Graeco-Buddhist Middle East?

I'm interested in the Jewish reaction to Buddhism.

This form of Buddhism would likely be close to Theravada Buddhism as we know it, conservative and not yet affected by the rise of the Mahayana teachings of the prajnaparamita or the introduction of the sophisticated pantheons of bodhisattvas, dharmapalas, and so on, as those did not really even start to arise until the 1st century BC. As a result, it would cleave fairly closely to the attitudes espoused in the Pali Canon, like this statement by the Buddha.

Having approached the priests & contemplatives who hold that... 'Whatever a person experiences... is all caused by a supreme being's act of creation,' I said to them: 'Is it true that you hold that... "Whatever a person experiences... is all caused by a supreme being's act of creation?"' Thus asked by me, they admitted, 'Yes.' Then I said to them, 'Then in that case, a person is a killer of living beings because of a supreme being's act of creation. A person is a thief... unchaste... a liar... a divisive speaker... a harsh speaker... an idle chatterer... greedy... malicious... a holder of wrong views because of a supreme being's act of creation.' When one falls back on creation by a supreme being as being essential, monks, there is no desire, no effort [at the thought], 'This should be done. This shouldn't be done.' When one can't pin down as a truth or reality what should & shouldn't be done, one dwells bewildered & unprotected. One cannot righteously refer to oneself as a contemplative. This was my second righteous refutation of those priests & contemplatives who hold to such teachings, such views.
- Tittha Sutta, Book of the Threes, Anguttara Nikaya
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an03/an03.061.than.html

That is, of course, a fairly summarized form of what would have been a more sophisticated approach to the position of deities (developed through countless debates between Brahmin teachers and Buddhist bhikkhus). The Buddhist cosmology permitted angelic and "divine" entities, the devas and the brahmas, but they are not omnipotent, immortal (though they can live for millions of years) or omniscient. The most powerful and influential of these is Maha Brahma, whose particular delusion is that, since he is the first being born after the beginning of the present universal cycle, he believes himself to be the Supreme Being. Although a righteous monarchical figure in his own right, he is certainly not what he thinks himself to be. If the Jewish priesthood were to come in contact with such ideas, I think they'd be outraged. Violent persecution of any Buddhist monks attempting to enter Jewish territory, perhaps? Certainly it could worsen the tension between the Greek rulers and the Jewish natives: if the Greeks converted to Buddhism, then to the Jews they would not be idolators merely, but something -worse- and more alien, men who worship a man and who say that God is a megalomaniac and a self-deceived being.


The easiest way to do this is to have everything go normally up to about 185 BC or so. The Maurya state continues to expand, then adopts Buddhism and summarily collapses, whereupon the Euthydemoi and the Sungas tear apart its corpse. The Euthydemoi need to stay alive - easy enough, just eliminate Eukratides from the picture - and hey presto, you have a reasonably stable and powerful Indo-Greek state that conveniently also controls Baktria. Historically, the Indo-Greeks adopted Buddhism to a considerable extent (see: pretty much anything to do with the life of Menandros I Dikaios) and I don't see a reason why this wouldn't happen in TTL.

Then you have to get that to the Middle East, at least ephemerally. That, in itself, isn't unduly hard; have the Euthydemoi win the genetic lottery and redirect the Sakarauka/Yuezhi a bit more west (which happened enough in OTL that it's extremely likely in TTL with a strong Indo-Greek state in charge of Baktria). Parthia is stillborn, and the Euthydemoi can exploit further weakness in the Seleukid state to at least temporarily seize control of Mesopotamia and maybe even Syria.

Naturally, such a huge empire would probably cease to exist inside of a hundred years, but no matter: it will have seeded Buddhism all throughout the Greek East.

Thank you! It's clear that you know this history much better than I do. :eek: So perhaps an effective point of divergence would be: Eukratides' uprising fails and the man is put to death, causing the Euthydemoi to retain stable control over Baktria. Their continued strength causes a farther migration of the Yuezhi and the Sakarauka, who trash Iran and the Seleukid forces in a window between about 150 and 120 or so? In a fit of excessive ambition, the Euthydemoi dramatically overextend their territory until by the year 100 they have almost as much territory as Alexander the Great himself had won. After that the Euthydemoi gradually break up into a patchwork of Hellenistic states.

Does Buddhism become established in the Iranian plateau, or would the Zoroastrians have resisted that fairly effectively? From what I've read about it, it seems like if the Parthians had been overwhelmed by Yuezhi and Sakarauka invaders, Zoroastrianism would not have been a stable religion. Certainly not the vital force it had been under the Achaemenids.

Whilst I agree with much of what you said, beware the fact that oftentimes exoticism is actually not an allure to ancient figures, who are often implicitly or even explicitly hostile to views they consider too far removed from their own.

Indeed, Historians were often more interested in other cultures than Philosophers; compare Herodotos' genuine interest in cultures outside of Greece to Plato or Aristotle.

It's not just that you need a society which produces 'intellectuals' or academics, you need a society where there's an intellectual culture that is interested in the exotic and foreign.

Yet do not empires that have reached their peaks tend towards an interest in exoticism? The Romans were certainly eager to devote themselves to Mithras, Sol Invictus, Cybele, and all the rest, were they not? I think that a firm nationalistic suspicion of Indian culture would have been present in Greek culture in the time of Pericles, but not by the time of the Hellenistic kingdoms, especially around the year 100 which I am positing to be the period when the Euthydemoic (Euthydemic?) kingdom reaches its zenith in size.



Lastly! A query about language: the Buddhist teachings were transmitted in a variety of Prakrit dialects, which in Theravada merged to become the liturgical language of Pali. I assume that Pali, or something similar to it, would have been the language of teaching among monks and nuns traveling westwards into Baktria, and then to Mesopotamia and farther. However, I wonder about the example of Buddhism traveling to China. When Mahayana teachings came to China, they were translated from Sanskrit to China so completely that there are scriptures only in Chinese nowadays, the Sanskrit versions being lost. Now, this makes good sense: Sanskrit and Classical Chinese were languages with radically different grammatical systems, phonemes, and lexicons. Does it seem likely that when Buddhism spreads into Greek territories, a Prakrit dialect remains the language of the teachings as a way to keep it orderly, considering the disparities of Iranian and Semitic languages to be found throughout the region at that time? Or might they have been translated into Koine Greek, since that was the language of the elite? Unlike Sanskrit and Chinese, a Prakrit and Koine Greek would be much more easily learned by a speaker of either one: they are both Indo-European languages with related lexicons (theos in Greek is deva in Pali/Sanskrit, for example) and with similar grammatical patterns.
 
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