Greek Buddha: Pyrrho’s Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia by Christopher I. Beckwith (PDF)

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Pyrrho of Elis went with Alexander the Great to Central Asia and India during the Greek invasion and conquest of the Persian Empire in 334–324 BC. There he met with early Buddhist masters. Greek Buddha shows how their Early Buddhism shaped the philosophy of Pyrrho, the famous founder of Pyrrhonian scepticism in ancient Greece.Christopher I. Beckwith traces the origins of a major tradition in Western philosophy to Gandhara, a country in Central Asia and northwestern India. He systematically examines the teachings and practices of Pyrrho and of Early Buddhism, including those preserved in testimonies by and about Pyrrho, in the report on Indian philosophy two decades later by the Seleucid ambassador Megasthenes, in the first-person edicts by the Indian king Devanampriya Priyadarsi referring to a popular variety of the Dharma in the early third century BC, and in Taoist echoes of Gautama’s Dharma in Warring States China. Beckwith demonstrates how the teachings of Pyrrho agree closely with those of the Buddha Sakyamuni, “the Scythian Sage.” In the process, he identifies eight distinct philosophical schools in ancient northwestern India and Central Asia, including Early Zoroastrianism, Early Brahmanism, and several forms of Early Buddhism. He then shows the influence that Pyrrho’s brand of scepticism had on the evolution of Western thought, first in Antiquity, and later, during the Enlightenment, on the great philosopher and self-proclaimed Pyrrhonian, David Hume.Greek Buddha demonstrates that through Pyrrho, Early Buddhist thought had a major impact on Western philosophy.

