Greek Buddha: Pyrrho's Encounter With Early Buddhism

That's French for "the ancient system," as in the ancient system of feudal privileges and the exercise of autocratic power over the peasants. The ancien regime never goes away, like vampires and dinosaur bones they are always hidden in the earth, exercising a mysterious influence. It is not paranoia to believe that the elites scheme against the common man. Inform yourself about their schemes here.

Greek Buddha: Pyrrho's Encounter With Early Buddhism

Postby admin » Fri Jul 09, 2021 4:53 am

Greek Buddha: Pyrrho's Encounter With Early Buddhism in Central Asia
by Christopher I. Beckwith
© 2015 by Princeton University Press
Cover photograph © Michel Wal. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.
Cover design by C. Alvarez-Gaffin

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Highlights:

The most important single error made by almost everyone in Buddhist studies is methodological and theoretical in nature. In all scholarly fields, it is absolutely imperative that theories be based on the data, but in Buddhist studies, as in other fields like it, even dated, "provenanced" archaeological and historical source material that controverts the traditional view of Early Buddhism has been rejected because it does not agree with that traditional view, and even worse, because it does not agree with the traditional view of the entire world of early India, including beliefs about Brahmanism and other sects that are thought to have existed at that time, again based not on hard data but on the same late traditional accounts. Some of these beliefs remain largely or completely unchallenged, notably:

• the belief that Sramanas existed before the Buddha, so he became a Sramana like many other Sramanas

• the belief that there were Sramanas besides Early Buddhists, including Jains and Ajivikas, whose sects were as old or older than Buddhism, and the Buddha even knew some of their founders personally

• that, despite the name Sramana, and despite the work of Marshall, Bareau, and Schopen, the Early Buddhists were "monks" and lived in "monasteries" with a monastic rule, the Vinaya

• that, despite the scholarship of Bronkhorst, the Upanishads and other Brahmanist texts are very ancient, so old that they precede Buddhism, so the Buddha was influenced by their ideas

• that the dated Greek eyewitness reports on religious-philosophical practitioners in late fourth century BC India do not tally with the traditional Indian accounts written a half millennium or more later, so the Greek reports must be wrong and must be ignored

• perhaps most grievously, the belief that all stone inscriptions in the early Brahmi script of the Mauryan period were erected by "Asoka", the traditional grandson of the Mauryan Dynasty's historical[???] founder, Candragupta, and whatever any of those inscriptions say is therefore evidence about what went on during (or before) the time he is thought to have lived

• we "know" what problematic terms (such as Sanskrit duhkha -- Pali dukkha) mean, despite the fact that their meaning is actually contested by scholars, the modern and traditional dictionaries do not agree on their etymologies or what they "really" mean, and the texts do not agree either2 [Some of these problems are discussed in Chapter Three. See Appendix C for further details.]

These and other stubborn unexamined beliefs have adversely affected the work of even the most insightful scholars of Buddhism. Yet no contemporaneous or near-contemporaneous hard evidence of any kind affirms such beliefs. Moreover, it is bad enough that such ideas have caused so much damage for so long within Indology, but the resulting misinformation has inflicted damage in other fields as well, including ancient Greek and Chinese philosophy, where the traditional construct has been used as the basis, once again, for rejecting the hard data, forcing scholars in those fields to attempt to explain away what seems to be obvious Indian Buddhist influence. This then helps maintain the traditional fiction of three totally unrelated peoples and traditions as "cultural islands" that had absolutely no contact of any kind with each other until much later times, as used to be unquestioned belief as recently as Karl Jaspers's famous book on the Axial Age, and continues, by and large, among those who follow in his footsteps....

This brings up the problem of the Buddha's birthplace. Not only are his dates only very generally definable, his specific homeland is unknown as well. Despite widespread popular belief in the story that he came from Lumbini in what is now Nepal, all of the evidence is very late and highly suspect from beginning to end. Bareau has carefully analyzed the Lumbini birth story and shown it to be a late fabrication....
[Bareau (1987) (Andre Bareau, 1987. Lumbini et al naissance du futur Buddha. Bulletin de l'Ecole Francaise d'Extreme-Orient 76: 69-81. (Google translate: Lumbini et al birth of the future Buddha. Bulletin of the French School of the Far East 76: 69-81.)). The lone piece of evidence impelling scholars to accept the Lumbini story has been the Lumbini Inscription, which most scholars believe was erected by Asoka. However, the inscription itself actually reveals that it is not by Asoka, and all indications are that it is a late forgery, possibly even a modern one. See Appendix C.]...

Together it is clear that the pillars were erected first, uninscribed, and that the inscriptions were added later.

The so-called Seventh Pillar Edict on the Delhi-Topra pillar actually mentions the existence of blank pillars. The existence of uninscribed pillars has inexplicably been taken by Hultzsch, and evidently by subsequent scholars, to mean that the Buddhist Inscriptions -- which are overtly Normative Buddhist -- are earlier than the Major Inscriptions. The elaborate theory of Norman (2012) claims, among other things, that the Pillar Edicts were inscribed while horizontal, before erection; he does not mention the uninscribed pillars, nor the fact that such uninscribed pillars are actually mentioned explicitly in the "Seventh Pillar Edict" as still existing when that inscription was added to the Delhi-Topra column, nor that some still exist today. He also claims that the texts of all of the inscriptions were written out on perishable material in the capital, Pataliputra and sent out to the provinces with "cover letters" that were supposedly "not meant to be published",
[This is an ad hoc proposal based on speculation; the differences are surely there in many cases because the texts were recast by the inscribers, while some of them are clear forgeries.]

despite the fact that Megasthenes visited Pataliputra in 305-304 BC and remarked that the Indians in that country did not know writing, and despite the fact that no "Asokan Inscription" has ever been found there; the written texts were then translated into local dialects, or for the Pillar Edicts, copied verbatim....

As for the minor monuments henceforth referred to as the "Buddhist Inscriptions", including the Minor Rock Edicts and Minor Pillar Edicts, a casual inspection of the inscriptional evidence and the scholarship on them might indicate that they were inscribed by Chandragupta's grandson Asoka, since the author of the First Minor Rock Edict is explicitly named "Devanampriya Asoka" in two copies of the text.

Unfortunately, we do not have rich, reliable historical sources for the Mauryas. We have only extremely tenuous information about them -- most of it about "Asoka" -- from very late Buddhist "histories", which are in large part fantasy-filled hagiographies having nothing to do with actual human events in the real world. Moreover, as Max Deeg has argued, not only did the inscriptions remain in public view for centuries, but their script and language remained legible to any literate person through the Kushan period (at least to ca. AD 250). This strongly suggests that the inscriptions influenced the legendary "histories" of Buddhism that began to develop at about that time.

That would explain why the story of Devanampriya Priyadarsi's conquest of Kalinga, his subsequent remorse, and his turning to the Dharma is all repeated in the Buddhist "histories", though they attribute the events to "Asoka", who is said to be the grandson of Chandragupta
....

Despite the deep learning and care many scholars have taken with the texts, some very striking irregularities in some of the inscriptions appear not to have been noticed. Hultzsch, author of the classic monumental edition of the inscriptions, rightly notes that the Seventh Pillar Edict on the Delhi-Topra column is "unique" because unlike all the other Pillar Edicts, which (like the Major Rock Edicts) exist in synoptic copies, it is only found in a single exemplar. Salomon correctly remarks that it is "the longest of all the Asokan edicts. For the most part, it summarizes and restates the contents of the other pillar edicts, and to some extent those of the major rock edicts as well."...

Yet even a cursory inspection of the Lumbini and Nigali: Sagar Pillar Inscriptions -- both of which were discovered by Fuhrer, who was purportedly working on them when he was exposed -- shows that the Lumbini Inscription repeats exactly much of the phraseology of the Nigali: Sagar Pillar's text, but unlike the genuine "synoptic" Major Inscriptions, the phrases are not identical or closely parallel. That fact, plus the idea that an already divinized Buddha having been many times "reborn" could go back as far as the third century BC, or that anyone in the vicinity of Lumbini could have been given a Sanskrit epithet in the same period, centuries before Sanskrit is first attested in Indian inscriptions, ought to have at least aroused suspicion. Instead, scholars insist on the authenticity of all of the inscriptions, and also insist that they must all be ascribed to the ruler known from traditional -- very late, fantasy-filled, pious, hagiographical -- "histories", as well as from the Maski and Nittur Inscriptions, as "Asoka".

[The name Devanampriya Asoka occurs only in the late Buddhist Inscriptions known as the Minor Rock Edicts, specifically the Maski Inscription and the recently discovered Nittur Inscription. According to Sircar (1975), the Gujarra Inscription should be included with them, but it is extremely problematic, and seems to be a crude forgery, as discussed below. The rubbing of the Maski Inscription provided by Hultzsch (1925: 174) is very poor. Hultzsch reads Asok[a]sa 'of Asoka' without comment or explanation of the bracketed "[a]", but in the rubbing the part that includes his Asok[a] is actually written very clearly [[x] [d]eva-na[m]piyasa Asokesa, with the name in an eastern dialect form.]
...

the Maski and Nittur Inscriptions confirm that the texts of the Major Inscriptions (which explicitly and repeatedly say they are by Devanampriya Priyadarsi) on the one hand, and the Buddhist Inscriptions on the other, must have been promulgated by different rulers, and Devanampriya Asoka is of course responsible only for the Buddhist Inscriptions. It is time for Indologists to seriously consider the recent scholarship which suggests that some of the inscriptions are spurious.
[See now Phelps (2010). Some have objected that the Lumbini pillar itself -- the stone and its preparation -- is unquestionably identical to the physical pillars used in the acknowledged Major Inscriptions. This is certainly the case. However, it is well known that there are a number of blank (uninscribed) pillars identical to pillars used in the Major Inscriptions, and the scholars who first saw the inscription on the Lumbini pillar remarked that it was remarkably clear, as if it had just been inscribed (Phelps 2010). Cf. the suspicious remarks of Schopen about the Lumbini Inscription (2004: 76-77). The inscription is also stunningly short. Even if the pillar was not recently inscribed by Fuhrer, the text itself reveals that it belongs not to the authentic Major Inscriptions of Devanampriya Priyadarsi, but to a much later period, no doubt exactly the period in which the legends about the Buddha's supposed birth in Lumbini were being created, as shown by Bareau (1987), who thus unknowingly -- but brilliantly -- demonstrates the lateness of the Lumbini Inscription. If he had even suspected that the Lumbini Inscription is spurious, his article would have made its case even more effectively than it does, and without the necessity of trying to explain what is patently an impossible historical background, as he actually shows very clearly. However, this topic requires much further specialized study.]
...

The only solution to this problem is to study the inscriptions without contaminating the data with material deriving from supposed Buddhist "historical" works such as those cited by Hultzsch....

If we were to believe Hultzsch and many other scholars, the Dipavamsa, a late Buddhist hagiographical "history", is a reliable historical work that can be trusted, so the author of the Major Inscriptions, who describes his remorse over his bloody war with the Kalingas, must be identified with Asoka. That would mean that the other set, the Later Inscriptions, which are sharply distinct in every respect, must be unidentified as to their author or authors, although unlike the Major Inscriptions they share the feature that they explicitly mention, and in most cases openly promote, Normative Buddhism. Moreover, one of the "Minor Rock Edicts" -- preserved in two apparently genuine inscriptional copies -- is clearly, explicitly said to be by Devanampriya Asoka 'His Majesty Asoka'. Accordingly, "Asoka" is the author of at least some of the later Buddhist Inscriptions, while other Buddhist inscriptions (most notably the Lumbini and Calcutta-Bairat Inscriptions) were evidently composed and erected even later. But in any case, the positive identification of Asoka as the author of the Maski and Nittur "Minor Rock Edict" inscriptions, which are radically different from any of the highly distinctive Major Inscriptions, makes it absolutely certain that "Devanampriya Asoka" cannot after all be the author of the Major Inscriptions, which explicitly and repeatedly say they are by Devanampriya Priyadarsi 'His Majesty Priyadarsi'. Considering the fact that we have absolutely no reliable historical information on "Asoka", and the fact noted by Deeg that the Major Inscriptions stood in open view for centuries after their erection and must have influenced the later writers of the Buddhist "histories" in question, it is most likely that "Asoka" was not in fact a Mauryan ruler. We do not really know when or where he ruled, if he existed at all; we do not actually know that Dasaratha was the grandson of a Mauryan ruler named Asoka; and so on....

Who, then, really was Devanampriya Asoka? The evidence suggests at least two possibilities. One is that he was imagined by the Kushan period Normative Buddhists on the basis of their understanding of the monumental Major Inscriptions erected by the Mauryas -- evidently by Amitrochates ~ Bindusara. "Asoka" was then projected back to the glorious Mauryan period as an ideal for good Kushan rulers to follow... At any rate, the inscriptions of this Devanampriya Asoka, the apparent author of some of the Late Inscriptions, simply do not have anything in common with the Major Inscriptions of the Mauryas decreed by Devanampriya Priyadarsi....

According to the traditional analysis, the single most important putative "Asoka" inscription for the history of Buddhism is the unique "Third Minor Rock Edict" found at Bairat, now known as the Calcutta-Bairat Inscription, in which "the king of Magadha, Piyadasa" addresses the "Samgha" (community of Buddhist monks) directly, and gives the names of a number of Buddhist sutras, saying, "I desire, Sirs, that many groups of monks and (many) nuns may repeatedly listen to these expositions of the Dharma, and may reflect (on them)." The problems with the inscription are many. It begins with the otherwise unattested phrase "The Magadha King Piyadasa", not Devanampriya Priyadarsi (or a Prakrit version of that name). The omission of the title Devanampriya is nothing short of shocking. Moreover, it is the only inscription to even mention Magadha. It is also undated, unlike the genuine Major Inscriptions, all of which are dated. In the text, the authorial voice declares "reverence and faith in the Buddha, the Dharma, (and) the Samgha".

This is the only occasion in all of the Mauryan inscriptions where the Triratna 'Three Jewels', the "refuge" formula well known from later devotional Buddhism, is mentioned. Most astonishingly, throughout the text the author repeatedly addresses the Buddhist monks humbly as bhamte, translated by Hultzsch as "reverend sirs".
The text also contains a higher percentage of words that are found solely within it (i.e., not also found in some other inscription) than does any other inscription. From beginning to end, the Calcutta-Bairat Inscription is simply incompatible with the undoubtedly genuine Major Inscriptions. It is also evidently incompatible with the other Buddhist inscriptions possibly attributable to a later ruler named Devanampriya Asoka.

However, because the inscription is also the only putative Asokan inscription that mentions Buddhist texts, and even names seven of them explicitly, scholars are loath to remove it from the corpus.
It therefore calls for a little more comment.


First, even if the Calcutta-Bairat Inscription really is "old", it is certainly much younger than the genuine inscriptions of Devanampriya Priyadarsi. If it dates to approximately the same epoch as the recently discovered Gandhari documents -- the Saka-Kushan period, from about the late first century BC to the mid-third century AD -- the same period when the Pali Canon, according to tradition, was collected, it should then not be surprising to find that the names of the texts mentioned in the inscription seem to accord with the contents of the latter collections of Normative Buddhist works, even though few, if any, of the texts (of which only the titles are given) can be identified with any certainty.

Second, as noted above, specialists have pointed out that the script and Prakrit language of the Mauryan inscriptions continued to be used practically unchanged down through the Kushan period, and though the style of the script changed somewhat in the following period, it was still legible for any literate person at least as late as the beginning of the Gupta period (fourth century AD),

[At that time the script underwent substantial changes that soon made older forms of it unreadable.]

so the inscriptions undoubtedly influenced the developing legends about the great Buddhist king, Asoka.

Thus at least some of the events described in the Major Inscriptions, such as Devanampriya Priyadarsi's conquest of Kalinga, subsequent remorse, and turning to the Dharma, were perfect candidates for ascription to Asoka in the legends. In the absence of any historical source of any kind on Asoka dating to a period close to the events -- none of the datable Major Inscriptions mention Asoka -- it is impossible to rule out this possibility. The late Buddhist inscriptions, such as the Calcutta-Bairat Inscription, may well have been written under the same influence.

Third, because the Calcutta-Bairat Inscription only mentions the titles of texts that have been identified -- rather uncertainly in most cases -- with the titles of texts in the Pali Canon, the actual texts referred to may have been quite different, or even totally different, from the presently attested ones. Because the earliest, or highest, possible date for the Pali Canon is in fact the Saka-Kushan period, the Calcutta-Bairat Inscription and the texts it names cannot be much earlier....

Among the texts considered to be identified are the Vinaya-samukasa and the Muni-gatha.


The Vinaya-samukasa has been identified with the Vinaya-samukase 'Innate Principles of the Vinaya', a short text in the Mahavagga of the Pali Canon....

Although the Buddha's own speech in this text is structured as a tetralemma, which was fashionable in the fourth and third centuries BC, it must also be noted that the tetralemma is a dominant feature of the earliest Madhyamika texts, those by Nagarjuna, who is traditionally dated to approximately the second century AD. But the problems with the inscription are much deeper than this. The Vinaya per se cannot be dated back to the time of the Buddha (as the text intends), nor to the time of Asoka; it cannot be dated even to the Saka-Kushan period. All fully attested Vinaya texts are actually dated, either explicitly or implicitly, to the Gupta period, specifically to the fifth century AD: "In most cases, we can place the vinayas we have securely in time: the Sarvastivada-vinaya that we know was translated into Chinese at the beginning of the fifth century (404-405 C.E.). So were the Vinayas of the Dharmaguptakas (408), the Mahisasakas (423-424), and the Mahasamghikas (416). The Mulasarvastivada-vinaya was translated into both Chinese and Tibetan still later, and the actual contents of the Pali Vinaya are only knowable from Buddhaghosa's fifth century commentaries."

As Schopen has shown in many magisterial works, the Vinayas are layered texts, so they undoubtedly contain material earlier than the fifth century, but even the earliest layers of the Vinaya texts cannot be earlier than Normative Buddhism, which is datable to the Saka-Kushan period. It thus would require rather more than the usual amount of credulity to project the ancestors of the cited texts back another half millennium or more to the time of the Buddha...

As for other well-known but evidently spurious "Asokan" inscriptions, note that the "Minor Pillar Inscription" at Lumbini not only mentions "Buddha" (as does, otherwise uniquely, the Calcutta-Bairat Inscription), it explicitly calls him Sakyamuni 'the Sage of the Scythians (Sakas)', who it says was born in Lumbini.

The use of the Sanskrit form of his epithet, Sakyamuni, rather than the Prakrit form, Sakamuni, is astounding and otherwise unattested until the late Gandhari documents; that fact alone rules out ascription to such an early period.
But it is doubly astounding because this Sanskritism occurs in a text otherwise written completely in Mauryan Prakrit and Brahmi script. What is a Sanskrit form doing there? Sanskrit is not attested in any inscriptions or manuscripts until the Common Era or at most a few decades before it.

Significantly, the inscription also notes that the village of Lumbini is exempted from tax and has to pay less in kind as well, yet not one of the other Mauryan inscriptions includes such "benefice" information.

It is incredible that an avowedly Buddhist Inscription bestows imperial largesse on a village
(though the village of Lumbini has been shown not to have existed yet in Mauryan times) rather than on a Buddhist institution.

Perhaps most telling of all, the inscription is uniquely written in ordinary third person (not royal third person) and is in the past tense. That means the text is narrated by some unknown person and does not even pretend to have been proclaimed by its putative sponsor Devanampriya Priyadarsi, the king who authored the synoptic Major Inscriptions (nor of course by Devanampriya Asoka, who may have authored the synoptic Buddhist Inscriptions). It says that it records events that supposedly happened at some time in the past, but those events have been shown to be fictitious.

The inscription is strikingly unlike the unquestionably authentic Major Inscriptions in general, and based on its contents is much later in date than it evidently pretends to be. It is a spurious inscription.

Finally, the Delhi-Topra pillar includes a good version of the six synoptic Pillar Edicts, which are genuine Major Inscriptions, but it is followed by what is known as the "Seventh Pillar Edict". This is a section that occurs only on this particular monument -- not on any of the six other synoptic Pillar Edict monuments. It is "the longest of all the Asokan edicts. For the most part, it summarizes and restates the contents of the other pillar edicts, and to some extent those of the major rock edicts as well."

In fact, as Salomon suggests, it is a hodgepodge of the authentic inscriptions. It seems not to have been observed that such a melange could not have been compiled without someone going from stone to stone to collect passages from different inscriptions, and this presumably must have involved transmission in writing, unlike with the Major Rock Edict inscriptions, which were clearly dictated orally to scribes from each region of India, who then wrote down the texts in their own local dialects -- and in some cases, their own local script or language; knowledge of writing would seem to be required for that, but not actual written texts.

For the Delhi-Topra pillar addition, someone made copies of the texts and produced the unique "Seventh Pillar Edict".
[The bilingual Aramaic and Prakrit (both in Aramaic script) fragment from Kandahar known as Kandahar II or Kandahar III, which is written in an extremely odd fashion (Falk 2006: 246), has been identified as representing a portion of the "Seventh Pillar Edict" (Norman 2012: 43), but strong doubts remain about the reading of the text (Falk 2006: 246). It is also by no means exactly like the "Seventh Pillar Edict", not to speak of the peculiar presentation of text and translation. In fact, it looks like a student exercise. It is very similar to the content of the Taxila Inscription and the two Laghman Inscriptions, both of which are also highly problematic, q.v. Falk's (2006: 253) conclusion: "There is no clear evidence for an Asokan influence on this text [the Taxila Inscription]. Like the two Laghman 'edicts' this text as well could be of a rather profane nature, mentioning Asoka as king just in passing." However, Falk (2006: 241) also says of Kandahar II/III that "Asoka must have ordered to bring his words to the public unchanged regarding their sound and content. Presenting this text in two languages using one script for both is a remarkable thought, aimed at avoiding flaws in the translation." This is an unlikely speculation. Finally, the "Seventh Pillar Edict" shares some of the peculiarities of the other minor inscriptions from Afghanistan. (I.e., they are to be distinguished from the genuine fragments of a Greek translation of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Rock Edicts, found at Kandahar, q.v. Halkias 2014.) C. f. Ito (1996), a study of the Greek and Aramaic bilingual inscription from Kandahar. These texts all await detailed, serious study.]

Why would anyone go to so much trouble? The answer is to be found in the salient new information found in the text itself. It mentions a category of mahamatra officers unmentioned anywhere else, saying that they are in charge of the different sects: it names the Samgha 'Buddhists' and the Brahmanas 'Brahmanists', but also (uniquely) the Ajivikas and Nirgranthas (Jains), and "various other sects" who are unnamed.

Most incredibly, the Buddhists are called the "Samgha" in this section alone, but it is a Normative Buddhist term; the Early Buddhist term is Sramana, attested in the genuine Major Inscriptions. Throughout the rest of the "Seventh Pillar Edict" Buddhists are called Sramanas, as expected in texts copied from genuine Mauryan inscriptions....


Yet it is not only the contents of the text that are a problem. It has been accepted as an authentic Mauryan inscription, but no one has even noted that there is anything formally different about it from the other six edicts on the same pillar. At least a few words must therefore be said about this problem.

