AHC: Buddhist Scandanavia

birdboy2000

Banned
The closest Buddhist got to Scandinavia anywhere near the Viking Age was the Kara-Khitai khanate. And that was still east of the Caspian Sea. Even the Mongols never managed to menace Scandinavia.

For Vikings to adopt Buddhism, someone else needs to do it first, to give them at the very least contact with the faith, and ideally a neighboring state for which converting to Buddhism offers trade and alliance benefits.

For instance, if the Indo-Greek kingdom (and later Asoka) was successful in spreading the religion throughout the Hellenistic world, and from there it became the state religion of the Roman Empire, a Buddhist Scandinavia becomes a probable occurrence. Alternatively, perhaps the religion could spread earlier on the Eurasian steppe (which it did in OTL, but not that soon and never completely) and spread through them to the Germanic peoples via an analogue of the Huns.

But OTL, Europe's major powers adopted not Buddhism but Christianity, and Scandinavia, having much to gain by adopting their religion, followed suit. I think any PoD turning Scandinavia Buddhist will have to turn large portions of Europe outside Scandinavia Buddhist first.
 
Or unless the Gokturk Khaganate or Khazars or the Uighurs lasted longer/got their acts together and managed to form a Silk Road over the Caspian and Black Sea to Rus like some have postulated they wanted to do by taking out Persia. The Buddhists had penetrated into Inner Asia by the 6th Century by this point of course.

The reason guessed why the Uighurs converted to Manichean was that the ruling class wanted to stand apart politically from other tribes and groups.
 

katchen

Banned
Marshal Braaginski is right. A Buddhist Khan in Russia would be needed. That could have happened in the 15th Century if the Altan Khan had defeated the Uzbek Muslim Khanate of Sibir and gone on to conque3r the Golden Horde, which was in decline, but by then, Russia was pretty much set in Orthodox Christian ways and Christianity woud have been a national rallying point. No, it would have had to have happened at the latest in the 13th or 14th Centuries
Then again, it might be possible to SUPERIMPOSE Tibetian Buddhism on Eastern Orthodox Christianity by first familiarizing Buddhist lamas with Christian theology so that they could come up with an "orthodox Buddhist" reinterpretation and reframing of Christian theology. Things like Jesus's teaching of being "born again" meaning reincarnation, for instance. And emphasizing the tradition that Jesus visited and studied in Ladakh, Tibet in his early years before His Ministry. That kind of amendment of Christianity in a New Age fashion to conform to state sponsored Gelugpa Buddhism. Then, slowly replacing local priests with the new Buddhist lama Christian priests, sometimes sending younger priests to lamaseries to be "re-educated" where priests who failed to do so would simply disappear. It's the way the Byzantine Emperors replaced Donatism and Arianism and Monophysite Christianity with Augustinian Christianity and with an illiterate population and control over the priesthood and the writing or printing of bibles, a Buddhist Golden Horde could do it too, now that I think of it, probably pretty late into the early Modern Period, perhaps even following a Dzungar conquest in the 1700s ATL. It would take several generations though. Once literacy began to spread amongst the peasantry, though, that would become impossible.
 

katchen

Banned
Buddhist Russi

Now that I think of it, there is even another way that Buddhism can spread through Russia and into Europe. As it was, OTL, between the Kalmyks and the Buryats, Tibetan Buddhism diid come to Russia and with the encouragement of the 13th Dalai Lama, (see "From Synarchy to Shambala: the Role of Political Occultism in 20th Century Russia" by Markus Oesterreider www.academia.edu/.../From_Synarchy_to_Shambhala_The_Role_of_ Political_Occultism_and_Social_Messianism_in_the_Activities_of nicholas roerich). Lamaseries were started in Moscow and St. Petersburg. And this was with Tibetan Buddhists a small minority. What if Russia had been more successful at the Great Game with Great Britain in the 1870s, had pusyhed through the Sanjul Pass into Chitral and on into Gilgit, Ladakh and Lhasa, incorporating Tibet and Mongolia into the Russian Empire? What sort of inroads might Tibetan Buddhism make on Russian society, particularly amongst the intelligentsia? Would the Okhrana encourage it as a distraction from socialism? It can be argued that it worked that way during the 70s and 80s here in the US...And would Tibetan Buddhism spread through the rest of Europe?_....,
 
I wrote a short story, although admittedly it involves a Scandinavianized England rather than Scandinavia proper.

I just read that story. It was interesting. A world where the dominant religion in England and presumably the rest of northern Europe is a blend of Buddhism and Norse paganism, that for some reason is apparently very pro-Loki (I'm going to take a guess and assume that his popularity is due to Buddhism disapproving of violence but having no such problems with guile). Hello swarm of butterflies.

Shame that it was just a one-shot, I'm kind of curious about that ATL now.

Sorry if this counts as a necro (standards differ from forum to forum).
 
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Actually this somewhat plausible in OTL Post-1900, given the number of Swedes and Norwegians vacationing in Thailand nowadays, marrying Thai girls half their age and having half Scandinavian half Thai children.

My Finnish cousins joke that in 50 years time, there will be civil wars in Norway and Sweden between the children of the Thai wives and the children of the Middle Eastern asylum seekers over whether Norway and Sweden become either Buddhist or Muslim countries.
 
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