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⭐Four centuries lie between the time the Buddha lived and the time the earliest known Gandhari and Pali Buddhist texts were committed to writing. Since religions are never static affairs, these texts undoubtedly diverged to some extent from the Buddha’s original teachings, but exactly how far and in which ways is uncertain; our knowledge of the gap between the earliest Buddhist teachings and early canonical Buddhism is basically a vast, empty chasm. Unfortunately for us, the Buddha’s Indian contemporaries lacked both a written language and an understanding of how history differs from mythology and hagiography.Indulge me in a thought experiment: Imagine that you and I live in a preliterate society. Imagine that nothing Abraham Lincoln ever said or did was written down, either at the time or subsequently. Imagine that there are no photographs or drawings of him. Imagine that there were no documents pertaining to the Civil War – no quartermasters’ inventories, no Mathew Brady photographs, no slave diaries, no rosters of those who served, no records of Lincoln’s speeches. Imagine too that there is no written record of the presidents who served before or after Lincoln. All that exists is our memory of what our parents and teachers told us face to face, based on their memory of what their parents and teachers told them.If this was so, how accurate would our knowledge of Lincoln be today? How much of what he said would be accurately remembered and generally agreed upon?Think of all the apocryphal Lincoln “quotes” that currently float through the Internet in all their glorious inaccuracy.Now imagine that another three hundred years passes before the orally transmitted “knowledge” of Lincoln is finally set down on paper. How much more inaccurate would those ideas about Lincoln be?This is the state we find ourselves in when in comes to the Buddha.Christopher Beckwith’s new book, Greek Buddha: Pyrrho’s Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia (2015, Princeton) is a fascinating attempt to fill this historical void with educated speculation. Beckwith urges us to make his own mental experiment. He suggests that we bracket off almost everything we think we “know” about early Buddhism from canonical sources, and instead invites us to follow him as he attempts to reconstruct early Buddhism from sources closer in time to when the Buddha actually lived, namely the stone edicts and pillars of the Mauryan kings, the records of ancient Greek travelers, recent archeological findings, and the earliest Chinese Taoist texts.Beckwith pays special attention to one such Greek traveller: Pyrrho of Elis, a young artist who travelled with Alexander the Great to Gandhara in the years 327-325 B.C. where Pyrrho met with and was influenced by a group of early Buddhist practitioners. Pyrrho returned to Greece espousing a radical new philosophy—“Pyrrhonism”—which bore more than a surface resemblance to the Buddhism he encountered in Gandhara (as has been noted previously by scholars like Georgios Halkias). For example, Pyrrho cultivated apatheia (passionlessness) in order to develop ataraxia (inner calm). He made explicit use of the fourfold negation of the tetralemma [five centuries before Nagarjuna!]. He was celibate, lived in simplicity, engaged in meditation, and was regarded by his neighbors as a holy man. He recommended an attitude of “not-knowing” in regards to pragmata, or “disputed ethical questions.” Pyrrho viewed pragmata as having three primary characteristics: they were inherently adiaphora (undifferentiated by logical differentia—possibly a parallel to the Buddha’s “anatta”), astathmeta (unbalanced—possibly a parallel to the Buddha’s “dukkha”) and anepikrita (indeterminate — possibly a parallel to the Buddha’s “annica”). The degree to which Pyrrho’s three qualities of pragmata actually map one-to-one onto the Buddha’s three marks of existence is a question I’ll leave to better philologists and philosophers than myself, but I found Beckwith’s argument intriguing.Beckwith then takes his argument a step further. He notes that concepts like “karma” and “rebirth” are mentioned by neither Pyrrho nor Megasthenes (another traveling Greek who served as Seleucus Nicatator’s ambassador to Chandragupta from 302 to 298 B.C.). Based on this, Beckwith asserts that these ideas weren’t a part of early Buddhism. This seems like an awfully big assumption to make, especially since Pyrrho himself wrote nothing—we only know of his thoughts through the writings of his contemporaries and students. In addition, while Pyrrho’s philosophy may have been based on Buddhism, he may not have adopted all of Buddhism’s tenets; he may have picked and chosen those ideas that were most consonant with his Hellenic background. While Beckwith is correct that we’ve no hard evidence that karma and rebirth were Buddhist beliefs prior to 100 B.C., absence of evidence is not the same thing as evidence of absence. The most we can say is that he may be right.Beckwith also speculates on the Buddha’s ethnicity. He argues against the canonical assertion that the Buddha was a native Magadhan born in Lumbini, and argues instead that the name “”kyamuni” (“Sage of the ”kyas”) suggests that the Buddha was a ”kya, i.e., an ethnic Scythian (a Central Asian people who dominated the steppes). Of course the epithet “”kyamuni” doesn’t necessarily imply that the Buddha himself was actually “foreign-born.” Alternatively, the Buddha could have been descended from Scythians who migrated to Magadha somewhat earlier, perhaps as early as 850 BC as Jayarava Attwood has speculated. One interesting implication of the Buddha’s possibly Scythian origin is that he may have developed the Dharma, at least in part, in response to Zoroastrianism, the religion of Darius’s Achaemenid Empire which stretched from the Balkans to the Indus Valley. If so, Buddhism can be understood, in part, as a rejection of Zoroastrian monotheism and cosmic dualism.Beckwith suggests, following the controversial chronology suggested by Johannes Bronkhorst, that early Buddhism preceded the Upanishads and, then goes off on his own to suggest that it also preceded Jainism. He believes that these allegedly later religious traditions adopted aspects of Buddhist teachings and then projected their own origin stories into an imaginary pre-Buddhist past to lend them greater authenticity, in much the same way that the Mahayana would later claim greater antiquity for its own sutras. Beckwith can find no support for the early existence of Jainism in the kinds of data he deems acceptable. The Greek travelers, for example, fail to mention it. The earliest datable references to Jainism are found in the post-100 B.C. Pali literature. Beckwith believes that those Pali Suttas that treat the Buddha and Mahavira as contemporaries are useful fictions designed to address Buddhist-Jain disputes that were current during the era in which they were actually composed.Even more fascinating is Beckwith’s speculation that Laotzu and the Buddha were one and the same person, and that Taoism grew out of very early Chinese contact with Buddhism. Beckwith does a linguistic analysis of Laotzu’s “actual” name (“Lao Tan”) as recorded around 300 B.C. in Chuangtzu. He argues that “Lao” is the same as “K’ao,” and that K’ao-Tan could plausibly have been pronounced “Gaw-tam” in certain old Chinese dialects, making it intriguingly close to “Gautama,” with the final /a/ being dropped due to canonical monosyllabicization. This is a linguistic argument far beyond my powers to evaluate. If true, it makes for a wonderful story of how Buddhism first influenced the formation of Taoism, and then several hundred years later, Taoism returned the favor in coloring how the Chinese translated and understood the Mahayana Sutras. What goes around comes around. In any case, Beckwith believes it to be no accident that similar theories arose nearly simultaneously in Greece, India, and China during the Axial Age, and that there was a greater degree of intercourse between these cultures than has previously been thought.There is much more to Beckwith’s book, including discussions of Pyrrho’s influence on David Hume, the provenance of the Mauryan stone edicts and pillars, the linguistic facility of Alexander’s entourage, and Pyrrho’s place in the stream of Greek philosophy. Beckwith’s discussion of the connection between Pyrrho’s quasi-Buddhist philosophy and David Hume’s examination of the problem of logical induction serendipitously coincides with Alison Gopnick’s recent speculation about how Hume may have become familiarized with Buddhist thought during his stay at the Royal College of La Flèche. Like the parallel emergence of novel philosophies during the Axial Age, the parallels between Hume’s philosophy and Buddhist insights may be due to more than mere coincidence.There are problems with the Beckwith’s book, to be sure. As mentioned above, it’s impossible for a non-scholar like myself to evaluate Beckwith’s claims. While some seem plausible, others seem more of a stretch. I suspect it’s better to think of them as hypotheses which can spur future research than to think of them as strongly supported facts. I should also note that Beckwith could have benefited from a better editor to help him eliminate some of his repetitiveness—he can, at times, worry a point beyond all endurance.Some readers might be tempted to dismiss Beckwith’s theses as being largely irrelevant to Buddhist practice. They might think, “What does it matter, in the end, whether the Buddha was really a Scythian or one-and-the-same person as Laotzu? What matters is how one is coming along in one’s practice and realization.” While I’m sympathetic to that point of view, I think it’s a mistake. Our hypotheses about who the Buddha actually was and what the Buddhist project is ultimately about deeply inform our approach to practice. Consider, as one example, Stephen Batchelor’s recent historical reimagining of early Buddhism and his proposal that doctrines of karma and rebirth weren’t nearly as central to it as some contend. Beckwith’s arguments buttress Batchelor’s, and together their ideas have the potential to significantly inform the future dominant direction of Western Buddhist practice.Even if Beckwith’s arguments turns out to be deficient in many of their particulars, Beckwith successfully points to the limitations of taking the Pali Canon’s account of Buddhist history at face value. Buddhist texts need to be read with a certain degree of suspicion. They need to be read alongside contemporaneous Greek and Chinese sources, checked against emerging archeological findings, and understood within the context of our growing understanding of Central and Southern Asian history. I’m incapable of doing this myself and I have no way of judging the ultimate worth of Beckwith’s arguments. On the other hand, I look forward with interest to whatever lively discussion ensues.