The "Seventh Pillar Edict" is palaeographically distinct from the text it has been appended to. It is obvious at first glance. The physical differences between the text of the "Seventh Pillar Edict", as compared even to the immediately preceding text of the Sixth Pillar Edict on the East Face, virtually leap out at one. The style of the script, the size and spacing of the letters, the poor control over consistency of style from one letter to the next, and the many hastily written, even scribbled, letters are all remarkable. These characteristics seem not to have been mentioned by the many scholars who have worked on the Mauryan inscriptions.

The text begins as an addition to the synoptic Sixth Pillar Edict, which occupies only part of the East Face "panel". After filling out the available space for text on the East Face, the new text incredibly continues around the pillar, that is, ignoring the four different "faces" already established by the earlier, genuine edicts. This circum-pillar format is unique among all the genuine Mauryan pillar inscriptions.

Another remarkable difference with respect to the genuine Major Inscriptions on pillars is that the latter are concerned almost exclusively with Devanampriya Priyadarsi's Dharma, but do not mention either the Sramanas ''Buddhists' or the Brahmanas 'Brahmanists' by name. This is strikingly unlike the Major Inscriptions on rocks, which mention them repeatedly in many of the edicts. In other words, though the Pillar Edicts are all dated later than the Rock Edicts, for some reason (perhaps their brevity), Devanampriya Priyadarsi does not mention the Sramanas or the Brahmanas in them. The "Seventh Pillar Edict" is thus unique in that it does mention the Buddhists (Sramanas) and Brahmanists (Brahmanas) by name, but the reoccurrence of the names in what claims to be the last of Devanampriya Priyadarsi's edicts suggests that the text is not just spurious, it is probably a deliberate forgery. This conclusion is further supported by the above-noted unique passage in the inscription in which the Buddhists are referred to as the "Samgha". This term occurs in the later Buddhist Inscriptions too; but it is problematic because it is otherwise unknown before well into the Saka-Kushan period.

[This is one of the many reasons for dating all of the Buddhist Inscriptions to the Saka-Kushan period at the earliest.]

The one really significant thing the text does is to add the claim that Devanampriya Priyadarsi supported not only the Buddhists and the Brahmanists but also the Ajivikas and Jains. However, all of the Jain holy texts are uncontestedly very late (long after the Mauryan period). The very mention of the sect in the same breath as the others is alone sufficient to cast severe doubt on the text's authenticity.

The "Seventh Pillar Edict" claims that it was inscribed when Devanampriya Priyadarsi had been enthroned for twenty-seven years; that is, only one year after the preceding text (the sixth of the synoptic Pillar Edicts), which says it was inscribed when Devanampriya Priyadarsi had been enthroned for twenty-six years. The "Seventh Pillar Edict" text consists of passages taken from many of the Major Inscriptions, both Rock and Pillar Edicts, in which the points mentioned are typically dated to one or another year after the ruler's coronation, but in the "Seventh Pillar Edict" the events are effectively dated to the same year. Most puzzling of all, why would the king add such an evidently important edict to only a single one of the otherwise completely synoptic pillar inscriptions?

Perhaps even more damning is the fact that in the text itself the very same passages are often repeated verbatim, sometimes (as near the beginning) immediately after they have just been stated, like mechanical dittoisms. Repetition is a known feature of Indian literary texts, but the way it occurs in the "Seventh Pillar Edict" is not attested in the authentic Major Inscriptions. Moreover, as Olivelle has noted, the text repeats the standard opening formula or "introductory refrain" many times; that is, "King Priyadarsin, Beloved of the Gods, says" is repeated verbatim nine times, with an additional shorter tenth repetition. "In all of the other edicts this refrain occurs only once and at the beginning. Such repetitions of the refrain which state that these are the words of the king are found in Persian inscriptions. However, this is quite unusual for Asoka."

In fact, this arrangement betrays the actual author's misunderstanding of the division of the authentic Major Inscriptions into "Edicts", and his or her consequent false imitation of them using repetitions of the Edict -- initial formula throughout the text in an attempt to duplicate the appearance of the authentic full, multi-"Edict" inscriptions on rocks and pillars.

In short, based on its arrangement, palaeography, style, and contents, the "Seventh Pillar Edict" cannot be accepted as a genuine inscription of Devanampriya Priyadarsi. The text was added to the pillar much later than it claims and is an obvious forgery from a later historical period. These factors require that the "Seventh Pillar Edict" be removed from the corpus of authentic inscriptions of Devanampriya Priyadarsi.

The Calcutta-Bairat Inscription, the Lumbini Inscription, and the "Seventh Pillar Edict" of the Delhi-Topra pillar thus do not belong with either the authentic Major Inscriptions of Devanampriya Priyadarsi or the possibly authentic inscriptions of Devanampriya Asoka.

[The next task is for scholars to study the spurious inscriptions to see when exactly each was inscribed, and in some cases why, so as to be able to attribute the information in them to approximately correct historical periods.]

-- Greek Buddha: Pyrrho's Encounter With Early Buddhism in Central Asia, by Christopher I. Beckwith


Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• On Transcription, Transliteration, and Texts
• Abbreviations
• PROLOGUE Scythian Philosophy: Pyrrho, the Persian Empire, and India
• CHAPTER 1 Pyrrho's Thought: Beyond Humanity
• CHAPTER 2 No Differentiations: The Earliest Attested Forms of Buddhism
• CHAPTER 3 Jade Yoga and Heavenly Dharma: Buddhist Thought in Classical Age China and India
• CHAPTER 4 Greek Enlightenment: What the Buddha, Pyrrho, and Hume Argue Against
• EPILOGUE Pyrrho's Teacher: The Buddha and His Awakening
• APPENDIX A The Classical Testimonies of Pyrrho's Thought
• APPENDIX B Are Pyrrhonism and Buddhism Both Greek in Origin?
• APPENDIX C On the Early Indian Inscriptions
• Endnotes
• References
• Index
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Re: Greek Buddha: Pyrrho's Encounter With Early Buddhism

Postby admin » Fri Jul 09, 2021 4:55 am

Preface

In the past few decades a quiet revolution has been under way in the study of the earliest Buddhism. Its beginnings lay in the discoveries of John Marshall, the archaeologist who excavated the great ancient city of eastern Gandhara, Taxila (near what is now Rawalpindi), and published his results in 1951. The evidence was incontrovertible: the Buddhist monastery, the vihara, with its highly distinctive architectural plan, appeared there fully formed in the first century AD, and had been preceded by the arama, a crude temporary shelter that was also found there.1 [See now Beckwith (2014).] Marshall openly stated that organized Buddhist monasticism accompanied the appearance of monasteries then -- in the Saka-Kushan period -- and had not existed before that time. This partly corresponded to the traditional trajectory of the development of Buddhism, but in delaying the appearance of monasticism for an entire half millennium after the Buddha, it challenged practically everything else in the traditional account of Early Buddhism. Most scholars paid no attention whatsoever to this. However, eventually others noticed additional problems, particularly contradictions in the canonical texts themselves that challenged many fundamental beliefs about the early development of the religion. Andre Bareau, Johannes Bronkhorst, Luis Gomez, Gregory Schopen, and others challenged many of these traditional beliefs in studies of the canonical texts viewed in the context of other material -- archaeological excavations (of which there were and are precious few), material in non-Buddhist texts, and so forth. Their discoveries have overthrown so many of the traditional ideas that, as so often in scholarship, those who follow the traditional view have felt compelled to fight back. But the new views on Buddhism are themselves not free of traditional notions, and these have prevented a comprehensive, principled account of Early Buddhism from developing.

The most important single error made by almost everyone in Buddhist studies is methodological and theoretical in nature. In all scholarly fields, it is absolutely imperative that theories be based on the data, but in Buddhist studies, as in other fields like it, even dated, "provenanced" archaeological and historical source material that controverts the traditional view of Early Buddhism has been rejected because it does not agree with that traditional view, and even worse, because it does not agree with the traditional view of the entire world of early India, including beliefs about Brahmanism and other sects that are thought to have existed at that time, again based not on hard data but on the same late traditional accounts. Some of these beliefs remain largely or completely unchallenged, notably:

• the belief that Sramanas existed before the Buddha, so he became a Sramana like many other Sramanas

• the belief that there were Sramanas besides Early Buddhists, including Jains and Ajivikas, whose sects were as old or older than Buddhism, and the Buddha even knew some of their founders personally

• that, despite the name Sramana, and despite the work of Marshall, Bareau, and Schopen, the Early Buddhists were "monks" and lived in "monasteries" with a monastic rule, the Vinaya

• that, despite the scholarship of Bronkhorst, the Upanishads and other Brahmanist texts are very ancient, so old that they precede Buddhism, so the Buddha was influenced by their ideas

• that the dated Greek eyewitness reports on religious-philosophical practitioners in late fourth century BC India do not tally with the traditional Indian accounts written a half millennium or more later, so the Greek reports must be wrong and must be ignored

• perhaps most grievously, the belief that all stone inscriptions in the early Brahmi script of the Mauryan period were erected by "Asoka", the traditional grandson of the Mauryan Dynasty's historical founder, Candragupta, and whatever any of those inscriptions say is therefore evidence about what went on during (or before) the time he is thought to have lived

• we "know" what problematic terms (such as Sanskrit duhkha -- Pali dukkha) mean, despite the fact that their meaning is actually contested by scholars, the modern and traditional dictionaries do not agree on their etymologies or what they "really" mean, and the texts do not agree either2 [Some of these problems are discussed in Chapter Three. See Appendix C for further details.]

These and other stubborn unexamined beliefs have adversely affected the work of even the most insightful scholars of Buddhism. Yet no contemporaneous or near-contemporaneous hard evidence of any kind affirms such beliefs. Moreover, it is bad enough that such ideas have caused so much damage for so long within Indology, but the resulting misinformation has inflicted damage in other fields as well, including ancient Greek and Chinese philosophy, where the traditional construct has been used as the basis, once again, for rejecting the hard data, forcing scholars in those fields to attempt to explain away what seems to be obvious Indian Buddhist influence. This then helps maintain the traditional fiction of three totally unrelated peoples and traditions as "cultural islands" that had absolutely no contact of any kind with each other until much later times, as used to be unquestioned belief as recently as Karl Jaspers's famous book on the Axial Age,3 [Jaspers (1949; English translation 1953). I should stress, however, that Jaspers's book is nevertheless very insightful and is still worth reading today.] and continues, by and large, among those who follow in his footsteps.

Setting aside the traditional beliefs mentioned above, and much other folklore, what hard data might be found on the topic at hand? What sort of picture can we construct based primarily on the hard data rather than on the traditional views? In the present book I present a scientific approach, to the extent that I have been able to do so and have not been mislead by my own unrecognized "views".

It is important to note that this book is not a comparison of anything. It is also most definitely not a critique or biobibliographic survey of earlier research. Such a study would be great to have (and in fact, an excellent bibliography on Pyrrhonism was published by Richard Bett in 2010), but I have cited only what I thought necessary to cite or what I was able to find myself, with a strong preference for primary sources.4 [I have also paid some attention to recent traditional interpretations of "Early" Buddhism, and have in several instances cited them for Normative Buddhist reflections of actual Early Buddhist thought.]

I have attempted to solve several major problems in the history of thought. The most important of these problems involves the source of Pyrrho's teachings. I would like to call it philosophy, and I have sinned -- sometimes willfully -- by doing so when I talk about Early Pyrrhonism's more "philosophical" aspects, but in general to call it philosophy in a modern language is to seriously mislabel it. The same would be true if I called it religion. It was to some extent both, and to some extent neither, and it was science, too.

I first spent a great deal of time reexamining and rethinking the Greek testimonies of Pyrrho's thought, and in 2011 finally published a long article on the topic in Elenchos (reprinted with minor revisions in Appendix A). I then looked into the studies which claim -- in accord with statements of ancient authors -- that Pyrrho acquired his unusual way of thought in India. I also read studies that claimed the exact opposite -- that he did not learn anything at all of major importance for his thought there -- and other arguments which essentially claim that Indian philosophy is basically Greek in origin. That forced me to investigate Early Buddhism in depth, with the result that I discovered the above problems, among others, and my study became much longer and more involved than I had expected.

My research set out to determine whether Indian thought -- particularly Buddhism -- had influenced Pyrrho's thought. It ended up delving very deeply into the problem of identifying genuine Early Buddhism: the teachings and practices of the Buddha himself, and of his followers for the first century or two after his death. As mentioned above, in my view all scholarship, regardless of its subject matter, should follow the dictum "theories must accord with the data", with the corollary that the earliest hard data must always be ranked higher in value than other data. In addition, theories and scholarly arguments must be based on rational, logical thought. These are among the core principles of scientific work in general, and I have done my best to follow them.

One of the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript of this book has different ideas about how I should have proceeded. He says, "A strong case could be made that even relatively specific features of the history of philosophy such as the Problem of the Criterion (relative, that is, to the general phenomenon of skepticism) could be explained as a generic motif rather than, so to speak, as a patented idea". He contends that "two figures saying similar, or even identical, things in different parts of the world is never enough to establish direct influence."

This is a problematic claim with respect to philosophy and religious studies. The field of biblical studies is founded on the ability and necessity to do text criticism. It is purely because textual near identity is recognizable that textual scholars can identify interpolations, university teachers can recognize plagiarization -- even cross-linguistic plagiarization5 [A student in one of my classes recently was guilty of such plagiarization in her paper and admitted it -- "Well, not all of it," she said to me in her native language.] -- and so on. Is it really conceivable that, for example, the famous statement of Protagoras, "Man is the measure of all things", is unrelated to the Greek original, or is not recognizable? The ancient Greek [x] has exactly the same meaning as the modern Chinese translation, [x], the modern Russian translation, [x], and so on. Assuming it is correctly translated, the quotation is famous, easily recognizable, and not liable to be confused with any other, whatever the language, despite its brevity. But why? It is the highly distinctive content of the text that makes it easily identifiable. Translation converts the meaning expressed from one language to another. It does not do it perfectly because with perfect identity no translation occurs -- the texts are identical. The reviewer's assertion denies the possibility of communication by language even in the same language (not to speak of the possibility of understanding, say, a German translation of an English textbook, or vice versa, as students manage to do every day), and the necessity of intelligibility assumed by the very existence of the field of linguistic typology.

Aristotle talks about exactly this topic in his Metaphysics. For example, no doubt many ancient Greeks, Indians, and Chinese said, "It's a nice day today," and proceeded to take a walk somewhere to enjoy the fine weather. Many people everywhere do that, and my wife is liable to say the same thing to me when it is warm and sunny. So it is easy for us to imagine that countless Greeks, Indians, and Chinese have said the same thing. But to paraphrase Aristotle again, we can hardly imagine that anyone in ancient India or China could then have said, "Let's walk to the Odeon in Athens!"

The reviewer instead compares the historical appearance of Pyrrhonism to that of "the widespread phenomenon of world-denying mendicants or for that matter cultural motifs of lycanthropy, unicorns, or night-walking." He proposes that "pan-Eurasian social dynamics could be enough to explain the independent appearance of philosophical theories that deny the attainability of certain knowledge and that reject all positive doctrine."6 [This is the view of dogmatic Academic Scepticism, not Pyrrhonism.]Yet Pyrrho's declaration in the Aristocles passage has challenged not only the manuscript reviewer but a century of scholars, who have not been able to explain it no matter what approach they have adopted, thus demonstrating both how unique it is and how difficult it has been for anyone to deal with it. This is only one part of the actual, complex problem that needs to be discussed and explained.

Another of the reviewers of the manuscript of this book suggests that I should discuss the controversial issue of the date of the foundation of Jainism, its relationship to Buddhism, and so on, in greater detail. I strongly agree that it would be great to have a careful, historically sound study of this topic, and I have long encouraged other scholars to undertake one. So far, however, Indologists, including Buddhologists, have not examined the Jain dating issue carefully and thoroughly from a historical point of view, and no such comprehensive study yet exists, though the issue is mentioned by a number of scholars, including Mette (1995), who though evidently pro-Jain concludes that Buddhism seems to be in all respects earlier than Jainism. The earliest incontestable hard evidence for the existence of Jainism is not earlier than the Saka-Kushan period (first century BC to third century AD), about a half millennium after the Buddha, as shown by the fact that none of the explicitly identified and datable Jain material1isted in Ghosh's authoritative register of Indian archaeological sites is earlier than the Saka-Kushan period, the earliest being caves dated (generously) to ca. 100 BC to AD 200.7 [Ghosh (1990: 2:446a). A figurine mentioned by B. Lal is called the "earliest Jain figure found so far", and is dated to "ca." fourth to third centuries BC (Ghosh 1990: 2:32a), but this is of course untenable, since there are no known statues of religious figures from any sect before the Saka-Kushan period. Ghosh's index lists ten sites with Jain artifacts (mostly medieval), but by contrast about ninety sites with Buddhist materials, many of them substantial and dated to the last three centuries BC. For Mathura, which is today an important Jain site, Ghosh lists no Jain artifacts at all from archaeological work.] My approach in the book is to base all of my main arguments on hard data -- inscriptions, datable manuscripts, other dated texts, and archaeological reports. I do not allow traditional belief to determine anything in the book, so I have necessarily left the topic out, other than to mention it briefly in a few places, with relevant citations. Here I quote a century-old summary that remains the received view:

Jainism bears a striking resemblance to Buddhism in its monastic system, its ethical teachings, its sacred texts, and in the story of its founder. This closeness of resemblance has led not a few scholars -- such as Lassen, Weber, Wilson, Tiele, Barth -- to look upon Jainism as an offshoot of Buddhism and to place its origin some centuries later than the time of Buddha. But the prevailing view today -- that of Buhler, Jacobi, Hopkins, and others- is that Jainism in its origin is independent of Buddhism and, perhaps, is the more ancient of the two. The many points of similarity between the two sects are explained by the indebtedness of both to a common source, namely the teachings and practices of ascetic, monastic Brahminism.


However, he then comments, "The canon of the White-robed Sect consists of forty-five Agamas, or sacred texts, in the Prakrit tongue. Jacobi, who has translated some of these texts in the 'Sacred Books of the East', is of the opinion that they cannot be older than 300 B.C.8 [This date is far too early. The oldest written texts in any Indian language are the Major Inscriptions of the Mauryas, which are dated to the first half of the third century BC and do not mention Jainism; see Chapter Three and Appendix C.] According to Jainist tradition, they were preceded by an ancient canon of fourteen so-called Purvas, which have totally disappeared ... ".9 [Aiken (1910).] With regard to the idea that any kind of monasticism, least of all Brahmanist asceticism, could be the "common source", it may be noted that monasteries per se in India cannot be dated earlier than the first century AD, when they first appear in Taxila; they were introduced from Central Asia, where Jainism was and is unknown.10 [Beckwith (2014).] Finally, my discussion here, and throughout this book, is concerned only with issues of historical accuracy. In my opinion, all great religions have much that is admirable in them, however old or new they may be.

I would like to emphasize that this book does not belong to any existing view, school, or field, as far as I am aware, so that it does not subscribe to any tradition walled off from the rest of intellectual life. It therefore has no gatekeepers, clad in the traditional metaphorical chain-mail armor and bearing the traditional metaphorical halberd, proclaiming threats to their perceived enemies in archaic languages, dedicated to keeping new knowledge out and stamping out all possible threats to those inside its walls so that the residents can safely continue their traditional beliefs without the necessity of thinking about them. The book is also inevitably imperfect, though I have tried to make it as correct as I could, despite the limitations of my own imperfections. So I hope it is not the "last word" on the many topics it covers, but only the "first word". My goal throughout has been exclusively to examine the evidence as carefully and precisely as possible, and to draw reasonable conclusions based on it -- while of course considering other studies that shed light on the problems or in some cases argue for a different interpretation. This sounds like a rather un-Pyrrhonian enterprise, but ultimately, and somewhat unexpectedly, it is what Pyrrhonism is all about.
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Re: Greek Buddha: Pyrrho's Encounter With Early Buddhism

Postby admin » Fri Jul 09, 2021 4:56 am

Acknowledgements

Although for me this book represents almost entirely new research on new ideas, it can also be said to go back to around 1967, when I was an undergraduate major in Chinese at Ohio State University and took a general philosophy survey class. The professor, Everett John Nelson, devoted one lecture to what I remember as "Classical Scepticism". I liked very much what I heard, and immediately went out and read the works of Sextus Empiricus in translation. Shortly after I took that course, I took Professor William Lyell's class in Chinese philosophy, and wrote a term paper for it in which I compared the ideas of Laotzu in the Tao Te Ching to the ideas of Sextus Empiricus. It never occurred to me then that the similarities I perceived had a foundation in anything historical -- partly because at the time I had a strong dislike for history in the usual sense. My two minor interests in Pyrrhonism and Early Taoism remained just that for the following decades, until by chance synergy happened and I found myself working on elements of both for one or another research project, and ended up, to my surprise, confirming the underlying perception in my long-ago undergraduate term paper.

At that point I had the opportunity to spend over a year in 2011- 2012 as a visiting research fellow in the Kate Hamburger Kolleg "History of Religions between Europe and Asia", at the Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany. There I was faced with a challenging, high-level research program involving regular colloquia, research group meetings, and, especially, workshops and conferences. After being quickly drafted to give papers in half a dozen workshops, I realized that I would not be able to write my planned book there unless my papers were on topics related to the book. When, half a year later, that decision finally began taking hold, I found myself investigating the problems of my topic in unexpected ways, mostly because of the need to accommodate myself to the particular theoretical approach of the given workshop or conference in which I was to present my paper. It was not easy for me to reorient myself in this way, but somehow I eventually managed, at least in part, so that to a certain extent I looked at the sources with new eyes and thought about them with a new mind. This turned out to be extremely fruitful, as it led me to discover things that I had never noticed before, and that nobody else had noticed either, as far as I know. It is partly for this reason that, I hope, this book makes a contribution to the solution of some major problems in philosophy, religious studies, and intellectual history in general.

I must therefore first thank Professor Everett John Nelson and Professor William Lyell for trying to teach me philosophy many decades ago when I was an undergraduate student at Ohio State, and for eventually succeeding -- to my own amazement -- in stimulating a genuine interest in the subject, as well as Professor Helmut Hoffmann, my doctoral advisor, who taught me much about Buddhism and scholarship in general.

I especially thank my friend and colleague Michael L. Walter, with whom I have had countless amiable and enlightening discussions about the history of Buddhism, including many points covered in this book. Without his kindness, assistance, and critical mind I would never have begun it.

I am also deeply indebted to Cynthia King for her very helpful comments on things Greek from beginning to end of this project, as well as for reading and offering numerous corrections and suggestions on an early draft of the manuscript; to Georgios Halkias for his unwavering support and also for his insightful comments on and corrections to the manuscript;1 [Regarding this book's main title, Greek Buddha, my colleague Georgios Halkias kindly informs me (shortly before I sent the manuscript to the press) that "the same title was used by Nikos Dimou, O Ellina Boudas, Athens: Nefeli Press, 1984. It is a study on Pyrrho and the influences of Hellenism on Buddhism." He also notes that the term appears to have been coined "by F. Nietzsche somewhere in his writings, again in reference to Pyrrho." A quick Internet search reveals that the term also has been used to refer to Heraclitus, and for many other purposes. I hope my own usage does not mislead anyone into thinking that it has anything to do with earlier usages. The title Greek Buddha occurred to me several years ago without my having the slightest knowledge of the fact that it had previously been used by anyone else in any language.] to Gregory Schopen for reading the manuscript and offering helpful comments; and to the three anonymous reviewers of the manuscript, whose observations led me to clarify many things.

