You guys are altogether too harsh on Gnosticism. Even the really looney ones like Valentinianism and Sethianism were probably talked way out of proportion by their orthodox contemporaries - for whom a significant fear was that the common people would not be able to tell the difference between Gnostics and orthodox believers. In any case, decently successful religions like Buddhism and Taoism show that you can have a bunch of loopy esoteric beliefs, allegorical or not, existing side-by-side with ordinary and positive religious worship. It's pretty easy, actually, because the "holy initiate - pious layman" dichotomy is really a quite strong and natural basis for religious society. Even orthodox Christianity got a lot more stratified in religious engagement as the centuries went on.
For the problem of an evil material world, I'd suggest people look toward the Cathars and why they were so popular despite believing, in theory, the exact same thing. The symbol of a holy man who abdicates the material world - an act considered spiritually noble but impractical for the average layman - is a very, very powerful one, and no substantial religious movement yet has really tried to get all of its followers to renounce their original lives. A Gnostic Christianity might just not look too different from the Christianity divided between church, monastery and community of OTL.
This is startlingly wrong, unless you're using such a strong definition of "major" as to leave it pretty much entirely to historical coincidence. Is the entire history of continental Southeast Asia (not to mention the Mauryas and Palas of India) not "major" enough for you? Not a coincidence, then, given that's where Buddhism is.
For the problem of an evil material world, I'd suggest people look toward the Cathars and why they were so popular despite believing, in theory, the exact same thing. The symbol of a holy man who abdicates the material world - an act considered spiritually noble but impractical for the average layman - is a very, very powerful one, and no substantial religious movement yet has really tried to get all of its followers to renounce their original lives. A Gnostic Christianity might just not look too different from the Christianity divided between church, monastery and community of OTL.
Buddhism has never been a state religion of a major empire.
This is startlingly wrong, unless you're using such a strong definition of "major" as to leave it pretty much entirely to historical coincidence. Is the entire history of continental Southeast Asia (not to mention the Mauryas and Palas of India) not "major" enough for you? Not a coincidence, then, given that's where Buddhism is.
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