⭐In 650 BC horse mounted Scythians from the Caucasus region fought their way to Egypt, as allies of the Assyrians from northern Iraq. After defeat by the Medes of Iran in 600 BC the Scythians built an empire in Central Asia that reached as far as China. In 550 BC Cyrus the Great of Persia captured much of what is present day Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. During this period the prophet Zarathustra reformed the earlier polytheism of the Medes into the first monotheistic religion, with oppositions of good vs. evil, heaven vs. hell and truth vs. lies.Beckwith posits that early Brahmanism adopted Persian beliefs in bodily resurrection, an everlasting soul, and the accumulation of good and bad deeds. Similar concepts in the Upanishads cannot be dated earlier than this period. He sees Buddhism as a rejection of these principles, although some were later accepted. The original teachings of the Buddha asserted there is no creator god, no self or soul, everything is impermanent and suffering is caused by desire. By Beckwith’s logic, the Buddha lived sometime between 517-326 BC, the Persian and Greek invasions of India.Dating the life of the Buddha is a challenge to historians. His name Gautama was first recorded in China around 300 BC. His epithet ‘Sakyamuni’ is argued by Beckwith to mean ‘Sage of the Scythians’ in Sanskrit. It was attested to in Gandhara by 100 BC (now Pakistan and Afghanistan, then ruled by Indo-Scythians). Darius the Great, scion of the Persian Empire, occupied the region in 517 BC, introducing Zoroastrianism and Scythian troops. Beckwith suggests the Buddha could have been a Scythian, whose nomadic lifestyle may be the model for wandering asceticism.While not adopting the Zoroastrian religion, the Scythians were interested in philosophy, and were known to the Greeks. The ‘Problem of the Criterion’ was first attributed to a Scythian named Anarcharsis who traveled to Athens around 600 BC. He posed epistemological questions of ‘what do we know?’ and ‘how do we know it?’. Since neither an expert nor an unskilled judge can be trusted, there is no standard to decide between contending viewpoints. The problem also appeared in the Chinese philosophy of Zhuangzi, after the conquests of Alexander.Beckwith theorizes through transliteration that Laozi, who wrote the Dao De Jing circa 500 BC, could be Chinese for Gautama, the Buddha. After the Dao was written, Laozi was said to have left for the west (ie India). Around 300 BC another Chinese book was written, known by its namesake Zhuangzi. It had similar concepts to early Buddhism and later Pyrrhonism in its denial of intrinsic identity and the ability to make differentiations. While speculation on Laozi is legendary, Indian influences on Pyrrho were recorded from accounts made during his lifetime.Pyrrho was a Greek philosopher alive in 326 BC. He traveled with Alexander the Great on his adventures into northwest India. Interaction with Indian philosophers led to Pyrrho’s later role in Greece, where he taught the causes of suffering, to be without passion and remain undisturbed. Since thought was imperfect, it was impossible to know anything absolute about ethics. He urged having no views to achieve a calm existence. His legacy was a Greek exegesis of Buddhist thought. The nature of things was impermanence, imperfection and an absence of innate self.Pyrrho’s thinking lay dormant in Europe for more than a millennium due to rejection by the Catholic church. It was revived in the Renaissance, perhaps reaching a zenith with David Hume during the Enlightenment. Hume reworked the ‘Problem of the Criterion’ as the ‘Problem of Induction’, posing a challenge to scientific inquiry. Arguing that ‘we have no logical justification for believing in the truth of knowledge acquired by (experimental science)’, he stated he was a ‘Pyrrhonian’. Certainly epistemology has been an enduring hallmark of the modern era.Beckwith is a professor at Indiana University who specializes in Central Eurasian Studies. He is a linguist as well as a historian, teaching living and dead languages from Aramaic to Turkic and Tibetan to Chinese. There is something of old school philology in his approach. This doesn’t reflect on the novelty of the ideas presented. It is a revisionist look at the influence of the Buddha in the west and east, perhaps as bold as Crone and Cook’s ‘Hagarism’, which reconstructed early Islam. It may not have happened exactly this way, but then again it just might have.