I am also grateful for the above-noted fellowship awarded to me by the Kate Hamburger Kolleg at the Ruhr-Universitat Bochum, where I wrote the first actual rough draft manuscript. For doing their very best to make my stay in Bochum enjoyable and productive, and for their input with respect to various parts of the book when they were still research papers, I am much indebted to Volkhard Krech, director of the Kate Hamburger Kolleg; Nikolas Jaspert, director of the research group to which I belonged within the Kolleg; Roman Horitsch and the other staff members; and among the other members of the Kolleg at that time, especially Anna Akasoy, Sven Bretfeld, Alexandra Cuffel, Licia Di Giacinto, Adam Knobler, Hans Martin Kramer, Carmen Meinert, Zara Pogossian, Jessie Pons, Peter Wick, Michael Willis, and Sven Wortmann.

In addition, I would like to thank Stefan Baums, Joel Brereton, Johannes Bronkhorst, E. Bruce Brooks, Michael Butcher, Jamsheed Choksy, Baohai Dang, Max Deeg, Michael Dunn, Andrew Glass, Luis Gomez, Kyle Grothoff, Jens-Uwe Hartmann, Anya King, Boram Lee, Natalia Murataeva, Richard Nance, Jan Nattier, Patrick Olivelle, Andrew Shimunek, Raphael Squiley, and all others who answered questions, commented on this book or parts of it in their various incarnations, or argued points with me.

For his unwavering enthusiasm and support for this book from its very inception, I am deeply grateful to Rob Tempio, my editor at Princeton University Press. I would also like to thank everyone else involved in the production of this book.

As always I thank my wife, Inna, for encouraging me to begin, continue, and finish the book, and for helping me in countless ways throughout. I could not have done it without her.

Despite all of the valuable help of different kinds from family, friends, and colleagues, I have sometimes ignored their advice for one reason or another, or in some cases I might have misunderstood it, but in any case I am, as always, responsible for any errors that might remain.

I never imagined that I would write a book on Greek philosophy, even marginally -- or on any kind of philosophy or religion -- despite my admiration for ancient Greek thought in general. I have no idea how my son became interested in ancient Greek astronomy, which he took up in the early years of elementary school when he was no more than seven or eight years old and lugged the library's huge copy of the translation of Ptolemy's Almagest there to read during recess. But I like to think that there is a connection between us in our interest in things Greek, and I hope that he will have the chance to follow it up again some day. I dedicate this book, with all my love, to Didi my son, Lee Beckwith.
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Re: Greek Buddha: Pyrrho's Encounter With Early Buddhism

Postby admin » Fri Jul 09, 2021 4:56 am

On Transcription, Transliteration, and Texts

CHINESE


I follow the traditional modified Wade-Giles system used by many scholars -- for example, Tao Te Ching, Chuang Chou -- except for proper names or derived words that have established traditional Anglicized forms, such as Confucius, Laotzu, Taoism, Peking, and so on. Only when citing Mandarin pronunciation per se do I use the Pinyin system with tone marks. Unfortunately, there are no true critical editions of any Chinese texts. I have done the best I could with what there is.

GREEK

I follow convention as much as possible. I use the traditional transliteration system, with y rather than u for Greek u upsilon except in the digraph ou, which is transliterated as ou, though transcribed as u in Latinized Greek. In general I have attempted to preserve recognizability for words that have been borrowed into English, such as mythos (rather than muthos) 'word, story, fiction, myth'. For texts, in the most important cases I have consulted several editions, particularly the critical edition of Eusebius by Mras, the edition of fragments of Early Pyrrhonism by Dedeva Caizzi, and the recent critical edition of Strabo by Radt. For other Greek works I have usually relied on the Loeb Library series.

INDIC

I generally follow traditional Indological practice in converting the often divergent Prakrit dialect spellings to Sanskrit, though Pali text titles are cited in Pali, and other Prakrit forms verbatim. The respective standard transcription systems are followed, except in transcription of forms from early inscriptions. When Indic words, including proper names, have become loanwords in English, even if only in Buddhological publications, I have normally adopted the usual spellings sans diacritics, italicization, or recognition of morphophonological variations in the original, for example the words dharma, karma, Madhyamika, Mahayana, samsara. I have converted all variant transcriptions of anusvara to m without comment except in proper names in which n has become customary (e.g., Kalinga). For texts of the early Indian inscriptions, I have mainly relied on my own reading of the rubbings and photographs that are clear enough for me to read.
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Re: Greek Buddha: Pyrrho's Encounter With Early Buddhism

Postby admin » Fri Jul 09, 2021 4:56 am

Abbreviations

Bax.: Baxter 1992.
CTP: Chinese Text Project, http://ctext.org/.
D.L.: Diogenes Laertius, ed. Hicks (Loeb) 1925, or via Perseus.
Enquiry: Hume 1758.
Herodotus: Herodotus, ed. Godley (Loeb) 1926, or via Perseus.
LSJ: Liddell, Scott, Jones, Greek-English Lexicon 1968, or via Perseus.
MChi: Middle Chinese.
MSC: Modern Standard Chinese (Mandarin).
OChi: Old Chinese.
Perseus: Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu /hopper/.
Praep. evang.: Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica, ed. Mras 1983.
Pul.: Pulleyblank 1991.
Strabo: Geography, ed. Radt 2002-2011, or via Perseus.
TLG: Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, http://www.tlg.ud.edu/.
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Re: Greek Buddha: Pyrrho's Encounter With Early Buddhism

Postby admin » Fri Jul 09, 2021 4:58 am

Part 1 of 2

PROLOGUE

Scythian Philosophy

PYRRHO, THE PERSIAN EMPIRE, AND INDIA


In the eighth century BC, Scythian warriors pursuing the Cimmerians rode south out of the steppes into the Near East in the area of northern Iran. They defeated the Cimmerians in the 630s and in the process conquered the powerful nation of the Medes, their Iranic ethnolinguistic relatives. As allies of the Assyrians, the Scythians fought across the Levant as far as Egypt. When they were defeated by the Medes in about 585 BC, they withdrew to the north and established themselves in the North Caucasus Steppe and the Pontic Steppe north of the Black Sea. They and their relatives built a huge empire stretching across Central Eurasia as far as China, including most of urbanized Central Asia, and grew fabulously rich on trade.1

[Beckwith (2009: 61-62). The present chapter is an essay mainly intended to present some of the background and basic themes of this book. For citations, texts, and detailed discussion of most arguments presented, please see the numbered chapters and the appendixes.]
Image
A map of the steppes

The Scythians and other North Iranic speakers thus dominated Central Eurasia at the same time that their southern relatives, the Medes and Persians, formed a vast empire based in the area of what is now western Iran and Iraq. Though the Scythians were increasingly fragmented, and were probably weakened by the Persian capture of the prosperous and populous Central Asian countries of Bactria, Sogdiana, and others, they and other North Iranic-speaking relatives -- including their eastern branch, the Sakas -- continued to rule much of Central Eurasia for many centuries.2

[On the names of the Scythian peoples, see Szemerenyi (1980); cf. Beckwith (2009: 377-380), where it is shown that the name Saka is an eastern Scythian dialect form of the same word that gave us the name "Scythian".]

To their south the prophet Zoroaster "reformed" the traditional religion of Media, Mazdaism, evidently around the time of Cyrus the Great [600 BC-530BC], who was half Mede and half Persian. Although the Scythians never adopted Zoroastrianism, they too were interested in religion and philosophy. We know of not one but two great Scythian philosophers, and both still have much to teach us.

ANACHARSIS THE SCYTHIAN

Anacharsis was the brother of Caduida, king of the Scythians. He spoke Greek because his mother was a Greek.3

[Diogenes Laertius 1, 8.103 (Hicks 1925: 1:106-107). Alekseyev (2005: 40) says he was the brother of Saulius, son of Gnurus.]

In about the forty-seventh Olympiad (592-589 BC), the age of Solon, he travelled to Greece and became well known for his astute, pithy remarks and wise sayings. Of the very brief quotations that are thought to go back to Anacharsis himself, many consist of observations on the opposite character of this or that cultural element among the Greeks as contrasted with the same element among the Scythians. For example, "He said he wondered why among the Greeks the experts contend, but the non-experts decide."4

[Diogenes Laertius I, 8.103 (Hicks 1925: 1:106-107: "[x]." There are several versions of this saying. Kindstrand (1981: 119, 150-151) prefers a political context, based on Plutarch's version, but a generic comment seems most likely in view of the usual presentation of Anacharsis in the earliest sayings attributed to him. This particular saying is also directly comparable to the following quotation on the Criterion attributed to him by Sextus Empiricus (cf. Kindstrand 1981: 49), which seems quite likely to have been modeled on this evidently genuine short saying. See now Griffith (2013) on judging between contending experts in Aristophanes' Frogs and in ancient Greek culture in general.]

The Greeks regularly quoted this and other pithy sayings of Anacharsis, which taken together are unlike those of any other known figure, Greek or foreign, in ancient Greek literature. Though he was considered to be a Scythian, the Greeks liked him, and he was counted as one of the Seven Sages of Antiquity in Greek philosophy. His own literary works are lost, but his fame was such that other writers used him as a stock character in their own compositions.5i

[On the origin and fate of Anacharsis, see Endnote i.]

Sextus Empiricus, in his Against the Logicians, quotes an otherwise unknown work attributed to Anacharsis, on the Problem of the Criterion:

Who judges something skillfully? Is it the ordinary person or the skilled person? We would not say it is the ordinary person. For he is defective in his knowledge of the peculiarities of skills. The blind person does not grasp the workings of sight, nor the deaf person those of hearing. And so, too, the unskilled person does not have a sharp eye when it comes to the apprehension of what has been achieved through skill, since if we actually back this person in his judgment on some matter of skill, there will be no difference between skill and lack of skill, which is absurd. So the ordinary person is not a judge of the peculiarities of skills. It remains, then, to say that it is the skilled person -- which is again unbelievable. For one judges either a person with the same pursuits as oneself, or a person with different pursuits. But one is not capable of judging someone with different pursuits; for one is familiar with one's own skill, but as far as someone else's skill is concerned one's status is that of an ordinary person. Yet neither one can certify a person with the same pursuits as oneself. For this was the very issue we were examining: who is to be the judge of these people, who are of identical ability as regards the same skill. Besides, if one person judges the other, the same thing will become both judging and judged, trustworthy and untrustworthy. For in so far as the other person has the same pursuits as the one being judged, he will be untrustworthy since he too is being judged, while in so far as he is judging he will be trustworthy. But it is not possible for the same thing to be both judging and judged, trustworthy and untrustworthy; therefore there is no one who judges skillfully. For this reason there is not a criterion either. For some criteria are skilled and some are ordinary; but neither do the ordinary ones judge just as the ordinary person does not), nor do the skilled ones just as the skilled person does not), for the reasons stated earlier. Therefore nothing is a criterion.6


[Sextus Empiricus, Adversus mathematicos VII, 1, 55-59, translation by Bett (2005: 13-14), courtesy Cambridge University Press, section numbers omitted. For explanation of the traditional mistaken title (Adversus mathematicos) of this and other works by Sextus, see Bett (2005: x-xii). The passage begins with the comment by Sextus, "Anacharsis the Scythian, they say, does away with the apprehension that is capable of judging every skill, and strenuously criticizes the Greeks for holding on to it."]

The focus of the text is the Problem of the Criterion, which is acknowledged not to have existed in Greek philosophy before the time of Pyrrho,7

[See Chapter One and Appendix A.] so it is clear that it cannot be an authentic work of Anacharsis, as scholars have already determined on other grounds.8 [Kindstrand (1981).]

Nevertheless, it is modeled directly on the above brief, genuine quotation of Anacharsis himself on the same topic -- the problem of judging or deciding -- and other genuine quotations similar in nature.

The argument is also strikingly close to the second part of the argument about the Problem of the Criterion in the Chuangtzu. Exactly as in the genuine saying of Anacharsis and in the argument attributed to him by Sextus Empiricus, the Chinese argument specifically concerns the ability to decide which of two contending individuals is right:

If you defeat me, I do not defeat you, are you then right, and I am not? If I defeat you, you do not defeat me, am I then right, you are not? Is one of us right, one of us wrong? Or are both of us right, both of us wrong? If you and I cannot figure it out, then everyone will be mystified by it. Who shall we get to decide who is right? We could get someone who agrees with you to decide who is right, but since he agrees with you, how could he decide it aright? We could get someone who agrees with me to decide who is right, but since he agrees with me, how can he decide it aright? Therefore, neither I nor you nor anyone else can figure it out.9


[[x] (Chuangtzu 2; text from CTP). The introductory remark, [x]"Since (someone) has made me argue with you," undoubtedly refers to Confucius; the last remark, [x] "So we're waiting for him?", is also probably a sarcastic reference to Confucius, who is criticized mercilessly in the immediately preceding passage. These remarks are outside the argument itself. Cf. the translations by Graham (1981: 60) and Watson (1968: 48). I am indebted to Boram Lee and E. Bruce Brooks for a helpful discussion of this passage on the Warring States Workshop online forum.]

The first part of the argument is structured as a tetralemma.10

[On the tetralemma, see Chapter One and Appendix A. This one is a rather complex example, and is followed by a short conclusion: "If you and I cannot figure it out, then everyone will be mystified by it."]

The explanation for the similarity of these two passages could well be that the author of the "Anacharsis" quotation given by Sextus Empiricus had heard just such an argument, directly or indirectly, from a Scythian. This would have been a simple matter during the Classical Age because many Scythians then lived in Athens, where a number of them even served as the city's police force. If it was a stock Scythian story, an eastern Scythian -- a Saka -- could have transmitted a version of it to the Chinese, so that it ended up in the Chuangtzu, which is full of stories and arguments of a similar character.

Whatever the explanation, the explicit Greek connection of this story with a Scythian philosopher known for pithy sayings having a clever argument structure clearly indicates that it is the kind of thing Scythians were expected to say. In view of the Chinese testimony, it seems likely that it was something that some Scythians actually did say.


GAUTAMA BUDDHA, THE SCYTHIAN SAGE

The dates of Gautama Buddha are not recorded in any reliable historical source, and the traditional dates are calculated on unbelievable lineages including round numbers such as one hundred, so they are not reliable either, as noted already by Fleet, Hultzsch, and many others.11

[Fleet, in JRAS 1909: 333, 335, cited in Hultzsch (1925: xxxiii): Scholars' continued insistence on following such dates anyway led to a 1988 conference devoted specifically to reconsideration of the dates of the Buddha, which however largely continued to take the fanciful, ahistorical, traditional accounts as if they were actual historical accounts, with the significant exceptions of the papers by Hartel (1995) and Bareau (1995).]

His personal name, Gautama, is evidently earliest recorded in the Chuangtzu, a Chinese work from the late fourth to third centuries BC.12

[See Chapter Three.]

His epithet Sakamuni (later Sanskritized as Sakyamuni), 'Sage of the Scythians ("Sakas")', is unattested in the genuine Mauryan inscriptions13 ...

[See Chapter Two and Appendix C.]

... or the Pali Canon.14

[However, it has been demonstrated that the caretakers of the Pali tradition systematically expunged references to various ideas and practices to which they objected, especially things thought to be non-Indian (Sven Bretfeld, p.c., 2012). (Bretfeld, Sven 2003. Visuelle Reprasentation im sogenannten "buddhistischen Yogalehrbuch" aus Qizil. Veroffentlichungen der Societas Uralo-Altaica 61 (Indien und Zentralasien: Sprach-und Kulturkontakt): 168-205) (Google translate: Visual representation in the so-called "Buddhist yoga textbook" from Qizil. Publications of Societas Uralo-Altaica 61 (India and Central Asia: Language and Culture Contact): 168-205))]

The Lumbini Discovery

The following year (1896) found Fuhrer back in Nepal once more, this time ‘to explore the whole neighbourhood of Taulihawa as far as Bhagvanpur, where there is said to exist another Asoka Edict pillar’. Fuhrer had referred to this other ‘Asoka Edict pillar’ in his 1895 report, though there was then no reason for believing that this pillar -- the present Lumbini pillar -- was Asokan; V. A. Smith had obtained rubbings from it ‘a dozen years’ earlier, and had found only ‘mediaeval scribblings’ on its exposed portion at that time.

The site was supposedly called ‘Rummindei’, this being considered to be a later variant of the name ‘Lumbini’. But as E. J. Thomas observed:
‘According to Fuhrer, “this deserted site is still locally called Rummindei” (Monograph, p. 28). This statement was generally accepted before Fuhrer’s imaginativeness was discovered, and is still incautiously repeated. Yet he admitted that it was not the name used by the present Nepalese officials. “It is a curious fact (he says) that the true meaning of this ancient Buddhistic name has long been forgotten, as the present Nepalese officials believe the word to signify the sthan of Rupa-devi”. V. A. Smith said “the name Rummindei, of which a variant form Rupadei (sic) is known to the hill-men, is that of the shrine near the top of the mound of ruins”. This gives no further evidence for Fuhrer’s assertion, and it appears that neither the Nepalese officials nor the hill-men called it Rummindei’.

The Indian Survey map of 1915 lists the spot as ‘Roman-devi’; it should be noted that another ‘Roman-devi’ exists about 30 miles WSW of the Nepalese site, near the Indian town of Chandapar. Today, the site is situated in the ‘Rupandehi District’ of Nepal.

The Lumbini Pillar Inscription.

Whatever the event, in December 1896 Fuhrer met up at this Nepalese ‘Rummindei’ with the local Governor, Khadga Shamsher, ‘a man with intrigue in his bones’, who having assassinated one Prime Minister of Nepal and plotted against two others, eventually fled to British India and sanctuary.

The subsequent excavations around the pillar reportedly disclosed an Asokan inscription about a metre below ground, and level with the top of a surrounding brick enclosure.

The credit for the discovery of this inscription later prompted an official enquiry, since Fuhrer had supposedly left the site just before any excavations had begun, leaving the Governor and his ‘sappers’ to do the digging. In his official letter on the matter, Fuhrer stated that he had advised the Governor ‘that an inscription would be found if a search was made below the surface of the mound’ on which the pillar was situated. Since there was no previous historical reference to such an inscription, one wonders at Fuhrer’s remarkable prescience on this occasion. However, since this inscription provides the basis for the identification of this place with Lumbini, I propose to deal with it before passing on to other features at this site.

The appearance of this inscription in 1896 marked its first recorded appearance in history. The noted Chinese pilgrims, Fa-hsien and Yuan-chuang, make no mention of it in their accounts of the Lumbini site (though Yuan-chuang does give a detailed description of a pillar) and as Thomas Watters observed:
‘We have no records of any other pilgrims visiting this place, or of any great Buddhists residing at it, or of any human life, except that mentioned by the two pilgrims, between the Buddha’s time and the present.

In Watters’ book ‘On Yuan Chwang’s Travels in India’ (prepared from an unpublished manuscript after his death) the following statement is found with reference to the Lumbini site:
‘Yuan-chuang, as we have seen, mentions a stone pillar, but he does not say anything about an inscription on it. The Fang-chih, however, tells us that the pillar recorded the circumstances of Buddha's birth’.

The Fang-chih -– a shortened version of Yuan-chuang’s account -- does nothing of the sort, since though it also refers to a stone pillar at Lumbini, no inscription ‘recording the circumstances of Buddha’s birth’ is mentioned in this text either. Watters, a great Sinologist, was referred to by V. A. [Vincent Arthur] Smith as ‘one of the most brilliant ornaments’ of Chinese Buddhist scholarship, and it is inconceivable that he would have made this critical mistake. Indeed, when Smith asserted that the Lumbini pillar inscription ‘set at rest all doubts as to the exact site of the traditional birthplace of Gautama Buddha’, Watters acidly retorted that ‘it would be more correct to say that the inscription, if genuine, tells us what was the spot indicated to Asoka as the birthplace of the Buddha’. Note that ‘if genuine’: this shows that Watters not only had his doubts about this inscription, but that he was also prepared to voice those doubts in public. Moreover, according to Smith, ‘Mr Watters writes in a very sceptical spirit, and apparently feels doubts as to the reality of the Sakya principality in the Tarai'. From all this, it will clearly be seen that this Fang-chih ‘mistake’ was totally at variance with Watters’ ‘very sceptical spirit’ regarding these supposed Nepalese discoveries (Lumbini included); and I shall therefore charge that it was a posthumous interpolation into Watters’ original text by its editors, Rhys Davids, [Stephen Wootton] Bushell, and Smith. If this charge is correct –- and I am quite sure that it is -- then the reasons behind this appalling deception can only be guessed at, I need hardly add.

-- Lumbini On Trial: The Untold Story. Lumbini Is An Astonishing Fraud Begun in 1896, by T. A. Phelps

It is earliest attested, as Sakamuni, in the Gandhari Prakrit texts, which date to the first centuries AD (or possibly even the late first century BC).15

[Baums and Glass (2010), a work in progress, when checked in July 2013, included three occurrences, each in a different manuscript. It also occurs in Sanskrit in much later texts from Gandhara, as well as once, in a fifth-century AD Bactrian Buddhist text, as [x], without the characteristic -y- of the Sanskritized form of the name (Sims-Williams 2010: 73).]

It is thus arguable that the epithet could have been applied to the Buddha during the Saka (Saka or "Indo-Scythian") Dynasty -- which dominated northwestern India on and off from approximately the first century BC, continuing into the early centuries AD as satraps or "vassals" under the Kushans -- and that the reason for it was strong support for Buddhism by the Sakas, Indo-Parthians, and Kushans.

However, it must be noted that the Buddha is the only Indian holy man before early modern times who bears an epithet explicitly identifying him as a non-Indian, a foreigner. It would have been unthinkably odd for an Indian saint to be given a foreign epithet if he was not actually a foreigner. Moreover, the Scythians-Sakas are well attested in Greek and Persian historical sources before even the traditional "high" date of the Buddha, so the epithet should presumably have been applied to him already in Central Asia proper or its eastern extension into India-eastern Gandhara. There are also very strong arguments -- including basic "doctrinal" ones -- indicating that Buddhism had fundamental foreign connections from the very beginning, as shown below. It is at any rate certain that Buddha has been identified as Sakamuni ~ Sakyamuni "Sage of the Scythians" in all varieties of Buddhism from the beginning of the recorded Buddhist tradition to the present, and that much of what is thought to be known about him can be identified specifically with things Scythian.16

[Walter (2012). The tradition by which Buddha was from a local Nepalese Sakya "clan" in the area of Lumbini is full of chronological and other insuperable problems, as shown by Bareau (1987); it is a very late development.]

Moreover, it must not be overlooked that we have no concrete datable evidence that any other wandering ascetics preceded the Buddha. The Scythians were nomads (from Greek [x]; 'wanderers in search of pasture, pastoralists') who lived in the wilderness, and it is thus quite likely that Gautama himself introduced wandering asceticism to India, just as the Scythians had earlier invented mounted steppe nomadism.17

[Beckwith (2009: 58ff.). Considering the mostly Anatolian [Turkey] origins of Greek philosophy, and the long domination of that region by the Medes and Persians, it must be wondered if the peripatetic tradition in Greek philosophy also reflects the Iranic penchant for wandering.]

