off". Of course then you lose all your special status and likely turn into one of those dreaded secular humanists.

Which is where I'd pitch Post-Marcionism, which knows that the Trolly Spirit writes in mysterious ways, and so we can just chuck out all the authenticity and do theology unhindered. By which I mean mostly puns.

(And I'll check out some Theravada reconstructionism. They did some really cool stuff with Mahasi, so even if it's false, I'm still fascinated to see what parts they need to be authentic to sell the renunciation stuff.)

(Already bought his book, was just 3 bucks on Kindle. Bumping him further up on my reading list.)

Muflax, sorry for being OT, but what is your opinion of Duolingo? I noticed you had an account. Have you tried it since they improved it massively and added Beeminder integration?

I looked at it shortly after launch and was unimpressed. It might be useful for more advanced learners to practice vocab / composition (I haven't really looked at that part yet), but I don't see how it could possibly work for beginners unless Duolingo massively curates its material (which I expect they don't, as that's their gimmick).

I could see a use for immersion practice, but once you're that advanced, I'm not sure why you'd do translations instead of starting flame wars or writing bad song lyrics (i.e. what I did for English). But anyway, I haven't looked at that option in detail yet.

(And OT is always fine.)

In the latest version, the internet sentence translation is no longer mixed in with the rest of the lessons and now seems to be mainly for people that have completed all the rest of the material but want to keep practicing. Perhaps it is worth a second look.

In regards to the difficulty level, I agree. It is slightly too difficult for someone who has no experience with the target language. On the other hand, I was able to make good progress with it on Spanish after only learning the 500 most used words via Anki.