⭐Absolutely love this book. Well presented arguments although some are quite repetitive (as if there’s a word count the author needs to reach). My only criticism about this book is that the author likes to reference something (like other people’s research) without giving background info and expect his readers to be familiar or know what he’s talking about.

⭐Interesting perspective on Buddha loaded with references. Very technical

⭐This is a very interesting book and it will have its impact on future considerations of “ Buddhism”. We know that the Achaemenid Empire connected the Mediterranean world with Central Asia and north eastern South Asia. Many Achaemenid officials and soldiers had to travel from one part of the empire to another, so had many Greek soldiers doing service in the King’s army. Probably there were many merchants, too. Ther was no India as we use to think of today. The Ionian Greeks had constantly to deal with Persia and they were curious people. Remarkably enough, in this cultural region originated what we call “ Greek philosophy “ in the west and “ buddhism” and Samkhya in the east and Zarathustra in the East of the empire, a time that Jasper called the “ Achsenzeit”. Why did Panini think about grammar? People became interested in what can we know and how can we know, in short what is Reality. Different answers have developed then. I ask myself whether we can really speak of eastern and western thinking in this old world.

⭐I have been a dhamma practitioner for 25 years.I would strongly recommend to all serious practitioners – read this book.There is much contemporary debate about “what the Buddha really taught” and in particular how essential are the ideas of kamma and rebirth. Much of the defence of the more religious metaphysics of conventional Buddhism derives from the assumption that the Pali canon is a fairly accurate account of the real Buddha’s teachings. This book offers an apparently well substantiated assault on that position and as such is a significant challenge to much contemporary Buddhist teaching.So if as a result of reading the Pali canon, or listening to teachers accounts derived from it, you think that Gautama was reacting against orthodox brahmanism, think again. If you think that Gautama lived at the same time as and formed his approach by trying out and debating with other currently known ascetic schools such as jainism – think again. If you even think that Gautama traversed the countryside of northern India visiting urban centres and advising and receiving the patronage of local rulers, think again.The book is full of controversial yet seemingly plausible insights. For example Beckwith makes the extraordinary, but seemingly well argued case, that Laotzu, apocryphal author of the Tao Te Ching, is in fact a direct reference to Gautama, not as literally “the author” but to his body of thought, a claim that I confess to being sympathetic to since I have personally noted the parallels.This book is bound to be attacked in part because because too many people have too much intellectual capital invested in the positions that it undermines, but also because its style being accessible and its author seemingly very knowledgeable, it is likely to be widely read.In terms of practice, it may assist some to liberate themselves from unhelpful dogma, which Beckwith places as it should be, at the heart of the Buddha’s teaching so far as it can be reliably identified.For myself it raises the question of whether what we know of the original teachings of the Buddha and the method of practice is so limited that the approach to the dhamma of stripping away later accretions of ideology in an attempt to get “back to basics” is fundamentally flawed.Maybe Buddhism can only be the tradition that the Buddha initiated and its development a matter of refining our understanding of what actually works to deliver liberation from greed hatred and delusion.So thank you Christopher, with the lifting of some of the weight of bad history from my understanding, I personally feel more confident in my meditation practice as a result of reading this.

⭐very good!

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