One way or the other, it would seem that the Buddha's teachings were unprecedented mainly because they opposed new foreign ideas -- the Early Zoroastrian ideas of good and bad karma, rebirth in Heaven (for those who were good), absolute Truth versus the Lie, and so on -- which were previously unknown in "India proper". He did this because he himself was foreign, and people actually understood and accepted that by calling him Sakamuni.

Buddha therefore must have lived after the introduction of Zoroastrianism in 519/518 BC, when the Achaemenid ruler Darius I invaded and conquered several Central Asian countries and then continued to the east, where he conquered Gandhara and Sindh, which were Indic-speaking, in about 517/516 BC.18

[Shahbazi (1994). Although the exact date of his invasion of Gandhara and Sindh is unknown, it probably happened shortly after his Central Asian campaign, so around 517 (Briant 1996: 153). In any case, there is no doubt about the conquest of the region during the early part of his reign (Kuhrt 2007: 182, 188-189). See also the extensive complementary treatment in the Epilogue of the present book.]

In the process of firming up his rule over the new territories, he stationed subordinate feudal lords, or satraps, over them, and some of the army was garrisoned there. Darius had come from conquering much of Central Asia proper, including Bactria and Arachosia, as well as the Saka Tigraxauda 'the Scythians wearing pointed hats', a nation of Scythians whose king, Skunkha, he captured19...

[Kuhrt (2007: 157n122, 150, figure 5.3).]

... and is portrayed in a captioned relief accompanying the Behistun Inscription. From then on Scythians formed the backbone of the imperial forces together with the Medes and Persians,20...

[Briant (1996: 50).]

... so some of the soldiers in the Indian campaign must have been Scythians, that is, Sakas. Herodotus details the dress and equipment of the Central Asian and Indian troops, who are listed by nation including, among others, Bactrians, Sakas ("that is, Scythians"), Indians (Indoi), Arians (more correctly Hareians,21...

[Herat, in modern northwestern Afghanistan, preserves the ancestral name of the region, Old Persian Haraiva.]

... neighbors of the Bactrians), Parthians, Khwarizmians, Sogdians, and Gandharans.22

[Herodotus VII; 64.1 to VII, 66.1.]

Gandhara became an important part of the empire. It is regularly included in the lists of provinces from the beginning of Darius's reign on to the end of the empire along with Bactria, Arachosia, the Sakas, and other neighboring realms.23

[Briant (1996: 50).]

There was a Persian satrap in Taxila, and official travellers went frequently between the Persian capital and one or another provincial locality in India,24 ...

[Briant (1996: 777, 370).]

... as attested by accounts preserved in the Persepolis Fortification Tablets, which detail the payments in kind to the travellers.25

[Meadows (2005: 186).]

Moreover, "the Indians", one of the twenty financial districts of the Persian Empire recorded by Herodotus, paid by far the greatest sum in "tribute".26

[Meadows (2005: 183).]

The Achaemenid influence in Gandhara was strong and long-lasting.27

[Briant (1996: 778).]
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Re: Greek Buddha: Pyrrho's Encounter With Early Buddhism

Postby admin » Sat Jul 10, 2021 5:32 am

Part 2 of 2

The conquest by Darius introduced the Persians' new religion, reformed Mazdaism, or Early Zoroastrianism,28 ...

[I call it "Early Zoroastrianism" because it did not exist for very long in its pristine state, but also because it was very different from fully developed Late Zoroastrianism (one could call it "Normative Zoroastrianism", following the terminology developed in this book for Buddhism). Soudavar (2010: 119), emphasis added, remarks, "Zoroastrianism as we now know [it], with its complicated rituals and canonical laws, had not enough time to develop between the lifetime of its prophet and the advent of Darius in the year 522 BC."]

... a strongly monotheistic faith with a creator God, Ahura Mazda, and with ideas of absolute Truth (Avestan asa, Old Persian arta) versus 'the Lie' (druj), and of an accumulation of Good and Bad deeds -- that is, "karma" -- which determined whether a person would be rewarded by "rebirth" in Heaven. These ideas are all found in the Gathas, the oldest part of the Avesta, which are attributed to Zoroaster himself, and all are expressed openly and repeatedly in the Old Persian royal inscriptions as well. Essentially the same ideas occur in the Major Inscriptions of the Mauryas in the third century BC in India.29

[See Chapters Two and Three.]
That the history of Asoka matches that of Diodotus I line by line can only imply that they were one and the same person....

The Parthian Prince An-shih-kao, who dedicated his life to the spread of Buddhism, is clearly Diodotus...

Asoka does not refer to Diodotus because he was Diodotus himself...

Historians have denied Diodotus his true place in world history.

-- An Altar of Alexander Now Standing at Delhi [EXPANDED VERSION], by Ranajit Pal

The traditional view30 ...

[E.g., Gombrich (1996: 51).]

is that the Buddha reinterpreted existing Indian ideas found in the Upanishads, but the Upanishads in question cannot be dated to a period earlier than the Buddha, as shown by Bronkhorst31 ...

[Bronkhorst (1986).]

... and discussed below. Just as Early Buddhism cannot be expected to be similar to the Normative Buddhism of a half millennium or more later, so Early Brahmanism cannot be expected to be similar to Late Brahmanism (not to speak of Hinduism), attested even later. "Zoroaster was ... the first to teach the doctrines of ... Heaven and Hell, the future resurrection of the body ... , and life everlasting for the reunited soul and body",32 ...

[Boyce (1979: 29).]

... and Early Zoroastrianism was the faith of the ruling nation of the Persian Empire. Both Early Buddhism and Early Brahmanism are the direct outcome of the introduction of Zoroastrianism into eastern Gandhara by Darius I. Early Buddhism resulted from the Buddha's rejection of the basic principles of Early Zoroastrianism, while Early Brahmanism represents the acceptance of those principles. Over time, Buddhism would accept more and more of the rejected principles.

Darius also sponsored the creation of a completely new writing system -- Old Persian cuneiform script, which is partly modeled on Aramaic script, one of the main administrative scripts of the Persian Empire -- and the practice of erecting monumental inscriptions.33

[In addition, he built imperial roads with rest houses provisioned for travellers. These three actions were prominently imitated by the early rulers of the Mauryan Empire in India, the northwestern part of which had been part of the Persian Empire until Alexander's conquest.]

In the great Behistun Inscription at the top of Mount Bagastana,34 ...

[This is the ancient name, which means 'place of gods' (Razmjou 2005: 153) or 'the place of God'.]

... Darius I repeats over and over how he achieved what he did because the early Achaemenids' monotheistic God of Heaven, Ahura Mazda 'Lord Wisdom', helped him. He insists that what he did was True, it was not a Lie, and repeatedly says that those who opposed him "lied". Druj 'the Lie' made them rebel and deceive the people, they were "lie-followers", and so on. The obsessive repetition of this litany throughout the inscriptions is striking. Anyone familiar with these basic Zoroastrian concepts could hardly contend that Darius was not an Early Zoroastrian. He could not have been anything else.

While, not surprisingly, the ordinary generic human contrast between truth and falsehood is found in the Vedas, the specifically Early Zoroastrian form of the ideas, including the result of following one or the other path, is completely alien to them. In the early Vedic religion, ritually correct performance of blood sacrifices was believed to be rewarded in this life, but the reward had nothing to do with one's virtuous actions or one's future in the afterlife. These ideas thus seem to have been introduced by the Achaemenid Persians into eastern Gandhara and Sindh, the western limits of the ancient Indic world and southeastern limits of the Central Asian world, just as they were introduced into Near Eastern parts of the vast Persian Empire. In fact, Early Zoroastrianism is attested in Achaemenid Central Asia and India in the earliest Persian imperial written documents from the region.35ii

[Benveniste et al. (1958: 4), based on two inscriptions in Aramaic. Cf. Bronkhorst (2007: 358), who remarks, "In the middle of the third century BC, it was Mazdaism, rather than Brahmanism, which predominated in the region between Kandahar and Taxila". For Bronkhorst's views on Brahmanism and early Magadha, see Endnote ii.]

These specific "absolutist" or "perfectionist" ideas are firmly rejected by the Buddha in his earliest attested teachings, as shown in Chapter One. In short, the Buddha reacted primarily (if at all) not against Brahmanism,36 ...

[Cf. Bronkhorst (1986; 2011: 1-4), q.v. the preceding note. From his discussion it is clear that even the earliest attested Brahmanist texts reflect the influence of Buddhism, so it would seem that the acceptance of Early Zoroastrian ideas in Gandhara happened later than the Buddhist rejection of them, but before the Alexander historians and Megasthenes got there in the late fourth century BC.]

... but against Early Zoroastrianism. At the lower end of the chronological scale, the Buddha must have lived before the visit of the two best known and attested Greek visitors of the late fourth century, Pyrrho of Elis, who was in Bactria, Gandhara, and Sindh from 330 to 325 BC with Alexander the Great and learned an early form of Buddhism there, and two decades later the ambassador Megasthenes, who travelled from Alexandria in Arachosia (now Kandahar) to Gandhara and Magadha in 305-304 BC and recorded his observations on Indian beliefs, including Early Buddhism and Early Brahmanism, in his Indica.37

[See Chapter Two for a detailed study of the relevant fragments of his book preserved in Strabo's Geography.]

The word bodhi 'enlightenment', literally 'awakening', is first attested in the Eighth Rock Edict of the Mauryan ruler Devanampriya Priyadarsi (fl. 272-261 BC), who says that in the tenth year after his coronation he went to Sambodhi -- now known as Bodhgaya (located about fifty miles south of Patna, ancient Pataliputra) -- where according to tradition the Buddha achieved enlightenment under the Bodhi Tree. The ruler says that after this visit he began to preach the Dharma around his empire.38

[Kalsi VIII, 22-23 (Hultzsch 1925: 36-37). Cf. Chapter Three.]
He claims the capital is Palimbothra or Palibothra, and that the city exists near the confluence of the Ganga and the Eranaboas (Hiranyabahu). But the Puranas are clear that all the 8 dynasties after the Mahabharata war had their capital at Girivraja (Rajagriha), located in the foothills of the Himalayas. There is no mention of Pataliputra in the Puranas. So, the assumption made by Sir William [Jones] that Palimbothra is Pataliputra has no basis in fact and is not attested by any piece of evidence. If the Greeks could pronounce the first P in (Patali) they could certainly have pronounced the second p in Putra, instead of bastardising it as Palimbothra. Granted the Greeks were incapable of pronouncing any Indian names, but there is no reason why they should not be consistent in their phonetics.

-- Historical Dates From Puranic Sources, by Prof. Narayan Rao

The inscription thus can only refer to the ruler's acceptance of a form of the Early Buddhist Dharma -- not the more familiar Normative Buddhism, which is attested several centuries later. The inscription also establishes that reverence for the Buddha existed by this time at Bodhgaya, in Magadha.39

[This makes it likely that the comment in Megasthenes' account about the Sramanas interceding between the kings and 'the divine one' also refers to reverence for the Buddha. See Chapter Two.]

The dates of Darius's conquest of Gandhara and Sindh (ca. 517 BC), and the late fourth century -- marked by the visit of Alexander (330-325 BC) along with his courtier Pyrrho, followed by Megasthenes two decades later -- are the chronological limits bracketing the enlightenment-to-death career of Gautama Buddha. It is possible to further narrow this down to some extent.

The shock of the introduction of new, alien religious ideas in the traditionally non-Persian, non-Zoroastrian environment of Central Asia, eastern Gandhara, and Sindh must have happened fairly soon after Darius's conquest and the establishment of his satrapies, when the satraps were undoubtedly still ethnically Persian and strongly Zoroastrian, and would have needed the ministrations of their priests. That would place the most likely time for the Buddha's period of asceticism and enlightenment within the first fifty years or so of Persian rule, meaning ca. 515 to ca. 465 BC, and his death after another forty years or so -- following the dubious tradition that he lived eighty years40 ...

[His traditional life span is undoubtedly fictitious, as 8, 80, 108, etc. are holy numbers in later, Normative Buddhism.]

... -- making the latest date for his death ca. 425 BC. This chronology would also leave enough time for Early Buddhism to spread from Magadha (the region where Sambodhi, or Bodhgaya, is located) -- assuming it was first preached there by the Buddha -- northwestward into western Gandhara, Bactria, and beyond, and (as shown in Chapter Three), for his name Gautama and some of his ideas and practices to travel all the way to China and become popular no later than the Guodian tomb's end date (terminus ante quem) of 278 BC. Among the things that the scenario presented here explains are the striking alienness of Buddhism in India proper,41 ...

[Independently mentioned to me by Michael L. Walter (p.c., 2010) and Michael Willis (p.c., 2012).]

... its earliness in Gandhara and Bactria,42 ...

[This is one of several problems with Bronkhorst's "Magadha" theory of the origin of Buddhism. Though he points out that Gandhara is one of the earliest regions in which Buddhism is attested (Bronkhorst 2011: 20-21), it is actually attested there far earlier than anywhere else; cf. above.]

... and the difficulty of showing that the Buddha was originally from Magadha.

This brings up the problem of the Buddha's birthplace. Not only are his dates only very generally definable, his specific homeland is unknown as well. Despite widespread popular belief in the story that he came from Lumbini in what is now Nepal, all of the evidence is very late and highly suspect from beginning to end. Bareau has carefully analyzed the Lumbini birth story and shown it to be a late fabrication.43

[Bareau (1987) (Andre Bareau, 1987. Lumbini et al naissance du futur Buddha. Bulletin de l'Ecole Francaise d'Extreme-Orient 76: 69-81. (Google translate: Lumbini et al birth of the future Buddha. Bulletin of the French School of the Far East 76: 69-81.)). The lone piece of evidence impelling scholars to accept the Lumbini story has been the Lumbini Inscription, which most scholars believe was erected by Asoka. However, the inscription itself actually reveals that it is not by Asoka, and all indications are that it is a late forgery, possibly even a modern one. See Appendix C.]

There are reasons to put the Buddha's teaching period -- most of his life, according to the traditional accounts -- somewhere in northern India, in a region affected by the monsoons. In particular, the eventual development of the primitive arama, the temporary seasonal shelter of the Buddha's lifetime, into the samgharama (an arama specifically for Buddhist monks)44

[This is the traditional understanding. Later, in the Kushan period, the fully developed monastery (eventually called the vihara) was introduced from Central Asia, as known from the excavations at Taxila (Marshall 1951). The idea of the "monastery" must have developed slowly within Buddhism -- no other religious or philosophical system anywhere is known to have developed it earlier. It clearly cannot be dated until well after the time of Megasthenes' account, which mentions explicitly where the sramanas lived but says nothing about monasteries or anything similar. The earliest identifiable group living centers, even if they were samgharamas (unlikely, since the stories about them are clearly ahistorical), are primitive affairs that can hardly be called "monasteries", as pointed out by Schopen (2004: 219; 2007: 61; cf. Bronkhorst 2011), partly on the basis of the early donative inscriptions at Sanci, which -- unlike later donative inscriptions -- do not mention viharas, indicating that the monks lived in villages. It is now clear that fully developed organized monasticism must have come first, and preceded any samgharamas, but it developed in Central Asia, whence it was introduced to India and China in the Kushan period (Beckwith 2014; forthcoming-a). Cf. Chapter Two.]

... -- the received historical trajectory, based on tradition, the "early" sutras, and archaeological data45 ...

[Dutt (1962); see Chapter Two and the discussion in Beckwith (2012c).]

... -- actually requires an original location in the monsoon zone. That is to say, if aramas were necessary, then monsoons were necessary too, meaning Early Buddhism must have developed in a monsoon zone region of early India. However, that could be almost anywhere from the upper Indus River in the west -- including ancient eastern Gandhara -- to the mouths of the Ganges in the east.

Of course, actual Early Buddhism (i.e., Pre-Normative Buddhism) did not entirely disappear in later times, and constitutes a significant element in the teachings and practices shared by most followers of Normative Buddhism and thus by most Buddhist schools or sects known from the Saka-Kushan period down to modern times. At the early end of the spectrum, the doctrinal content of the Gandhari documents dating to the early Normative period agrees closely with the doctrinal content of what are believed to be the earliest texts of the Pali Canon,46 ...

[Stefan Baums (p.c., 2012); I am of course responsible for any misunderstanding about this.]

... with the main exception that some Mahayana texts have been found among the materials from Gandhara.47

[For some of the best-preserved examples, see Braarvig and Liland (2010). Most are however in Sanskrit and from about the fourth to the sixth century AD, approximately a millennium after the Buddha.]

However, one may safely assume that the Buddha must have passed away well before 325 to 304 BC, the dates for the appearance of the earliest hard evidence on the existence of Buddhism or elements of Buddhism. This is still three centuries before even the earliest Gandhari texts and the traditional (high) date of the Pali Canon. Despite widespread belief that the latter collections of material, both of which are from the Saka-Kushan period or later, represent "Early Buddhism", the work of many scholars has shown that even by internal evidence alone it must be already quite far removed from the earliest Buddhism -- the teachings and practices of the followers of the Buddha himself and the next few generations after him, up to the mid-third century BC -- which is referred to in this book as Early Buddhism.

PYRRHO'S JOURNEY TO GANDHARA AND BACK AGAIN

In or about the year 334 BC, Pyrrho of Elis (ca. 355-ca. 265 BC)48 ...

[He was actually from Petra, a small town near Elis (Pausanias VI, 24, 5; cf. Conche 1994: 16). It is not recorded when he -- supposedly already with his teacher Anaxarchus (q.v. D.L. IX, 58-60; O'Keefe 2006) -- joined Alexander's court. Conche (1994: 28:-30) argues that Pyrrho most probably met Alexander in 332 BC, but as Clayman (2009: 16) remarks the meeting must have been no later than 334, when Alexander, his court, and the army crossed the Dardanelles. Cf. the following note.]

... met Alexander the Great and joined the Macedonian conqueror's entourage. It is unlikely that Pyrrho was over thirty years old when he left on his trip, as the usual chronologies suggest.49

[Scholars (e.g., Bett 2000: 1n1; Clayman 2009: 16) have generally accepted the estimate of von Fritz (1963: 90) that Pyrrho was born in ca. 365-360 and died in ca. 275-270 BC, based primarily on the assumption that he was about thirty years old when he joined Alexander's campaign to conquer the Persian Empire. He was a painter (Clayman 2009), but he was unmarried, and it was normal for Greek men to marry by the age of thirty. Although some sources suggest that he had previously studied with other teachers of philosophy, most of these comments are highly doubtful, especially the putative connection with the Megarians in Diogenestaertius, q.v. Bett (2000: 1-2, 165-169). It is probable, as Clayman (2009) has suggested, that he learned philosophy from Anaxarchus and the other philosophers Alexander brought with him in his court. In that case, he should have been younger still at the beginning of the campaign, having been born closer to 355, and thus died closer to 265 BC. At any rate, even following von Fritz's dates and the tradition that he lived for almost ninety years, he would have lived some fifty more years after his return from the East and therefore "was very much alive when Timon left (Elis, to make a living as a travelling sophist), certainly not later than 276, but probably much earlier" (Clayman 2009: 16).]

... Pyrrho had been a painter, and was -- or more likely became on the trip -- a student of the philosopher and musician50 ...

[So Plutarch, De Alex. fort virt. 1, 331e.]

... Anaxarchus (killed ca. 320 BC). Alexander himself was only twenty-six years old when he left Persia to invade the East, and most of his companions were equally young or younger, as they needed to be to survive the rigors of the campaign. Anaxarchus was famously close to Alexander,51 ...

[Arrian, Anabasis IV, 9-11; see Romm and Mensch (2005: 103-106).]

... and they interacted personally in such a way that it is difficult to believe he was over fifty years old at the time -- twice as old as Alexander. If it is assumed that Anaxarchus was closer to Alexander in age, and thus ten to twenty years younger, Pyrrho, who receives attention in the sources mainly as his student rather than in his own right, must have been much younger still, perhaps twenty years old, at the time. It is significant that when Pyrrho is mentioned in India, he is shown to be naive or impressionable; both are stereotypical characteristics of youth.52

[One of the big assumptions in the scholarly literature is that Pyrrho learned philosophy in Greece and was already a student of Anaxarchus when he joined Alexander's expedition. There is no good evidence for this, and some specific evidence against it. As far as we know, Pyrrho was a painter when he joined Alexander's expedition, and also a poet -- his one known written work was a poem, which is unfortunately lost. He spent a full decade as part of Alexander's court, which included prominent philosophers from different Greek schools, but also the famous Indian thinker Calanus, who according to Arrian had a good number of students among the Greeks for the last two years of their fellowship. It is thus quite likely that Pyrrho was influenced -- even if only negatively -- by other Greek thinkers, but it was as a member of Alexander's expeditionary court that he either learned Greek philosophy or perfected his knowledge of it. For discussion of the "smorgasbord" approach to analyzing Pyrrho's philosophy, see Appendix B.]

Toward the end of 330 BC Alexander and his followers reached Kapisa, a principality in what is now east-central Afghanistan. After campaigning in Central Asia, including the conquest of Bactria, Sogdiana, and western Gandhara, they crossed the Hindu Kush into eastern Gandhara, the southeasternmost corner of Central Asia and the northwesternmost part of India. They spent over two years there -- spring 327 to fall 325 -- before leaving by land and by sea to return to the Near East.53

[Bosworth (1988), Cawthorne (2004), Holt (1989).]

In their travels, Pyrrho and his teacher Anaxarchus met Iranic and Indic philosophoi "philosophical-religious practitioners".54

[So in Megasthenes. Centuries later, Diogenes Laertius IX, 61 calls the thinkers Pyrrho met by their stereotypical Greek names, Gymnosophistai 'naked wise-men (specifically of India)' and Magoi 'Magi' (the stereotypical Greek term for 'Persian wise men'). The ancient Greek word philosophos (plural philosophoi) literally means 'those who love wisdom', and includes a rough approximation of the modern idea of a 'philosopher', but the Greek word equally meant 'religious teacher-practitioner'; it certainly does not mean the same thing as modern English philosopher. Moreover, on the more "philosophical" side of things, philosophia meant something more like 'science' than is the case with modern English philosophy. The nearly universal custom of using the modern loan cognate of an ancient Greek word as the equivalent of the ancient word has resulted in misrepresentation and misunderstanding of Antiquity by scholars as well as by laymen; cf. the examples discussed in Appendix A.]

At some time during Pyrrho's attachment to the court, he wrote a poem in praise of Alexander, who rewarded Pyrrho with a large sum of money -- according to Plutarch, ten thousand gold coins.55

[Sextus Empiricus, M 1.282: [x] (Bury 1933, IV: 162-163); translated by Bury as "for Pyrrho himself, it is said, wrote a poem for Alexander of Macedon and was rewarded with thousands of gold pieces." Unlike Plutarch, who does not give the reason, Sextus explicitly says the coins were for the poem. For the Plutarch version, see the discussion of Narrative 1, Pyrrho in India, in Chapter One.]

Unfortunately, the poem is lost.

This incident is explicitly given as the explanation for Pyrrho's reaction to an event involving his teacher Anaxarchus. An Indian philosopher chastised Anaxarchus for pandering to kings -- specifically implying Alexander -- and this reminded Pyrrho of his own behavior in writing a poem in praise of the ruler and accepting money for it. As a result, Pyrrho "withdrew from the world and lived in solitude."56

[D.L. IX, 63, trans. Hicks (1925: 2:477).]

Diogenes Laertius also says that Pyrrho's encounter with the Iranic and Indian philosophers led him to develop his "most noble philosophy".57

[D.L. IX, 61, trans. Hicks (1925: 2:475); cf. the discussion of this narrative in Chapter One.]

Pyrrho undoubtedly returned to the Near East with the court and returned home no later than the death of Alexander in 323. Back in Greece he taught about ethics, specifically about the causes of pathe 'passion, suffering' and a way to be apatheia 'without passion, suffering', and thus achieve ataraxia 'undisturbedness, calm'. His new way of thinking and living focused on the logical point that our thought is circular and imperfect and therefore cannot tell us anything absolute about ethical matters.58

[For the logic, see Chapter Four.]

He urges us therefore to have no views, and to have no inclinations for or against any interpretations or views on ethical matters. If we follow his path, says his student Timon, we will eventually achieve apatheia 'passionlessness' and then ataraxia 'undisturbedness, calm'.59

[See Chapter One and Appendix A.]

Pyrrho practiced his teachings for the rest of his long life. He was honored by the people of Elis, who erected a statue of him in the center of town and out of respect for him made philosophoi exempt from taxation.60

[See the discussion and citations in Chapter One.]

DID PYRRHO LEARN ANYTHING IN CENTRAL ASIA AND INDIA?

It has been argued by most Classicists that the thought of Pyrrho is completely Greek in origin, with the possible exception of a few very minor details that he might have picked up in India. However, upon closer inspection of the ancient testimonies on Pyrrho and Timon,61 ...

[On distinguishing Pyrrho from Timon in works by Timon, see the discussion by Bett (2000: 6-12). It is clear from Aristocles' comments elsewhere in his chapter on Pyrrhonism as well as references by other writers that the Aristocles passage comes from Timon's Pytho (see Appendix A). Its introductory and concluding bits definitely are Timon's own work. Pyrrho's section is highly artificial and extremely carefully constructed, so it must reflect the artistic hand of Timon too, but its strikingly distinctive character and its consistency with other testimonies (pace Bett 2000), as shown in Chapter One, indicate it really does reflect Pyrrho's own thought. Nevertheless, it is probable that Pyrrho did not disagree with Timon, or vice versa, and that Timon simply expressed some things in his prefatory and concluding remarks that Pyrrho might have preferred to be left unsaid.]

... and of other contemporaneous sources on the early Greek contact with the "philosophers" of Central Asia and India, it appears that there are far too many exceptions.

Most significantly, no one has been able to relate Pyrrho's thought, as a system, to any other European tradition.
If Pyrrhonism were simply a pastiche of Greek philosophical tidbits -- as most Classicists have in effect argued62

[On the smorgasbord approach to the history of thought, see Appendix B.]

... -- why would anyone have paid any attention to it, and how could it possibly have revolutionized Hellenistic philosophy, as it most certainly did? And if Pyrrho's thought were fundamentally Greek, or -- as has also been argued -- if Indian "philosophy" were fundamentally Greek,63 ...

[This refers to the argument that the thought of Pyrrho derived from Greek tradition even if Pyrrho adopted it from the Buddhist thinkers he met in Central Asia and India, because their ideas are originally Greek. See Appendix B.]

... it would not be possible to explain why the ancient witnesses marvel at his teachings and practices,64 ...

[An anonymous peer reviewer of the manuscript of this book notes, "But this does not mean that we have to postulate a non-Greek origin. The Cynics and the Cyrenaics were also regarded as extraordinary, and this does not lead people to postulate non-Greek origins for their ideas." However, we cannot rule out a non-Greek origin either. Bett (2000) shows that the unique, core teaching of Pyrrho -- to reach ataraxia by having "no views" -- is unprecedented in Greek thought. He also notes that Pyrrho's practice of a type of early yoga is best explained as an artifact of his Indian experience. See Chapter One.]

... which they are mostly baffled by, though at the same time they express admiration for his incredible, unprecedented ethical achievements. Yet these and other attempts to explain Early Pyrrhonism -- and to dismiss any connection with Buddhism -- are based on fundamental misunderstandings of Pyrrho's teachings and, especially, of the Buddha's teachings attested in the Early Buddhism of the late fourth century BC, as shown by the hard data, unlike the late, traditional, fantasy-filled picture that too many continue to think is "Early" Buddhism. Richard Bett has shown that the key distinctive point of Pyrrho's thought that is unprecedented in Greece and sets it apart from all other Greek philosophy is that having "no views" and choosing to "not decide" leads to the goal of undisturbedness, peace. He says that among Greek thinkers it belongs to Pyrrho and the Pyrrhonists alone.65

[Bett (2000: 179, 219-221).]

How can Pyrrho's teachings be briefly described as a system, then? All accounts agree that ataraxia "undisturbedness, calm", the telos or 'goal' for Pyrrho, is directly connected to the rest of his thought and practice, which constitutes a coherent, consistent system. We must ask then not only how it is connected to the rest of his thought but how it is to be achieved. Pyrrho and Timon tell us that ataraxia is achieved "indirectly," in a particular sequence, following a particular program of thought and practice connected to three important fundamental logical points, as a consequence of which one should have "no views" and "not incline (in either direction)" toward them -- that is, one should "not decide".

Bett, like most other scholars, does not connect Pyrrho's philosophical-religious program to India. However, he does conclude that Pyrrho is unique in Greek thought in saying that having no views and not deciding leads to undisturbedness. This "thread running most consistently through the entire history of Pyrrhonism" is "a point that sets the Pyrrhbnists apart from all other Greek philosophers". Whereas others "who adopt the goal of ataraxia, or some related form of tranquility, typically aspire to achieve this goal as a result of coming to understand the nature of things through painstaking enquiry, and being able to ascribe to them some set of definite characteristics", the Pyrrhonians renounce "any attempt at such understanding".66 [Bett (2000: 220).] The idea that having no views leads to undisturbedness is a well-known Early Buddhist idea.
67

[Bett (2000) was apparently unaware of the scholarship on this; see the discussion and references in Chapter One.]

Bett also suggests that an Indian origin best explains Pyrrho's practice of what appears to be yoga. In fact, it was specifically an early form of yoga that involved not moving for extended periods, and enduring pain, as described very well in the Alexander histories, in the testimonies on Pyrrho, and in the account of Megasthenes.68

[Bett (2000: 169-170). On the characteristics of early yoga, see Bronkhorst (1986); see further in Chapter One.]

Furthermore, Diogenes Laertius, and many modern scholars, credit Pyrrho with introducing the Problem of the Criterion to European thought. They do not say it was introduced from India, but that is perhaps because of the way Pyrrho himself states the problem in the best ancient source for his thought that we have, the verbatim quotation by Eusebius of Aristocles' version of Timon's report of Pyrrho's own statement, analyzed in Chapter One alongside the parallel testimonies.69

[For a close study of the Greek text, see Appendix A.]

Despite the widely differing interpretations of Bett and other scholars interested in Pyrrho, these elements have been recognized by them as key features of his thought and practice. Any analysis of Early Pyrrhonism must therefore account for them in a principled way, as a part of a complete system: Early Pyrrhonism.

No specialist has been able to find a convincing systematic origin for Early Pyrrhonism in Greek thought, and no one has suggested looking to the Persians, Chaldeans, Egyptians, or Chinese, among many other conceivable distant alternatives. However, a few scholars have taken the ancient Greeks' own remarks to heart. Citing some of the salient features of Late Pyrrhonism, they have proposed that Pyrrho's Indian sojourn really did affect his thought, as Diogenes Laertius says it did based on contemporaneous accounts of Pyrrho's life and thought, which he quotes. A small number of articles published over the last century and a half discuss this issue, mostly comparing the Late Pyrrhonism of Sextus Empiricus with the late Buddhist Madhyamika system, which is thought to go back to the legendary sage Nagarjuna (traditionally dated to about the second century AD).70

[For a partial bibliography of such comparative works, see Bett (2000, 2010a) and Kuzminski (2010).]

They then conclude that the comparison was after all unwarranted because one can still explain the constituent elements of Pyrrhonism by picking and choosing from the many ideas of ancient Greek philosophy. The ad hoc approach prevailed essentially unchallenged among Classicists up to the publication a few years ago of a monograph by Adrian Kuzminski, which presents a systematic comparison between Late Pyrrhonism and Madhyamika Buddhism.71

[Kuzminski (2010); cf. his earlier article, Kuzminski (2007). I discovered his book and article after my work on Pyrrho was already far advanced. His approach is based mainly on comparing Late Pyrrhonism with the teachings of the fully developed Madhyamika school of late Normative Buddhism, so while philosophically interesting and important in its own right, it is in general not relevant to the present work.]

The hitherto noted similarities of Pyrrhonism to Buddhism are on the right track, including the similarity to Madhyamika, since it has already been pointed out long ago that the key elements of Madhyamika are firmly attested in early works preserved in the Pali Canon.72

[Gomez (1976). As shown in Chapter Two, the same elements are attested in the account of Megasthenes, dated to 305-304 BC.]

They are essential elements or logical corollaries of the basic teachings of the Buddha, as shown in Chapter One.

However, there is much more that can be said. In particular, it is important to compare Pyrrho's own thought with the thought of the Buddhism of his own day as much as possible. Despite a large literature arguing for a sharp divide between the Early and Late forms of Pyrrhonism, careful consideration reveals that Late Pyrrhonism hardly deviates systemically in any significant way from Early Pyrrhonism: the emphasis on epoche 'suspension of judgement' about matters of metaphysics, epistemology, and so on, derives directly from Pyrrho's explicit exhortation to have no views and to be aklineis 'uninclined' -- to not make judgements about such things, or 'not decide'. Its connection with Late Pyrrhonism is explicit in a quotation of Timon's Pytho, where he states the attitude as "determining nothing and withholding assent."73

[Diogenes Laertius IX, 76, translation by Bett (2000: 31); cf. Appendix A.]

Even the revived Neo-Pyrrhonism of David Hume captures many of the essential features of ancient Pyrrhonism, regardless of Hume's poor sources and their contamination by dogmatic Academic Scepticism.74

[One of the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript of this book misunderstood my use of the term "dogmatic" in connection with various philosophical views, in one instance taking it as a criticism of the view of Richard Bett. However, I have simply taken over the ancient Sceptics' own terminology, using the term "dogmatic" as a way of distinguishing all other philosophical traditions from the true Pyrrhonian attitude, which is explicitly and literally "nondogmatic". I intend no criticism of any modern scholar by it.]

As shown in Chapter Four, this is due in final analysis to the coherence of Pyrrho's thought, which is in turn based on Early Buddhist thought.

This book shows not only that Pyrrho's complete package is similar to Early Buddhism, but also that the same significant parts and interconnections occur in the same way in both systems. The earliest sources on Early Pyrrhonism and Early Buddhism are examined closely, including in some cases determining what "Early" means.75

[See the Epilogue for a point-by-point summary of what attested Early Buddhism was like in contrast to early Nonnative Buddhism.]

They show that the close parallel between Early Pyrrhonism and Early (Pre-Normative) Buddhism is systemic and motivated by the same internal logic. Pyrrho's journey to Central Asia and India with Alexander thus had an outcome for the future of philosophy that has lasted down to the present.
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Re: Greek Buddha: Pyrrho's Encounter With Early Buddhism

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Part 1 of 3

Chapter 1: Pyrrho's Thought

BEYOND HUMANITY


A brief passage that derives ultimately from the lost dialogue Pytho 'Python'1 [Based on remarks by Aristocles in his history of philosophy preserved by Eusebius; see Appendix A.] by Timon of Phlius is accepted to be the single most important testimony for the thought of his teacher, Pyrrho.2 [See Appendix A for the Greek text, detailed point-by-point analysis, and full references.] Because it is preserved in a chapter of a history of philosophy by Aristocles of Messene (quoted verbatim in the Preparation for the Gospel by Eusebius), it is generally known as "the Aristocles passage". The text begins with Timon's short introduction, in which he says, "Whoever wants to be happy must consider these three [questions]: first, how are pragmata '(ethical) matters, affairs, topics' by nature? Secondly, what attitude should we adopt towards them? Thirdly, what will be the outcome for those who have this attitude?"3 [This is my slight revision of the translation by Long and Sedley (1987: 1:14-15). For their original and my commentary, see Appendix A.] Then Timon quotes4 [As normal in ancient Greek, this is done in oratio obliqua 'indirect discourse', so it is not necessarily exact, but unlike the English equivalent, oratio obliqua in Greek is explicitly marked grammatically as a quotation, even if indirect. Poetry, by contrast, is virtually always quoted verbatim. For further examples and discussion, see Chapter Two.] Pyrrho's own revelation of the three negative characteristics of all pragmata 'matters, affairs, questions, topics'. The ethical meaning of the word pragmata is absolutely clear because other testimonies5 [Especially Narrative 5, "Pyrrho and the Dog", below in this chapter. ] show that it meant for Pyrrho exclusively ethical 'matters, affairs, topics'. Accordingly, the word will be so translated below, or given in Greek as pragmata (singular pragma).6 [LSJ's primary definitions of the word pragma are: 'deed, act, thing, advantage, concern, affair, matter, matter in hand, question [i.e., subject, topic], fact, circumstances, state-affairs, fortunes, business ("esp[ecially] lawbusiness"), trouble, annoyance'. In the long entry in LSJ there is not a single glossed example of pragma (singular) - pragmata (plural) in the meaning of a physical object, such as a stone, a tree, a dog, etc. The sense "thing, concrete reality" listed in the LSJ entry does not in fact refer to "concrete physical things" at all, as one should expect, but only to abstract "subjects" or "objects". As I note in Appendix A, the English in LSJ is sometimes peculiar, probably because it was first published in the mid-nineteenth century. I also checked all linked source citations and read them; none use the word in a physical or metaphysical sense.]

Following these prefatory remarks, Timon says, "Pyrrho himself declares that"7 [There is no reflection of the word pephyke 'by nature, really' in Pyrrho's statement, despite most scholars' interpretations. It has been used to further the "metaphysical" interpretation of Pyrrho's statement, e.g., by Bett (2000). The word occurs only in Timon's introductory remarks, which Aristocles explicitly says are by Timon. In my 2011 article reprinted in Appendix A, I unthinkingly followed the usual interpretation. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer of the manuscript for catching me on this. My translation here corrects this error. ]

As for pragmata 'matters, questions, topics',8 [Literally, "Matters (pragmata) are equally . .. ", i.e., "All matters are ... ".] they are all adiaphora 'undifferentiated by a logical differentia' and astathmeta 'unstable, unbalanced, not measurable' and anepikrita 'unjudged, unfixed, undecidable'. Therefore, neither our sense-perceptions nor our 'views, theories, beliefs' (doxat) tell us the truth or lie [about pragmata]; so we certainly should not rely on them [to do it]. Rather, we should be adoxastous 'without views', aklineis 'uninclined [toward this side or that]', and akradantous 'unwavering [in our refusal to choose]', saying about every single one that it no more is than9 [Literally "(it) no more is or (it) is not", making the symmetry complete. On the tetralemma, see below and the extended discussion in Appendix A.] it is not or it both is and is not or it neither is nor is not.10 [Eusebius, ed. K. Mras (1983: XIV 18:1-5); Chiesara (2001: 20-21); see Appendix A for the Greek text and commentary.]


To paraphrase, Pyrrho says that ethical matters or questions are not logically differentiated, they are unstable (or 'unassessed and unassessable by any measure'), and they are unjudged, not fixed (or, undecidable). Therefore, our inductive and deductive reasoning cannot tell us whether any ethical question is True or False, so we should not count on them to tell us. Instead, we should have no views on ethical matters, we should not incline toward any choice with respect to ethical questions, and we should not waver in our avoidance of attempts to decide such matters, reciting the tetralemma formula -- "It no more is than it is not or it both is and is not or it neither is nor is not" -- in response to every single one of such ethical questions.

The Aristocles passage is crucially important, highly condensed, and not easy to understand, as attested to by the fact that its basic meaning has been disputed by scholars of Classical philosophy for the past century. It thus requires additional explanation.

To begin with, as the subject of Pyrrho's entire declaration, the meaning of pragmata is crucially important, so it needs a little further clarification.

The Greek word pragma (singular) ~ pragmata (plural) is largely abstract. In other words, it means 'something, things', but in the abstract logical sense of 'an object of our cogitation or disputation,'11 [I.e., in the sense of Tugendhat: "What is meant by 'objects' in philosophy has its basis in ... what we mean by the word 'something' .... There is a class of linguistic expressions which are used to stand for an object; and here we can only say: to stand for something. These are the expressions which can function as the sentence-subject in so-called singular predicative statements and which in logic have also been called singular terms ... " (Tugendhat 1982: 21-23), quoted in Laycock (2010).] so translating pragmata as 'things'-in the same general abstract logical sense -- is not wrong, but things in English are by default largely physical or metaphysical objects. As a result, scholars have let themselves be misled by that default meaning into misinterpreting Pyrrho's entire message. When helpful below, pragmata will be translated as "ethical things, matters (etc.)".

Moreover, it must be emphasized that Pyrrho sees pragmata as disputed matters.12 [Cf. the usage of Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics 1094b, where it occurs in the singular and means 'subject, topic (under discussion)'; v. LSJ, s.v. pragma.] If people agreed on pragmata or did not argue about them, they would not be characterizable as Pyrrho says. They would already be decided and no problem. Arguments about opposing or disputed "matters, topics" are ubiquitous in Greek philosophy, as for example in Plutarch, "They quarrel about whether the matter (pragma) is good or evil or white or not white."13 [Plutarch Adversus Colotem (Stephanus 1l09D7, from TLG): [x].]

Based evidently on the general scholarly unclarity about pragmata,14 [Scholars have given and discussed at length examples referring to hard physical objects, including "a tomato", "the earth", and "rocks" (Bett 2000: 23, 117-120), "the sun" and "an icy lake" (Thorsrud 2009: 21), etc.] some have argued that the Aristocles passage represents a "dogmatic" metaphysical position, on account of which they conclude that Pyrrho could not be the founder of Pyrrhonism. This idea has been much criticized,15 [See the survey of previous studies in Appendix A. An anonymous reviewer of the manuscript of this book, like Bett, understands pragmata to mean physical or metaphysical "things". The reviewer notes, also like Bett, that scholars "who favor the 'metaphysical' reading of Pyrrho's thought ... have had a hard time making their case to scholars of Greek philosophy".] mainly because the ancient testimonies overwhelmingly say that the concern of Pyrrho is purely with ethics, and many modem scholars agree.16 [The anonymous reviewer who favors the metaphysical interpretation (see the previous note) agrees with this too.] The very first significant word in his declaration is adiaphora, a logical term, which is followed by inference after inference. Pyrrho's way of skewering ethical issues is to use logic. How would using metaphysics for ethical problems make sense?17 [Cf. Stopper (1983) on the putative "zany inference" in the Aristocles passage.] Pyrrho never, in this or any other testimony, talks about physical or metaphysical issues (though he is said to have criticized other philosophers who did talk about them), and in two testimonies -- the Aristocles passage and the narrative about the dog18 [See below in this chapter.] -- he explicitly mentions pragmata and makes it very clear that he uses the word to refer to conflicting ethical "matters, affairs". In short, for Pyrrho, pragmata are always and only ethical 'topics, questions, matters, affairs' which people dispute or try to interpret with antilogies -- opposed choices such as Good : Bad, or True: False.

Pyrrho's declaration may now be examined section by section.

THE THREE CHARACTERISTICS

Pyrrho famously declares that all ethical "matters, questions" have three characteristics which, oddly, are all negative, so his statement is actually a declaration of what matters are not. That is, the positive equivalent of each negative term is what Pyrrho negates, so we must base our understanding of the terms on their positive forms, which (unlike the negative ones) are all well attested in Classical Greek. His declaration is presented as the foundation of his teaching, and modern scholars' intensive analysis of the entire passage and the other ancient testimonies has confirmed that it is indeed the core of his thought:19 [See Bett (2000: 14-18) and Appendix A.] it is inseparable from his practical indirect path, via apatheia 'passionlessness', to ataraxia 'undisturbedness, calm'. Because of its conciseness, the text requires interpretation based on the remaining part of the Aristocles passage, other material in Aristoc1es' chapter on Pyrrhonism, and other testimonies, including in particular those containing statements attributed directly to Pyrrho himself.

1. Adiaphora 'Without a Self-Identity'

The first term, adiaphora, is the negative of diaphora 'differentiated by a logical differentia' and literally means 'undifferentiated by a logical differentia',20 [A differentia is a kind of categorization that distinguishes a genus from a species, as explained by Aristotle (Metaphysics [x] 6 (1016a) 24-27, from Ross and Smith 1908): [x], translated by Apostle (1966:80) as "Also those things are called 'one' whose genus is one, although they differ by opposing differentiae; and all these are said to be one in view of the fact that the genus underlying the differentiae is one. For example, a horse and a man and a dog are one in this sense: they are all animals" (Apostle 1966: 80). I.e., "horse", "man", and "dog" all belong to the genus "animal", but are all distinct species that "differ by opposing differentiae".] that is, 'without a logical self-identity': pragmata 'matters, affairs' do not come supplied with their own self-identifying differentiae or other categorizing criteria. For example, someone's expression of anger is not automatically identified for us by a "thought balloon" spelling out its genus (or superordinate category) "an emotion" and further differentiating it as a "bad" emotion, thus distinguishing it from "good" emotions (among other choices). In several testimonies Pyrrho denies that pragmata are in fact differentiated from their contrasting opposites, for example "the just" versus "the unjust", or "the truth" versus "a lie". People dispute pragmata as to whether they are good or bad, just or unjust, and so on, but any specific pragma, in order to be a subject of philosophical discussion at all, must necessarily be discrete and differentiated from other pragmata by a logical differentia. Because pragmata themselves do not actually have differentiae (as Timon says, "by nature"), we ourselves necessarily supply the differentiae. But that makes the entire process strictly circular and therefore logically invalid. 21 [This is a fundamental epistemological problem. In Antiquity it was generalized and became known as the Problem of the Criterion. It was taken up again in the Enlightenment, most famously by Hume; see Chapter Four.]

A direct consequence of the teaching of adiaphora 'without a logical differentia, no self-identity' is the explicit denial of the validity of opposed categories, or "antilogies".

2. Astathmeta 'Unstable, Unbalanced, Not Measurable'

The second term, astathmeta, is an adjective from the stem sta- 'stand' with the negative prefix a-, literally meaning 'not standing'. The word is based on the noun stathmos 'standing place, stable; a balance-beam, measuring scale'. For example, Aristophanes, in The Frogs, has Aeschylus say, "what I'd like to do is take him to the scales (stathmos); That's the only real test of our poetry; the weight of our utterances will be the decisive proof."22 [Aristophanes, The Frogs 1365: [x]. Text and translation from Henderson (2002), emphasis added. Aeschylus and Euripides then go over to the large measuring scales, and each speaks a line into his measuring pan. Dionysus, the judge, says (of the measuring scale pans), "Look, this one's going much lower!" Aeschylus wins a second attempt too, and Dionysus says, "His (side of the scale) went down farther again, because he put in Death, the heaviest blow." (Henderson 2002: 210- 215). Henderson (2002: 209n130) comments, "This weighing scene is probably modeled on the scene in Aeschylus' Weighing of Souls where Zeus weighs the souls of Achilles and Memnon as they fight." See Griffith (2013) for an extremely illuminating and important discussion of this passage and of judging in general in ancient Greek culture.] So astathmeta means 'non-standing-place; no stathmos (a balance-beam, scale)', thus, 'unstable, unbalanced'.23 [LSJ online, s.v. stathmos. Cf. Bett (2000: 19) "astathmeta -- derived from stathmos, 'balance' -- could mean 'unstable' or 'unbalanced' ... [or] 'not subject to being placed on a balance', and hence 'unmeasurable'." The interpretation 'not measurable' would follow if pragmata are 'not balanced' or 'unbalanced'.] Since pragmata are unbalanced and unstable, they pull this way and that, and are unsettling. They make us feel uneasy and susceptible to passions and disturbedness.

3. Anepikrita 'Unjudged, Undecided, Unfixed'

The third term, anepikrita, is a negative made from epikrisis 'determination, judgement',24 [Cf. Bett (2000: 19). One of its few occurrences is in D.L. ix, 92, where it means 'judgement' or 'decision'. However, its positive verbal form is very well attested in Classical period Greek. See the following note.] from the well-attested derived verb epikrino 'to decide, determine; judge; select, pick out, choose'-as in Aristotle's usage "with what part of itself (the soul) judges that which distinguishes sweet from warm"25 [Aristotle, De Anima 431a20 (text from TLG): [x]. Cf. LSJ online, s.v. epikrino.] -- which is based in turn on the verb krino 'to separate, distinguish; choose; decide disputes or contests; judge; prefer'; krino is the source also of the important word kriterion 'criterion, means for judging or trying, standard'.26 [LSJ online, s.v. krino. Cf. Griffith's (2013) illuminating discussion of judging between contestants in ancient Greek culture.] Anepikrita thus means 'unjudged, undecided, unchosen, unfixed', 27 [Cf. Bett (2000), who regularly refers to this characteristic as a lack of "fixity", though he interprets it metaphysically.] so pragmata are not permanently decided or fixed.

THE THREE CHARACTERISTICS -- THE BUDDHA

Pyrrho's tripartite statement is completely unprecedented and unparalleled in Greek thought. Yet it is not merely similar to Buddhism, it corresponds closely to a famous statement of the Buddha preserved in canonical texts.28 [The canonical Nikaya texts of the Pali Canon are traditionally thought to reflect Early Buddhism -- meaning, in theory, the state of the teachings close to the time of the Buddha. However, the actual dates of the Nikaya texts are unstated, and in general traditional studies do not reveal when they were composed, pace Wynne (2005) and many others. Their acknowledged doctrinal similarity both to early translations of Buddhist texts into Chinese and to the recently discovered Gandhari texts does not affirm the picture of Buddhism presented in them as being close to the time of the Buddha because these Chinese and Gandhari texts both date to the late Kushan period. Their Similarity to the "early" Pali canonical texts tells us only that all three sets of texts date to the same period, thus confirming that traditional "early" Buddhist canonical literature reflects Normative Buddhism (q.v. below), a product of the same Saka-Kushan period. Because the Nikaya texts are also far from homogeneous in their representations of the teachings of the Buddha, scholars have determined that some elements are earlier or later, while study of the inner logic of the Buddha's own teachings (to the extent that it is agreed what they were) also allows inclusion or exclusion of various elements.] The statement is known as the Trilaksana, the 'Three Characteristics' of all dharmas 'ethical distinctions, factors, constituents, etc.' Greek pragmata '(ethical) things' corresponds closely to Indic dharma ~ dhamma '(ethical) things' and seems to be Pyrrho's equivalent of it.29 [I am indebted to Georgios Halkias (p.c., 2012) for this observation; I am of course responsible for any misunderstanding. Cf. the discussion of dharma in Appendix C.]

The Buddha says, "All dharmas are anitya 'impermanent' .... All dharmas are duhkha 'unsatisfactory, imperfect, unstable' .... All dharmas are anatman 'without an innate self-identity'."30 [Anguttara-nikaya III, 134. Mitchell (2008: 34) translates it: "all [the world's] constituents are [1] transitory [So anitya, P. anicca 'impermanent'] ... all its constituents are [2] unsatisfactory [So duhkha, P. dukkha] ... all its constituents are [3] lacking a permanent self [So anatman, P. anatta 'containing no permanent inner substance or self]." His "constituents" translates Sanskrit dharma, Pali dhamma.]

1. Anitya 'Impermanent, Variable, Unfixed'

The first term, anitya (Pali anicca) is the negative form of nitya 'eternal, invariant, fixed (etc.)' and means 'impermanent, variable, unfixed'.31 [ Monier-Williams (1988: 547), online edition, S.V. anitya and nitya.]

2. Duhkha 'Uneasy; Unsatisfactory; Unsteady'

The meaning of the second term, duhkha (Pali dukkha), is contested by scholars and actually has no universally accepted basic meaning or etymology. The standard Sanskrit dictionary and recent scholars' interpretations of duhkha include 'unsatisfactory, imperfect', and 'uneasy, uncomfortable, unpleasant',32 [Monier-Williams (1988), online edition, s.v. duhkha.] and so on, but the term is perhaps the most misunderstood -- and definitely the most mistranslated -- in Buddhism.33 [Hamilton (2000: 12) says, "Until recent years, dukkha was usually translated as 'suffering', with 'pain' or 'ill' being common alternatives; now 'unsatisfactory' is more usually used." Despite Gethin's (1998: 187) reasonable definition of duhkha as "unsatisfactory and imperfect", he still regularly mistranslates it as "suffering" in much of his book. Note that Hamilton (2000), which is based on the Pali Nikaya texts, rightly treats the Trilaksana as a key element of Early Buddhism. Nevertheless, her book presents a solidly traditional Normative Buddhism, not Pre-Normative Buddhism or actual historical Early Buddhism.] However, at the very beginning of his definition, Monier-Williams says, "(according to grammarians properly written dush-kha and said to be from dus and kha [cf. su-kha] ... )".34 [Monier-Williams (1988: 483).] The opposite of duhkha is widely thought to be suhka 'running swiftly or easily (only applied to cars or chariots)' -- a usage that occurs in the Rig Veda.35 [Monier-Williams (1988), online edition, S.V. suhka. Cf. below. The other meanings are later.] The usual meaning of suhka is now simply 'good', so its apparent opposite, duhkha, should mean 'bad', but such an idea is explicitly refuted by the third characteristic, anatman, as well as by complete agreement in attested Early Buddhism that antilogies such as "good" versus "bad" are misconceived. Accordingly, although the sense of duhkha in Normative Buddhism is traditionally given as 'suffering', that and similar interpretations are highly unlikely for Early Buddhism. Significantly, Monier-Williams himself doubts the usual explanation of duhkha and presents an alternative one immediately after it, namely: duh-stha "'standing badly,' unsteady, disquieted (lit. and fig.); uneasy," and so on.36 [Monier-Williams (1988: 483); Bohtlingk (1928), Cologne online edition.] This form is also attested, and makes much better sense as the opposite of the Rig Veda sense of suhka, which Monier-Williams gives in full as "(said to be fr. 5. su + 3. kha, and to mean originally 'having a good axle-hole'; possibly a Prakrit form of su-stha37 [Monier-Williams (1988: 1239) defines sustha as 'well situated, faring well, healthy, comfortable, prosperous, happy'.] q.v.; cf. duhkha) running swiftly or easily (only applied to cars or chariots, superl[ative] sukhcitama), easy". It would seem that there were two forms of each word; Prakrit and Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit chose the -kha forms instead of the -stha forms, which survived nevertheless in a much smaller way. The most important point here is that duh + stha literally means 'dis-/ bad- + stand-', that is, 'badly standing, unsteady' and is therefore virtually identical to the literal meaning of Greek astathmeta, from a- + sta' not- + stand',38 [The root of the verb in both languages (as in English) is a cognate inheritance from Proto-Indo-European *sta- 'to stand; place or thing that is standing' (Watkins 2000: 84).] both evidently meaning 'unstable'. This strongly suggests that Pyrrho's middle term is in origin a simple calque.

3. Anatman 'No (Innate) Self (-Identity)'

The third term, anatman (Pali anatta), means 'no (innate) self ( -identity)'. As with the other characteristics, it is applied to all dharmas, including humans, so it of course includes the idea of the human "self-identity", and much discussion in Buddhist texts and the scholarly literature on them focuses on that idea.39 [Hamilton (2000) is one of the many extreme examples of this, but her book does contain some unique insights on anatman.] Nevertheless, Buddha explicitly says that "all dharmas are anatman." As Hamilton rightly points out, "In a great many, one might almost say most, secondary sources on Buddhism" anatman "has regularly been singled out as being the heart or core of what Buddhism is all about."40 [Hamilton (2000: 19); cf. Gethin (1998), who devotes thirty pages to the topic "No Self'.] Like all major Early Buddhist teachings, this one is presented negatively. It rejects the idea of inherent absolutes such as good and bad, true and false, and so on. The rejection is explicit also in Buddhist-influenced Early Taoist texts as well as in early Normative Buddhist texts such as the Pratyutpanna Samadhi Sutra, first translated into Chinese between AD 178 and 189 by the Kushan monk Lokaksema, and the Sukhavativyuha Sutra (translated in the early third century AD), both of which belong to the Pure Land school of Buddhism, traditionally classed as a branch of Mahayana.

The "three characteristics" are said to apply to "all dharmas", that is, everything, and are central in Buddhism.41 [Hamilton (2000) stresses the centrality of the concepts in the Tril~a1:!a, but also emphasizes the "Four Noble Truths" and the "Eightfold Path". It is significant that neither of the latter two lists mentions anitya 'impermanent' and anatman 'lacking an inherent self-identity', and the Four Noble Truths are fixated on duhkha alone. It is pointed out by Bareau (1963: 178-181; cited in Bronkhorst 1986: 101-104), from contrastive study of Vinaya accounts of the Buddha's first sermon with the accounts in the early sutras, that the Four Noble Truths are not even mentioned in the sutras. Moreover, it has since been shown definitively by Schopen (2004: 94) that the Vinaya versions we now have are actually dated or datable only to the fifth century AD. Because the Trilaksana seems to be attested in Pyrrho's Greek version, it is datable to 330-325 Be, and is therefore three centuries earlier than the otherwise earliest known Buddhist texts -- the Gandhari manuscripts -- and nearly a millennium earlier than the attested Vinaya. In any case, the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path are clearly developments of late, standardized Normative Buddhism, which spread far and wide and absorbed or replaced earlier forms of Buddhism in the Saka-Kushan period.] But for Buddha, as for Pyrrho, their reference is exclusively to ethical or moral matters, including emotions and other conflicts. Like Pyrrho, the Buddha did not even mention metaphysics. He is presented in early Normative Buddhist texts as considering metaphysics to be distracting sophism, and refuses to teach it,42 [Majjhima-nikaya I, 428. Discussed by Gethin (1998: 66-67).] but that story has patently been concocted to explain why a topic of concern in later times was not discussed by the Buddha.

Pyrrho's version of the Trilasana is so close to the Indian Buddhist one that it is virtually a translation of it: both the Buddha and Pyrrho make a declaration in which they list three logical characteristics of all discrete "(ethical) things, affairs, questions", but they give them exclusively negatively, that is, "All matters are non-x, non-y, and non-z." The peculiar way in which the characteristics are presented is thus the same, the main difference being the order of the first and third characteristics.43 [In view of the three centuries separating Pyrrho's version of the Trilaksana from the Gandhari texts (and probably still more centuries for the Pali texts), the probability must be considered that the meaning of the word duhkha (Pali dukkha) had changed so much in that long interval that its Early Buddhist meaning has been lost in Indic. In that case, Pyrrho's version may preserve something closer to the Buddha's own intentions. As for the reversal of the first and third characteristics in Pyrrho's version, it could similarly represent the earlier tradition, or it could perhaps have been deliberate, due to Pyrrho's own stress on adiaphora, as discussed below.] This passage about the three characteristics is thus the absolutely earliest known bit of Buddhist doctrinal text. It is firmly dated three centuries earlier than the Gandhari texts.44 [The statement of the Trilaksana is attested in the earliest known Buddhist manuscripts, the Gandhari texts that are currently under intensive study, including one dated to the first century AD, or possibly even the previous century. See Baums (2009: 251, 302, 406): "anica . dukha . anatva", which he translates traditionally as "impermanent, painful and without self'. It is currently thought that the Gandhari texts date to approximately the same time as the traditional date of the compilation of the Pali Canon, but that the latter has been much altered in the following centuries.]

Now, the Trilaksana is not just any piece of Buddhist teaching. It is at the center of Buddhist practice, which is agreed to be the heart and soul of living Buddhism of any kind. Speaking of "insight meditation", evidently the oldest, but certainly the single most important of the different kinds and stages of Buddhist meditation, Gethin (1998) says,

With the essential work of calming the mind completed, with the attainment of the fourth dhyana, the meditator can focus fully on the development of insight. . . . 45 [Here Gethin (1998: 187) adds "and the wisdom that understands the four truths." This is no doubt relevant for practitioners of later, Normative Buddhism, but as noted above it has been demonstrated that the Four (Noble) Truths cannot be reconstructed to Pre-Normative Buddhism.] Insight meditation aims at understanding [that "things"] ... are impermanent and unstable (anitya/anicca), that they are unsatisfactory and imperfect (duhkha/dukkha), and that they are not self (anatman/anatta). The philosophical nuances of these three terms may be expressed differently in the theoretical writings of various Buddhist schools, but in one way or another the higher stages of the Buddhist path focus on the direct understanding and seeing of these aspects of the world.46 [Gethin (1998: 187). However, it must be emphasized that the Buddha did not teach about metaphysics (or for that matter physics, etc.), as noted above.]


This characterization is supported by the Mahasaccaka Sutta, in which the Buddha describes his final enlightenment, ending with his achievement of the four dhyanas.47 [Sanskrit dhyana, Pali jhana, has been borrowed into Chinese as Ch'an [x], and into Japanese via Chinese, as Zen [x].] In the last and highest of these, the fourth, he says, "As a result of abandoning bliss, and abandoning pain, as a result of the earlier disappearance of cheerfulness and dejection, I reached the Fourth Dhyana, which is free from pain and bliss, the complete purity of equanimity and attentiveness, and resided [there]."48 [Mahasaccaka Sutta, MN 1, 247, translated by Bronkhorst (1986: 17), who adds that the text's "description of the Buddhist Four Dhyanas ... is standard, and recurs numerous times in the Buddhist canon."] What the Buddha is abandoning here is the distinction between the opposite qualities or antilogies that are mentioned. This is Pyrrho's adiaphora state of being 'undifferentiated, without (an intrinsic) self-identity', which is identical to the Buddha's state of being anatman 'without (an intrinsic) self-identity'. It is equated with nirvana (nirvana or nirodha) 'extinguishing (of the burning of the passions)', and the peace that results from it. In the terms of the Mahasaccaka Sutta, 'being free from both pain and bliss,49 [Bronkhorst's "bliss" is his translation of Skt. suhka, and "pain" is his translation of Skt. duhkha. These are common late Normative Buddhist interpretations of the meanings of the words, as discussed above.] means the state of apatheia 'passionlessness', while "complete equanimity" is exactly the same thing as ataraxia. As Timon says, the result of following Pyrrho's program is first apatheia 'passionlessness',50 [See the passage quoted below in this chapter; apatheia is my textual emendation for aphasia, as shown in detail in Appendix A, q. v.] and then ataraxia 'undisturbedness, equanimity' -- nirvana.
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Re: Greek Buddha: Pyrrho's Encounter With Early Buddhism

Postby admin » Sat Jul 10, 2021 5:33 am

Part 2 of 3

WE KNOW NEITHER THE ABSOLUTE TRUTH NOR THE LIE

Pyrrho next points out that the logical problem he has noted has specific implications for truth values of anything, and accordingly, for our epistemology: "Therefore, neither our sense perceptions nor our doxa 'views, theories' tell us the (ultimate) truth or lie to us (about pragmata 'matters'). So we certainly should not rely on them (to do it)." Because differentiae and other criteria are provided by human minds,51 [Of course other animals -- even the simplest ones -- do the same thing.] and ethical "matters, affairs, topics" are by nature unstable and unfixed, both our inductive knowledge (based on perceptions) and our deductive knowledge (views, theories, or arguments, even if based on purely internal logical calculation) must be circular, and therefore logically invalid and fatally defective in general.52 [See the discussion of the Problem of Induction in Chapter Four.] They are thus useless for determining any ultimate, absolute truth, or its converse, untruth -- the lie -- about pragmata 'matters'; so we certainly should not expect our intrinsically flawed and imperfect sense perceptions and mental abilities to do that.53 [Pyrrho's explicit mention of the converse of telling the truth indicates not only that he was well aware of the Law of Non-Contradiction, but that he was aware of the deeper implications of his negative "declaration" about things, q.v. Chapter Four.]

Pyrrho's rejection of the antilogy of the Truth versus the Lie hearkens back to the fundamental antilogy, repeated over and over in the early Avesta and the early Old Persian inscriptions, between Asha or Arta 'the Truth', supported by Heavenly God, Ahura Mazda 'Lord Wisdom', versus Druj 'the Lie'.54 [In the Gathas, although Zoroaster vehemently rejects the daevas or daivas, the old polytheistic gods, they are equated with druj only indirectly, via condemnation of the priests who worship the daevas. Their worship was evidently too prevalent to be stamped out, and the most important of the old gods were reintroduced under the later Achaemenids.]

Pyrrho's point here is that humans want to know the ultimate, absolute Truth, but the ultimate or the absolute is a perfectionist metaphysical or ontological category created by humans and superimposed on everything. The same people declare our task to be to learn the absolute, perfect truth, and to understand it, as if it really existed.55 [This is the goal of most of the major ancient Greek philosophical schools.] Yet such categories cannot exist without humans, as pointed out in the Buddha's teaching of anatman -- dharmas do not have inherent self-identities -- and in Pyrrho's version of it, adiaphora.

In several famous Normative Buddhist sutra narratives the Buddha is presented as steadfastly refusing to discuss metaphysics and other forms of speculative philosophy, declaring that they are nonsense, and harmful, because they lead one astray from one's path to passionlessness and nirvana.56 [The most famous example is in the Cula-Malunkya Sutta; see Gethin (1998: 66).]

The attitude of the Buddha in these texts is very clear:

Buddhism regards itself as presenting a system of training in conduct, meditation, and understanding that constitutes a path leading to the cessation of suffering.57 [Gethin's usual translation of duhkha.] Everything is to be subordinated to this goal. And in this connection Buddha's teachings suggest that preoccupation with certain beliefs and ideas about the ultimate nature of the world [i.e., metaphysics] and our destiny in fact hinders our progress along this path rather than' helping it. If we insist on working out exactly what to believe about the world and human destiny before beginning to follow the path of practice we will never even set out.58 [Gethin (1998:65-66).]


There has been much empty scholastic debate on why the Buddha did not answer the metaphysical and other questions posed by the novice monk Malunkyaputta in the sutra about him, including even whether or not Buddha knew the answers.59 [See Gethin (1998: 67-68) for a summary.] It must first be stressed that this entire problem is purely a Normative Buddhist one, and cannot be projected back to the time of the Buddha. However, from the perspective of that late form of Buddhism, the reason he did not answer is remarkably clear in the sutra itself: from the Buddhist point of view, the questions are irrelevant, but also, as the Trilaksana makes abundantly clear, they are "unanswerable because they assume ... absolute categories and concepts -- the world, the soul, the self, the Tathagatha -- that the Buddha and the Buddhist tradition does not accept or at least criticizes and understands in particular ways. That is, from the Buddhist perspective these questions are ill-formed and misconceived. To answer 'yes' or 'no' to anyone of them is to be drawn into accepting the validity of the question and the terms in which it is couched."60 [Gethin (1998: 68), emphasis added.] The Buddha's great insight, as stated in the Trilaksana, is that absolute, perfect categories and concepts61 [See Chapter Four.] conceived by humans are among the obstacles to achieving passionlessness and nirvana; it is necessary to get rid of them in order to progress.62 [As Gethin (1998: 68) puts it, "such views (drsti/ditthi) about the ultimate nature of the world are, from the Buddhist perspective, the expression of a mental grasping which is but one manifestation of that insatiable 'thirst' or 'craving' which Buddhist thought regards as the condition for the arising of suffering".] The questions of Malunkyaputta reveal that some Buddhists did not understand the Buddha's main overt teachings, let alone the covert ones.

WHAT WE SHOULD BE WITHOUT

Based on the above considerations, Pyrrho advises, "So we should be adoxastous 'without views, theories' [about pragmata 'matters'], and aklineis 'uninclined' [toward or against pragmata] , and akradantous 'unwavering' [in our attitude about pragmata] , saying about every single one63 [The phrase "every single one (of them)" here refers again to pragmata, explicitly echoing the beginning statement that pragmata are "equally" -- i.e., "all" -- undifferentiated, etc.] that it no more is than it is not, or it both is and is not, or it neither is nor is not."

1. We Should Have No Views

Pyrrho says that we should have "no views, theories" because they force us to be inclined in one direction or another with respect to pragmata. They thus constitute an obstacle to our attainment of passionlessness or unperturbedness -- though Pyrrho does not say this himself, no doubt because stating an explicit goal would violate the principles he has just outlined. Instead, he must have taught his students to understand that the goal can be attained only indirectly, because Timon does supply this information at the end of his account, as quoted by Aristocles.

Pyrrho's explicit enjoinment that we should have "no views" corresponds exactly to the Buddhist attitude attested in some of the earliest texts in the Pali Canon. In the Atthakavagga,64 [The fifth book of the Sutta Nipata subsection of the Khuddaka Nikaya section of the Pali Canon.] several texts say unambiguously that we should have "no views". The teaching of "right views" and "the highest knowledge" are rejected as "the false science of those who are still attached to views. Moreover their attachment is not deemed to be merely the attachment to wrong views, but to views in general. Also, there is no question here of teaching the superior dharma, rather the point is that the true follower of the path would not prefer any dharma; he would make no claims to the possession of a higher dharma."65 [Gomez (1976: 139-140). I have silently changed his past tense verbs to present tense and spelled out Atthakavagga here and below. Gomez (1976: 156) also notes, "Some key passages from the Atthakavagga could be called 'proto-Madhyamika' passages in the sense that they anticipate some of the axial concepts of the Madhyamika .... [However], the theoretical framework of the Madhyamika is totally absent from the Atthakavagga. The twofold truth, emptiness, causation, and dependent origination, the indeterminables, the tetralemma, the equivalence of samsara and nirvana, are conspicuous by their absence." Note that by "the tetralemma" Gomez means the developed form of it used conspicuously and even profligately in Madhyamika works. However, it is very definitely odd that Madhyamika should have revived a dialectical fashion of the fourth to third centuries BC (see Appendix A). Something thus seems to be wrong with the periodization here. D'Amato (2009) compares the early texts discussed by Gomez to the fully developed Madhyamika system.] Wise men are those who "fancy not, they prefer not, and not a single dharma do they adopt."66 [Atthakavagga 803 (Gomez 1976: 140). His comment on this being "a form of nondualism" is precisely correct. It is one aspect of the Buddha's rejection of Early Zoroastrianism, which is permeated with an early kind of dualism focused on antilogies, opposed ethical categorizations.] Gomez points out further, "This idea is in fact well known to us through the traditional doctrine of the Middle Path -- avoiding the two extremes. Thus, not to rely on views is in a certain way a form of nondualism."67 [Gomez (1976: 141).] This connection is explicit in Pyrrho's next point.

2. We Should Be Uninclined to Either Side

Second, Pyrrho says we should be "uninclined". One of. the parallel testimonies, a poem by Timon in praise of Pyrrho, says he was "not weighed down on this side and that by passions (patheon), theories (doxes), and pointless legislation". This clarifies that we should maintain our balance in the middle, neither for nor against passions, doxa 'views, theories', and vain attempts to "fix" things (i.e., to make them established, permanent).68 [See Appendix A for references and discussion of Timon's poem.] With the exception that they are not in the same order, these three points correspond to the three injunctions of Pyrrho presently under consideration, which also apparently correspond to the "three characteristics" of all pragmata in the first line of Pyrrho's declaration, namely adiaphora (there are no logically differentiated pragmata) : adoxastous (be without views or theories-which require differentiae -- about pragmata); astathmeta (there are no balanced pragmata): aklineis (do not be unbalanced by inclining toward this one or that one); anepikrita (there are no fixed pragmata) : akradantous (unwaveringly avoid trying to fix or "choose" them by fiat). The ancient testimonies say that Pyrrho did not "choose." He maintained a balance between extremes, without views, and thus achieved ataraxia 'undisturbedness, calm'.

One of the insights of Buddhism that appears to go back to the Buddha himself is that we should not have attachments (upadana) or cravings (trsna tanha) with regard to material things, human relations, views, and so on, in order to avoid disturbance. In normal daily life "we become attached to things that are unreliable, unstable, changing, and impermanent." Though we try to find something "that is permanent and stable, which we can hold on to and thereby find lasting happiness, we must always fail." The Buddha's solution is, "Let go of everything." The goal of the Buddhist path is thus the cessation of craving, equated with the cessation of duhkha.69 [Gethin (1998: 74); here as elsewhere, he translates duhkha as "suffering".]

One who "does not grasp at anything in the world ... craves no longer, and through not craving he effects complete nirvana".70 [Digha Nikaya II, 68, translation by Gethin (1998: 146).] Although this is expressed in Normative Buddhist language understood by modern Normative Buddhist exegesis, the point is the same as in Pyrrhonism: maintaining one's balance by not clinging or being weighed down by passions, which pull us, in one direction or another, away from the balanced condition of having no views, no passions, no choices, and so on. Buddhist mendicants are explicitly enjoined not to refuse whatever food is given them when begging, nor to refuse a robe given to them, but to eat and wear whatever they may have without complaint -- that is, they should not be choosy or picky. It is precisely the attitude and behavior of Pyrrho described in several narratives about him,71 [See below in this chapter.] and it is precisely the attitude of the Buddha: according to the traditional account in the Mahaparinirvana Sutra, he died after eating spoiled food given him by a pious donor.

This "not choosing" is thus one of the core teachings of Early Buddhism and Early Pyrrhonism both. It is expressed in exactly the same words. The Paramattaka Sutta in the Suttanipata, in stressing that holding particular views is a form of clinging, says, "One who isn't inclined toward either side -- becoming or not-[becoming], here or beyond -- who has no entrenchment when considering what's grasped among doctrines, hasn't the least preconceived perception with regard to what's seen, heard, or sensed."72 [Paramattaka Sutta, Suttanipata 4.5, trans. Thanissaro Bhikku (1994-2012) http:// http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka ... .than.html, emphasis and clarification added. The sutra also emphasizes the importance of having no views: "Abandoning what he had embraced, abandoning self, not clinging, he doesn't make himself dependent even in connection with knowledge; doesn't follow a faction among those who are split; doesn't fall back on any view whatsoever."] These points thus occur in exactly the same systemic relationship in both Buddhism and Pyrrhonism.

3. We Should Be Unwavering

Pyrrho finally enjoins us to be "unwavering" in our disposition about pragmata '(ethical) things, matters, affairs', reciting the tetralemma formula in response to "every single one" of them so as to deny that they have any validity whatsoever. "For Pyrrho declared no matter to be good or bad or just or unjust, and likewise with regard to all matters, that not one of them is (good or bad or just or unjust) in truth, but that people manage all matters (prattein)73 [The construction in Greek uses not the noun pragmata but its corresponding verb prattein 'to achieve, bring something to an end', from prak-; it is a verbal form of pragma and praxis that means something like 'to "do" pragmata', i.e., 'to manage matters'.] by law and custom, because each one is no more this than it is that."74 [D.L. IX, 61:[x]. Text by Hicks (1925: 474), but correcting the erroneous printed form [x] in his text from the text of Decleva Caizzi (1981: 29).]

The denial that dharmas, or "(ethical) things", exist "in Truth" is yet another pervasive teaching of Buddhism.75 [The apparent partial exception to this teaching taken by the Sarvastivada school ('those who say all [dharmas] exist'), an important subsect of Normative Buddhism in Late Antiquity (q. v. Willemen, Dessein, and Cox 1998), was the cause of much creative disputation, q.v. Beckwith (2012c).] What both Pyrrho and the Buddha deny is the idea of anything existing in some ultimate, absolute sense beyond that of our perceptions and thoughts, as opposed to phenomenal appearance.76 [See Chapter Four.]

Both Pyrrho and Buddha stress that the Way is not easy; one must struggle against our natural human inclinations to waver back and forth between this passion and that. We are not perfect beings living in a perfect world, so we sometimes err. We must stick to the path, despite occasional setbacks and other difficulties, as pointed out by Pyrrho in his response to criticism related below in Narrative 5.

Pyrrho tells us that when we are confronted by a conflict, we should recite the tetralemma, a four-part formula that negates all possible determinations. Doing this "unwaveringly" in every instance eliminates the obstructions of pragmata one by one.

Although it has been argued that Pyrrho's use of the tetralemma reveals that his thought derives from Buddhism, this has been shown to be an untenable view because the tetralemma already occurs in earlier Greek philosophical texts. Plato (428-347 BC) quotes a tetralemma in the Republic spoken by Glaucon and responded to by "Socrates", and Aristotle too quotes a tetralemma in his discussion of those who deny the Law of Non-Contradiction.77 [See Bett's (2000: 123-131, 135-137) excellent discussion of their usage of the tetralemma, bearing in mind his view of Pyrrho as a dogmatic metaphysician; see Appendix A for discussion and citations.] It also occurs in the Chuangtzu (composed mostly of material put together in the fourth to third centuries BC). In Normative Buddhist texts, the tetralemma is earliest attested in works ascribed to the Madhyamika philosopher Nagarjuna (traditionally dated to the second century AD), but the tetralemma also occurs in sutras from the Pali Canon traditionally thought to reflect Early Buddhism. Moreover, as noted above, basic Madhyamika philosophy itself is found in some of the early Pali sutras.

PASSIONLESSNESS, AND THEN UNDISTURBEDNESS -- PYRRHO AND BUDDHA

The Aristocles account ends with the quotation of Timon's conclusion: "Timon says that, for those who maintain this attitude, what is left is first apatheia 'passionlessness, absence of suffering', and then ataraxia 'undisturbedness, calm, peace"'. This translation is based on a hitherto overlooked passage, later in Aristocles' chapter on Pyrrhonism, which explicitly paraphrases the long problematic -- in fact, bewildering -- received text's conclusion. In the received text the first of the two results is given as aphasia 'unspeakingness', rather than apatheia, which is what the other ancient testimonies lead us to expect. In short, the resulting textual correction totally vacates the extensive scholarly literature about what Pyrrho meant by aphasia because the word was never in Aristocles' text, which had apatheia.78 [For detailed discussion of the textual error in the received text of Aristoc1es in Eusebius, and its emendation, see Beckwith (2011b) -- now Appendix A.]

The passage as a whole is remarkable because once again it corresponds exactly to the Buddhist tradition. The last two of the Classical stages of realization in Buddhist "mindfulness" yoga (breath meditation)79 [In the Central Asian Buddhist yoga textbook (Schlingloff 2006), they are stages or steps 15 and 16 of the first phase, Development for the Present, in chapter 2, Mindfulness of Breathing. See the next note.] are apranahita (Pali appanihita) 'passionless' and nirodha 'extinguishing; nirvana',80 [See Schlingloff (2006) on the Central Asian manuscript in Sanskrit; he compares it to the standard lists in Sanskrit and Pali; see also Bretfeld (2003). The literal meaning of both nirodha and nirvana is 'the extinguishing (of the burning of passion)'.] which correspond precisely to what, according to Timon, are the two things "one is left with" after following Pyrrho's "attitude" or path: "first apatheia 'passionlessness' and then ataraxia 'undisturbedness, peace'."81 [See Note 78 and attendant text.] The earliest form of Buddhist meditation,82 [It seems to go back to Buddha himself. Bronkhorst (1986) shows that it is the earliest identifiable form of meditation in Buddhist literature.] which ends with the Fourth Dhyana and nirvana, as discussed above, explicitly states that having abandoned antilogies such as good and bad, one is free from them, that is, passionless, and one dwells in "indifference" and "mindfulness". 83 [Bronkhorst (1986: 16-17, 82-83).] The first of these is of course apatheia "passionlessness", and the second is ataraxia "undisturbedness, calm". In Buddhism, nirvana is regularly stated to be inexpressible. Like all the rest of the basic teachings of Buddhism and Pyrrhonism, it is expressed only negatively in both.84 [See also the discussion of Narrative 4, below.]

In sum, Pyrrho points out that because pragmata '(ethical) things, matters, questions' are inherently undifferentiated by logically valid criteria, there is no valid difference between good and bad, just and unjust, and so on. Therefore, neither sense perceptions nor doxa 'views, theories' can either tell the truth or lie, as a consequence of which neither the absolute Truth nor an absolute Lie can "really" exist, nor is it possible to determine "in truth" whether any pragmata exist. Therefore, we should not expect our senses or our doxa 'views, theories' to be able to tell the "real truth" or a "real lie" about anything. Instead, we should have "no views" about pragmata, we should be uninclined toward any extreme with respect to pragmata, and we should be unwavering'in our attitude about them, reciting about every single pragma the tetralemma formula, "It no more is than it is not, or it both is and is not, or it neither is nor is not". This formula invalidates all dogmatic arguments.85 [Bett (2000: 30); he discusses this and other interpretations at length (29ff.).] What is left after maintaining this "attitude" or path, says Timon, is first apatheia86 [See Appendix A for the long overlooked textual problem and its solution.] 'passionlessness', and then ataraxia 'undisturbedness, peace'. According to Diogenes Laertius, Timon says suspending judgement "brings with it ataraxia 'undisturbedness, calm', like its shadow".87 [Diogenes Laertius IX, 107.] Although suspending judgement is a feature specifically of Late Pyrrhonism, essentially the same thing is already advocated by Pyrrho himself in the Aristocles passage, and by Timon in his Pytho, where he puts it as "determining nothing and withholding assent".88 [Diogenes Laertius IX, 76. See the discussion in Appendix A.]

Pyrrho's ataraxia "undisturbedness" is perfectly paralleled by the early sutras' accounts of Buddha's enlightenment when he reached the Fourth Dhyana. His enlightenment was equated with nirvana. It has been shown conclusively that in the earliest sutras Buddha is shown as having attained nirvana in this lifetime, and did not lose it during the decades before his death.89 [This is shown already by Bareau (1963: 72-77; cited in Bronkhorst 1986: 93).] Hundreds of years later, in Normative Buddhism, the early picture of Buddha's enlightenment as nirvana had become increasingly modified, to the point that many came to consider it impossible to attain nirvana in one lifetime. Nevertheless, this must not mislead us into thinking that such was the view of the Buddha's followers in his lifetime, or soon after his death.90 [Bronkhorst (1986: 93-95 et seq.), q.v. for analysis and citations.] It is logically necessary for the Buddha to have achieved nirvana and for his followers to have believed that they could do the same thing if they imitated him, in order for such later ideas to have developed in reaction to it. If the Buddha had not achieved his remarkable, heroic breakthrough, there would have been no Buddhism.91 [Cf. Bronkhorst (2011: 10-11): "[T]he buddhist texts state repeatedly that the Buddha taught something new, something that had not theretofore been known in the world. . . . [The texts indicate that] the Original teaching of the Buddha was in various respects radically different from other teachings that were current in its time and region. The buddhist texts themselves insist that the Buddha had discovered something new, and that he therefore taught something new. Scholars have not always believed this, but their scepticism was not justified."]

The teachings in the Aristocles passage are paralleled and amplified by other ancient testimonies. Together, the corpus of material on Pyrrho's thought, though certainly quite limited, presents a very clear, consistent, unambiguous picture of it. Moreover, the main teachings of both Early (Pre-Normative) Buddhism and Early Pyrrhonism are the same. Both have the same telos or 'goal', which is expressed negatively and is explicitly said to be attained as an indirect result of following the path, and both express specific details of the teachings in precisely the same way, in several cases in the same words.

PYRRHO'S DECLARATION AND EARLY BUDDHISM

Pyrrho's negative statement that all pragmata 'discrete matters, objects of cogitation', are Not-x and Not-y and Not-z corresponds to the Buddha's negative statement about all dharma 'discrete matters, objects of cogitation, dharmas'. Both of them include the statement that individual pragmata ~ dharmas have no inherent self-identity. Logically, then, we cannot say for certain if anything is "true" or "false", and so forth, so we should have "no views" (such as that a given pragma is true or false), and we should "not incline" toward any choice. If we are "unwavering" in this "attitude", we will be passionless, and then calm.

No other Greek system proposes such a program as a coherent system, and no one has ever suggested that there is one. It is equally the core of the Early Buddhist system. Pyrrhonism and Buddhism alone propose it, and they match down to details.

PYRRHO'S PRACTICE

Some of the most striking bits of information about Pyrrho make almost no sense in the Greek tradition, and have been treated with some puzzlement by scholars, but they make very good sense as attestations of Buddhist practice, and are completely consistent with Pyrrho's -- and the Buddha's -- teachings.

The most literally solid statement of all is the remark by Pausanias (fl. ca. AD 150-175) in his Description of Greece that the city of Elis erected a statue in Pyrrho's honor. "On the side of the roofed colonnade facing the marketplace stands a statue of Pyrrho, son of Pistocrates, a sage92 [The text has [x]. Greek [x] is usually rendered into English as 'sophist', even though it often does not have the negative meaning of the English word sophist. Considering what Pausanias says here about Pyrrho it is impossible to imagine that he could have intended the meaning 'sophist'. I have translated it as 'sage', one of the alternative translations frequently used for instances when the Greek word is applied to people we might properly call 'philosophers'.] who would not give firm assent to any proposition."93 [Pausanias VI, 24.5: [x]. Text from Perseus online version of Spiro (1903); cf. Jones (1917: 3:148-151).] Pausanias's book is a travelogue or guidebook rather than a history, but he has been shown to be a faithful and extremely accurate observer. He saw the statue himself, as well as Pyrrho's tomb nearby in his home village, Petra. 94 [Pausanias VI, 24.5: [x]. "Not far from the town of the Eleans, at a place called Petra, there is also a tomb of Pyrrho."]

This accords very well with a report, on the authority of Nausiphanes, who had personally studied with Pyrrho: "So revered was he by his home town that they appointed him high priest, and because of him they voted to make all philosophers exempt from taxation."95 [D.L. IX, 64: [x].] The veracity of this testimony has been doubted, and perhaps for a typical Greek philosopher such consideration is difficult to imagine. But for Pyrrho, who in his own lifetime was viewed by nearly everyone -- even those who did not agree with him -- as a kind of holy man,96 [The testimonies contain repeated reference to such opinions by many well-known contemporaries of Pyrrho who knew him personally, including some who are said to have remarked that they did not agree with Pyrrho's philosophy.] much like the Buddha, it is easy to understand. The agreement of this strand of thought in the testimonies adds further support to the report of Nausiphanes. It should not be surprising then to learn that it also accords very well with the historical treatment of Buddhist teachers.

It is well established from the earliest accounts of Normative Buddhism that monks, nuns, and their monasteries were not taxed in ancient India.97 [The tax-free status of religious foundations was one of the main reasons for their proliferation. On the tax-free status of Buddhist viharas, see Beckwith (2012c: 41-42) and references. On the de facto continued ownership of viharas by donors in India, see Schopen (2004: 219-259); cf. the continued ownership by the Barmakids of the famous Nawbahar (Nava Vihara) of Balkh and the lands that were donated to support it, surviving Islamization and several wars (Van Bladel 2010).] The ancient Greek accounts of Early Buddhism do not mention whether or not the Sramanas were taxed, but since they are explicitly described as living extremely frugally, it is difficult to imagine how they could have been taxed. The Forest-dwelling Sramanas, in particular, essentially owned nothing and had no property -- in fact, they did not participate in economic activity of any kind, as noted in Chapter Two -- while the Town-dwelling Sramanas, the Physicians, begged for their food and stayed with people who would put them up in their houses, so it would have been next to impossible to collect any taxes from them.98 [The Brahmanas, by contrast, had extensive possessions, including land, so one would imagine that they were taxed even during their ascetic stage, which according to Megasthenes was thirty-seven years long. The period is given as forty years in the accounts of Calanus, but he was not a Brahmanist at all, based on Megasthenes' description of the beliefs and practices of his sect; cf. the Epilogue. The insistence of modern scholars that Megasthenes' description does not accord with what "we know" about ancient Brahmanism is based not on ancient Brahmanism (of which we have absolutely no record for at least half a millennium after Megasthenes' time, and typically much longer), but on the imaginations of medieval to modern writers.] Not only does Megasthenes present this as the normal state of affairs, the gymnosophistai 'naked wise-men' (or "Gymnosophists") of ancient Greek tradition -- who were neither Sramanas nor Brahmanas -- described in all accounts as having lived extremely frugally, and they openly encouraged the Greeks to join them and live the same way so as to learn their philosophy and practices. Did Pyrrho actually live as a Sramana for a while when he was in India? We do not know. But the account of Megasthenes tells us that the "philosophers" or "holy men" of ancient Gandhara were undoubtedly not taxed; they were left alone to practice and teach.99 [Plutarch makes this explicit, insofar as he quotes Alexander himself as having said that the naked wise men of India did not even have a wallet, unlike Diogenes the Cynic, whom Alexander had met in Corinth and had been impressed by. Plutarch's account, however, seems to have been influenced by Megasthenes' account of the Forest-dwellers. The actual "philosophers" met by the Greeks when Alexander was there depended on other people for many things, as the accounts make clear. See further in Chapter Three.]

In view of the high esteem, and even veneration, accorded him by his contemporaries, it is not difficult to imagine the elderly Pyrrho -- a companion of Alexander, as well as an esteemed teacher -- being honored by his fellow citizens in the way described, perhaps after suggestions and encouragement from Timon and others who had heard Pyrrho's stories about his experiences in India.

From Eratosthenes, reported by Diogenes Laertius, it is well established that Pyrrho also remained celibate.100 [D.L. IX, 66: "He lived in fraternal piety with his sister, a midwife" (translation by Jones 1933: 3:479).] Diogenes Laertius, quoting from Antigonus of Carystus's book about Pyrrho, says, "He would withdraw from society and live as a hermit,101 [Greek [x]; derived from[x]; 'desolate, desert, solitary, lonely', the source of the English loanwords "eremitic", "hermit", etc.] rarely making an appearance before his family."102 [D.L. IX, 63: [x]. Text and translation by Jones (1933: 3:477); cf. Narrative 1 below.] Later in the same section of quotations Diogenes says, "Often . . . he would leave his home and, telling no one, would go roaming about with whomsoever he chanced to meet."103 [Translation by Jones (1933: 3:477). The quotations are of course in oratio obliqua.] That is, he wandered. Both of these reports accord perfectly with the itinerant wandering, hermetic life of the Buddha, according to the traditional accounts, as well as with that of a Buddhist sramana, particularly the Forest Sramana type attested in the Indica of Pyrrho's contemporary Megasthenes.104 [See Chapter Two.]
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Re: Greek Buddha: Pyrrho's Encounter With Early Buddhism

Postby admin » Thu Sep 16, 2021 10:25 pm

Part 3 of 3

THE NARRATIVES ABOUT PYRRHO

The Greek version of the Trilaksana text and its parallels,105 [Discussed above; for a detailed study of this material, see Appendix A.] some statements directly connected to them, and a number of verbatim quotes of Timon's poems praising Pyrrho are the most important testimonies about Pyrrho's teachings. By contrast, the most important testimonies on his practices are narrative vignettes about his life. These "anecdotes" typically describe him in the context of events involving other actors and spectators, and conclude with a moral, or judgemental comment.

No previous attempt seems to have been made to organize these narratives106 [This is a rather Aristotelian enterprise, fully un-Pyrrhonian, so I doubt Pyrrho would approve of it as such, but I hope that the clarification of his teachings that results from it would have met with his approval.] and analyze their purpose.107 [When they are discussed by scholars, they have usually been given ad hoc explanations, rather than ones that fit the points of the vignettes into the picture of Pyrrho's thought and practice known from other sources. Clayman (2009: 44-46) argues that the "essentially Skeptical portrait" of Pyrrho in the narratives "was a deliberate creation of Timon who embodies the principles of Skeptic practice in Pyrrho." However, there is no evidence for this claim. Bett (2000) notes the practical impossibility of distinguishing Pyrrho from Timon in the sources; cf. Appendix A.] They are moralistic or didactic stories. Regardless of their subject matter, the narratives are concerned to show whether Pyrrho behaved in accordance with his teachings or in violation of them. This is significant in the Greek context because "philosophers" were expected to follow their teachings in daily life.108 [Cf. Clayman (2009: 35) on this Greek tradition.] Most strikingly, all of them show Pyrrho as an imperfect being living in an imperfect world. In this respect they contrast sharply with the panegyrical verses of Timon that praise Pyrrho as a perfected being beyond ordinary men. Accordingly, the narratives cannot be attributed to Timon.

As reports apparently written in most cases by non-Pyrrhonists who were contemporaries of Pyrrho, the narratives are important for understanding what Greeks in general thought of Pyrrho's teachings and practice, and how Early Pyrrhonism contrasted with what might be called "normal traditional Greek thought and behavior".

The narratives begin with Pyrrho's experiences as a member of Alexander's court for over ten years, five years of which were spent in Central Asia and India. According to all accounts, Pyrrho had an experience there that permanently changed him.

1. Pyrrho in India

The first narrative about Pyrrho survives in two pieces found as quotations or paraphrases in different works, though each piece assumes or refers to the other. The main versions are in Diogenes Laertius, Sextus Empiricus, and Plutarch.109 [ Bett (2000: 1n4).] The story relates that while in India, "Pyrrho heard an Indian reproach [his teacher] Anaxarchus, telling him that he would never be able to teach others what is good while he himself danced attendance on kings in their courts. Since Pyrrho himself had written a poem in praise of Alexander, for which he had been rewarded with ten thousand gold pieces,110 [Sextus Empiricus, Adversus Mathematicos ("Against the Learned" = M), I, 282, ed. and trans. Bury (1933: 4:162-163): [x] "for Pyrrho himself, it is said, wrote a poem for Alexander of Macedon and was rewarded with thousands of [or 'ten thousand'] gold pieces." Plutarch has: [x] "To Pyrrho of Elis he (Alexander) gave ten thousand gold pieces when he first met him". Plutarch, Moralia 331 E ("On the Fortune of Alexander"), ed. and trans. Babbitt (1927: 4:411). The significant difference in Plutarch's version is his omission of the reason for Alexander's gift, as noted by Bett (2000: 1n4).] he withdrew from the world and lived in solitude, rarely showing himself to his relatives."111 [The first and third sentences are in chronologically reversed order in D.L. IX, 63, the first being intended to explain the third, which reads in Hicks's (1925: 2:477) translation, "He would withdraw from the world and live in solitude, rarely showing himself to his relatives."] This narrative seems to go back ultimately to a personal account by Pyrrho himself or someone very close to him. Its moral is simple and clear, but the effects of the Indian's remark on Pyrrho are stunning. As a result, Pyrrho not only ceased writing poetry, he adopted a "philosophy" that was unprecedented and bewildering (for a Greek). In particular, though, he "withdrew from the world", and "lived in solitude", and "rarely showed himself to his relatives".

These three things are stereotyped expressions for what a person beginning Early Buddhist practice did, especially one following the way of the Forest-dwelling sramanas. Buddhist texts regularly refer explicitly to sramanas as those who have "left their families (or homes)" and have "withdrawn from the world".112 [In Normative Buddhism, these expressions are specifically equivalent to saying "became a monk". Cf. Gethin (1998: 85, 87) on "becoming a Buddhist monk ... : 'going forth' (Sanskrit pravrajya. - Pali pabbajja.) ... from the household life into homelessness".] The early sramanas who are thought to have best preserved the original practices of the Buddha before he achieved enlightenment are those who "lived in solitude" in the forest and practiced greater austerities than the other sramanas. Megasthenes, a contemporary of Pyrrho who gives an eyewitness account of the Indian "philosophers", tells us explicitly about these Forest-dwelling sramanas and their austerities, thereby confirming the antiquity of the Indian tradition in this case. Pyrrho himself is said to have behaved as a hermetic ascetic.

2. Pyrrho's Continuing Issue with Wealth

The first narrative tells us that Pyrrho took the Indian's admonishment to heart specifically because of his own acceptance of a fortune in gold from Alexander. In the next story, from Athenaeus, Pyrrho says to a host who has just lavishly entertained him, "I'm not going to visit you in the future, if you entertain me that way, so that I don't feel bad when I see you wasting your money unnecessarily, and so that you don't run short of funds and suffer. Because it's better to favor one another with our company than with a large number of dishes, most of which the servants consume."113 [Athenaeus x, 419, doe, translation by Olson (2008: 4:469).] The other quotations in that section of Athenaeus are mostly dated to Pyrrho's time, or slightly earlier or later, so it is quite possible that Pyrrho actually said something like this, but even if he did not, his statement is specifically Pyrrhonian and is certainly the kind of thing he would have said to a friend. Pyrrho does not want either of them to feel distressed because of the banquet or, to put it in more Pyrrhonian terms, to become "disturbed" or "unbalanced" by excesses.

The narrative about the Indian's reproach and the narrative about the banquet could simply be written off as traditional morality -- either generic or, as Bett suggests, that of a specific Greek school, the Cynics.114 [Bett (2000: 64); he summarizes the account, saying, "Pyrrho goes to a sumptuous dinner with a friend, and says that he will not see him again if he is received in this fashion, because what is important is good company rather than a display of unnecessary luxury." He then remarks, "Here, as in some of the other anecdotes, Pyrrho's behaviour is reminiscent of that of the Cynics ... " This misses the point or moral of the story (see the discussion above), which is given explicitly in Athenaeus, who has taken the passage from the second century Be writer Hegesander (Bett 2000: 64). Certainly Pyrrho's thought is sometimes reminiscent of Antisthenes (ca. 445-ca. 365 BC), a student of Socrates' who focused on ethics and is considered to be a forerunner of the Cynics, but Antisthenes also promoted monotheism, among other interesting and non-Pyrrhonian things. It is even more difficult to find much in common between Pyrrho and Diogenes the Cynic (ca. 404-323 BC), the practical founder and model of the school.] But the point of the first text is that Pyrrho reacted to the Indian's remarks because he felt bad about having accepted a lavish reward from Alexander. The second says explicitly that he wanted to avoid being distressed by receiving the "gift" of a luxurious banquet. In both cases his remarks are strictly about the effects of excess on the individual. He says nothing at all about waste or unfairness themselves, both of which have to do with social morality.

This focus on the individual is a specific characteristic of Early Buddhism, which encourages people to "leave the family" to pursue individual enlightenment, just as Pyrrho himself did. Both narratives are in full accord with the Early Buddhist reason for not accepting wealth, or anything luxurious: to avoid extremes and attachments to things, with their attendant emotional disturbances.

3. Pyrrho's Humility

A narrative in Diogenes Laertius, taken from Eratosthenes, presents Pyrrho performing humble, everyday tasks without either complaint or excessive enjoyment: "He lived in fraternal piety with his sister, a midwife, ... now and then even taking things for sale to market, poultry perchance or pigs, and he would dust the things in the house, quite indifferent as to what he did. They say he showed his indifference by washing a porker."115 [Diogenes Laertius IX, 66. This narrative is strongly reminiscent of the story about the Early Taoist master Liehtzu in Chuangtzu 7.5: "He went back home, and for three years did not leave his house. He did the cooking for his wife; he fed the pigs as though he were feeding people. He did not prefer one thing over another, from fine carving he reverted to the plain material. He took his place like a clod of earth. Amidst confusion, he was secure." Translation by Brooks and Brooks (2015: 195-196), emphasis added. See Chapter Three on the influence of Early Buddhism on Warring States Chinese thought.] This account twice uses the term adiaphora or a derivative; Hicks translates them as "indifferent" and "indifference", and the text itself apparently suggests that meaning -- in other words, that Pyrrho did not care one way or the other what he did. However, this is certainly an error, perhaps going back as far as Pyrrho's own day, when the original anecdotes may have been recorded, because in the Aristocles passage, quoted and discussed at length above, Pyrrho uses the word adiaphora as it was used by Aristotle, meaning "undifferentiated by a logical differentia". Pyrrho does not refer to himself, Timon, or any other person, as adiaphora or the like. He uses the term explicitly in reference to pragmata "matters, affairs" -- which almost exclusively meant for Pyrrho, as for Buddha, conflicting ethical or emotional matters, with attendant antilogies such as good versus bad, true versus false, and so on. Moreover, neither Pyrrho nor the Buddha ever hints at a metaphysics, or even an epistemology. To the contrary, Pyrrho says explicitly that we should have "no views" or theories, and the Early Buddhist tradition says precisely the same thing.116 [See the discussion above in this chapter.] The concept embodied in adiaphora, in the sense used by Pyrrho, is one of the characteristic and most important elements of his teachings. The comments about Pyrrho's behavior in this narrative are therefore technically inaccurate, and the narrative as we have it is perhaps not datable to Pyrrho's own time (though misunderstanding knows no chronological bounds). Nevertheless, the points made by the story are close to those of Early Pyrrhonism. In the story Pyrrho shows graphically, in a way anyone can understand, that conventional theories about what is truly or ultimately or absolutely good or bad are logically unfounded and therefore invalid. He also teaches those around him about humility, simplicity, and morality, virtues that seem to have been expressed by the Buddha, and by Buddhist teachers ever since.

4. The Seaworthy Pig

The association of Pyrrho with animals recurs in the fourth narrative. This version of it is from Plutarch:117 [Plutarch, Moralia 82 F ("Progress in Virtue"), ed. and trans. Babbitt (1927: 1:441), online version from Perseus, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc = Perseus: text:2008.01.0153:section=11&highlight=Pyrrho. The other version is in D.L. IX, 68, taken from Posidonius.] "[When Pyrrho] was on a voyage, and in peril during a storm, he pointed to a little pig contentedly feeding upon some barley which had been spilled near by, and said to his companions118 [Babbitt's (1927: 441) translation from this point on reads, "a similar indifference must be acquired from reason and philosophy by the man who does not wish to be disturbed by anything that may befall him."] that such passionlessness (apatheia) must be cultivated through reason and philosophy by anyone wishing not to be thoroughly disturbed by the things that happen to him."119 [This is my translation of [x], text from Babbitt (1927: 1:440).] Once again, Pyrrho is shown in humble circumstances and uses them to teach the cultivation of passionlessness "through reason and philosophy" in order to attain, indirectly, ataraxia 'undisturbedness'-which he explicitly refers to in the text via a negative plus the word tarattesthai 'to be disturbed', a positive verbal form of the same word, that is, ataraxia.

5. Pyrrho and the Dog

The next narrative is also set in everyday conditions that any audience could understand. It relates how Pyrrho responded upon being attacked. "When a dog rushed at him and terrified him, he answered his critic that it was not easy entirely to strip oneself of one's human nature, but one should strive with all one's might against pragmata '(conflicting ethical) matters, events', by deeds if possible, and if not, then through reason."120 [D.L. IX, 66. I have revised the translation of Hicks, which reads, "When a cur rushed at him and terrified him, he answered his critic that it was not easy entirely to strip oneself of human weakness; but one should strive with all one's might against facts, by deeds if possible, and if not, in word." The phrase "through reason" (or perhaps "through logic") here translates the last word in the Greek passage, [x], in the translation of Hicks, "in word". Cf. Bett (2000: 66).] The quotation of Pyrrho's statement in this narrative agrees very closely with the content of his statement quoted in the Aristocles account.121 [See Appendix A and above in this chapter.] The dog narrative is vivid, and Pyrrho's words are characteristically idiosyncratic. The story thus seems to go back ultimately to an actual event involving Pyrrho himself. It is particularly helpful for understanding the Aristocles account of his teaching about the three characteristics of pragmata -- which word means for Pyrrho conflicting ethical or emotional things.

Significantly, this narrative shows that Pyrrho behaved completely according to normal human reactions. Aristocles' version even has him climb a tree to get away from the dog.122 [Bett (2000: 68n16).]

Pyrrho also says one should struggle to free oneself of one's human nature. It is impossible to achieve undisturbedness if one is continually disturbed, but it is not easy to achieve undisturbedness, nirvana. One must struggle against one's own human nature, using deeds (that is, the physical body), and if that does not work, reason (that is, the mind). This corresponds exactly to the Buddhist use of yoga (or "meditation"), a method of physical training of the body as well as the mind to overcome human nature. Timon and other ancient Pyrrhonists say that it worked for Pyrrho and those who followed his path, and it apparently did for the Buddha before him. Pyrrho's teaching in this narrative is identical in all essentials to the Buddha's teaching, the way of the sramanas. Pyrrho tells us straight out that to be disturbed is ordinary human nature. It is thus in effect heroic-superhuman-to achieve undisturbedness. And that is exactly how Timon praises Pyrrho in his poems, as many Buddhist writers too have praised the Buddha down through the ages.

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE NARRATIVES

It should by now be clear that none of the narratives about Pyrrho are versions of the well-known, traditional, and late Normative Buddhist narratives about the Buddha.123 [As Bareau, Schopen, and other scholars have begun showing, the traditional stories, including even much of the canon, cannot be dated to anywhere near the time of the Buddha himself. Even the epithet "Buddha" does not appear in the Greek sources until Clement of Alexandria (mid-second to early third century AD), though it does appear on a Kushan coin of Kanishka I (r. first half of the second century AD), where it is written in Bactrian spelling [x] 'Buddha' http://www.bpmurphy.com/cotw/week2.htm, and bodhi 'awakening' is attested in the early third-century AD Major Inscriptions of king Devanampriya Priyadarsi, q. v. Chapter Two and Appendix C. Megasthenes, Pyrrho's contemporary, refers to Buddhists as Sarmanes, the Sramanas of the Mauryan inscription fragments in Greek. The word Sramana was the unambiguous term for 'Buddhists', and was still used exclusively in that sense in the Middle Ages, as shown in Chapter Two.] All of Pyrrho's take place in his lifetime; they are about Pyrrho himself, who was a Greek "philosopher" by training, and despite his Indian experience, still a Greek; and all but one of them take place in Greece and are clearly Greek in color and detail.124iii [The poetic fragments of his disciple, Timon, praise Pyrrho, but they are not narratives; they are basically panegyrics. The most outstanding example of them is a poem in which Timon compares Pyrrho to the Sun God. See Endnote iii.] The narratives present Pyrrho as an ordinary man, somewhat ascetic and hermetic, who understood much about the human condition and what one needed to do to overcome it. He does not attempt to hide his lapses, but instead uses them as a way to explain about imperfection and to teach others a practical way to ataraxia 'undisturbedness, peace'.

Although the narratives are not versions of the later Indian stories of Normative Buddhism, the didactic elements of the narratives provide important clarification of Pyrrho's teachings and practices, which are in their intention thoroughly Early Buddhist in nature. Together with the contemporary account of 'India' by Megasthenes, the texts relating to Pyrrho provide us with valuable information about late fourth century Be Buddhism, and show that it corresponds well to traditional accounts of what it was like in the Buddha's lifetime. One thing clear from Pyrrho's teachings, from the account of Megasthenes, and from the portrayal of Gautama in Early Taoism is that Buddhism had not yet become fixated on the person of the Buddha as a kind of divinity. As recent research by Gregory Schopen has shown, Buddhism had also not yet developed other devotional and organizational elements that did eventually appear.125 [In particular, the works collected in Schopen (1997, 2004, 2005).]

The conclusion to be drawn from the evidence about Pyrrho's thought and practice is that he adopted a form of Early Buddhism during his years in Bactria and Gandhara, including its philosophical-religious and pragmatic elements, but he stripped it of its alien garb and reconstituted it as a new 'Greek Buddhism' for the Hellenistic world, which he presented in his own words to Timon and his other students.

THE PROBLEMATIC NARRATIVES

Perhaps not surprisingly, the most popular and widely quoted narrative about Pyrrho is utterly spurious -- it occurs already in Aristotle and has been shown to have been wrongly applied to Pyrrho.126 [See Bett (2000: 67-69). The story was used as a criticism of Pyrrho already in Antiquity.] It is placed prominently by Diogenes Laertius at the very beginning of his long, detailed account of Pyrrhonism, and perhaps for this reason it has given far too many scholars the wrong impression about Pyrrho and his thought. So as not to perpetuate the tradition, it and a textually corrupt narrative have been deliberately placed at the end of this chapter rather than at the beginning.

1. The Topos of the Madcap Fool Philosopher Applied to Pyrrho

Diogenes Laertius gives a succinct summary of Pyrrho's teachings at the beginning of his chapter on him.127 [His account of Pyrrho's thought is unfortunately contaminated in part with features of Late Pyrrhonism and simple errors (some of which are discussed below), though on the whole it is rather accurate. However, some scholars have unwittingly thought that the entire long chapter is supposed to be about Pyrrho himself and his thought, whereas the bulk of it is about the Late Pyrrhonism of Diogenes' own times and shortly before him.] Referring to Pyrrho's experiences in India, he says, "he even forgathered with the Indian Gymnosophists and with the Magi," and he says, "This led him to adopt a most noble philosophy, to quote Ascanius of Abdera .... He denied that anything was honourable or dishonourable, just or unjust. And so, universally, he held that ... custom and convention govern human actions; for no single thing is in itself any more this than that."128 [D.L. IX, 61, translation of Hicks, from Perseus online.]

Immediately following this summary of his teachings, Diogenes gives his first narrative about Pyrrho: "He led a life consistent with this doctrine, going out of his way for nothing, taking no precautions, but facing all risks as they came, whether carts, precipices, dogs or what not, and, generally, leaving nothing to the arbitrament of the senses; but he was kept out of harm's way by his friends who, as Antigonus of Caristus tells us, used to follow close after him."129 [D.L. IX, 62, translation of Hicks, from Perseus online.] Diogenes himself then remarks that this passage is contradicted by a sober comment of Aenesidemus, a later Sceptic who adopted much of Pyrrho's thought, saying that Pyrrho "did not lack foresight in his everyday acts." Diogenes concludes -- significantly, in view of the life-threatening nature of the philosopher's supposed behavior in the anecdote of Antigonus -- that Pyrrho "lived to be nearly ninety."130 [ D.L. IX, 11.62.] Yet despite Diogenes' correctives, the image of a batty eccentric has been painted from the outset upon the unwary reader's mind.

While other testimonies -- including those in Diogenes Laertius -- do portray an unusual person, they do not show us a foolish or crazy one. His actions all make a philosophical point. Moreover, this particular narrative reveals its source. The main point, along with the example of walking over a cliff, is found in Aristotle's Metaphysics, in the discussion of what would happen to someone who denied the Law of Non-Contradiction. 131 [Many scholars report this story as if it had some basis in fact. Clayman (2009: 35) says that in it "Pyrrho is making himself a living example of the Skeptic view that appearances are not to be trusted", but later in the same work she rightly notes and discusses the Aristotelian parallel, as pointed out and briefly discussed by Bett (2000: 68, 88). There are also points of textual similarity, most notably the expression [x] 'if he comes to it' in Aristotle (Metaphysics IV, iv, 40 [1008b], ed. and trans. Tredennick 1933: 1:178) and [x] 'as [= if] they came' in Antigonus as quoted in D.L. IX, 11.62; they are used the same way in both texts. Clayman (2009: 43-44) says, "This story comes not from Pyrrho's own life, but was invented by someone familiar with Aristotle's Metaphysics .... He is obviously not describing Pyrrho himself, who was a much younger contemporary". Unfortunately, she then suggests, "but it may also have been Timon who meant to capture the charming simplicity of Pyrrho's disposition."] It has thus been applied to Pyrrho despite the fact that he is not known to have denied the Law of Non-Contradiction, and hardly could have done so, since that would have meant he held a doxa 'view, theory, dogmatic belief, among other violations of his teachings. The statement of Diogenes Laertius in his introduction has often been interpreted to mean that Pyrrho denied anything exists, suggesting that the behavior ascribed to him by Antigonus followed his beliefs, but Pyrrho does not and could not deny that anything exists -- it makes absolutely no sense on the basis of what we know about his philosophy and religious practices -- and Diogenes does not actually make such a c1aim.132 [See above and Appendix A for a correct translation of Diogenes' parallel to the Aristocles passage. Bett's (2000: 51) argument that in a sense Pyrrho "does away with all existing things" depends on accepting Bett's thesis that Pyrrho's thought is founded on dogmatic metaphysical ideas; see Appendix A.] Pyrrho is quoted by Timon as saying not to have any doxa "views, theories", and Timon and others praise him repeatedly for his success in not having any. More could be said, but all of the evidence tells us that this particular narrative is spurious and must be eliminated from the corpus of authentic information about Pyrrho and his teachings.

Having done that, one might then ask if we can determine to which philosophical or religious tradition the topos of the devil-may-care philosopher who denies the Law of Non-Contradiction could belong.133 [Bett discusses at length the identity of the unnamed opponents of Aristotle who denied the Law of Non-Contradiction (Bett 2000: 123-131). He rightly concludes that their position "is not, in fact, particularly close" to Pyrrho's, and "whoever are the people who Aristotle is attacking [in Metaphysics IV], there is no serious basis for the belief that they were associates of Pyrrho, or that they and Pyrrho were of like mind" (Bett 2000: 131).] Although we do not of course have any information about the people who proposed such a view (assuming that Aristotle got it right),134 [An anonymous reviewer of the manuscript of this book states, "The idea that Aristotle is addressing Indian ideas in his discussion of the Law of Non-Contradiction in Metaphysics gamma is completely unsupported, and very unlikely. Aristotle names a great many Greek thinkers as his opponents in these chapters; and; while we can hardly doubt that he also has in mind other thinkers whom we can no longer identify, there is no reason to think that they are not Greek. Pyrrho and others may have been open to influence from other cultures, but Aristotle was a determinedly chauvinist Greek." However, as he rightly notes, Aristotle does not give the slightest hint who these people were, and there is no reason to think he could not have heard the idea from one of the many Greeks who knew, or knew about, Calanus. Without insisting that the idea must have an Indian source, I think it is better to present the data and an argument for the identification than to ignore this particular motif.] it would seem at least arguable that they correspond to the school of Indian philosophy most familiar to the Greeks, namely the sect of men exemplified by Calanus, an Indian philosopher from Taxila who joined Alexander's court there, left India with him, and after spending a year in the West committed suicide at Pasargadae by burning himself to death on a funeral pyre in 323 BC.135 [Calanus reached Persia with Alexander the year before his suicide, so Aristotle outlived him by about a year. Since we know from Arrian that Calanus had a good number of disciples among the Greeks, it is reasonable to assume that they learned something on Indian beliefs and practices from him.] The Indians made interesting comments to the Greeks about why his sect did this:136 [Strabo xv, 1, 68 (text from Radt 2005: 4:220).] "Megasthenes says that suicide is not a dogma among the philosophers, and that those who commit suicide are judged guilty of the impetuosity of youth; that those who are tough by nature throw themselves against a blow or over a cliff;137 [The Greek here reads: [x], translated by Jones (1930: 7: 118-119), "some who are by nature hardy rush to meet a blow or over precipices".] whereas others, who shrink from suffering, plunge into deep waters;138 [I.e., they drown themselves.] and others, who are much suffering, hang themselves; and others, who have a fiery temperament, fling themselves into fire; and that such was Calanus, a man who was without self-control and a slave to the table of Alexander; and that therefore Calanus is censured."139 [The text continues, contrasting Calanus with another Indian, Mandanis, who criticizes Calanus severely. However, Mandanis does not seem to have belonged to the same sect, though the sources suggest they shared some values, at least.] The accounts of this particular sect of Indians do not say much more than this, but there is an exception, also in Megasthenes. As discussed in Chapter Two, some Indians denied that there was any difference between good and bad -- according to Aristotle's misinterpretation, they therefore denied the Law of Non-Contradiction. They also believed that death was "birth" -- that is, necessarily, rebirth -- into the "true life", which is the "happy life", so they devoted themselves to preparing for death. This is what the sect of Calanus is said to have believed.140 [Strabo XV, 1, 59, 64, 68.] The identity of his sect within the Indian philosophical tradition is not certain, probably because all written evidence of such traditions in Indic languages is very late, and scanty until even later, while not surprisingly, the sect seems to have died out very early. However, its teachings are similar in part to those of the early Pure Land sect of Buddhism which is first attested when texts introduced from the Kushan Empire to China in the mid-second century AD were translated into Chinese.141 [It has been much noted that some Pure Land followers committed suicide by self-immolation (Keown 1996: 9n2; Kleine 2006: 167n1). Most examples that have been cited, however, are medieval, so it is not at all certain that this was a feature of early Pure Land Buddhism; a chronologically sensitive study would seem to be needed; cf. Chapter Two.]

This is the same sect that worshipped the Buddha Amitabha essentially as a sun god, a belief that might be responsible for Timon's similar treatment of Pyrrho in some of his poems, as noted above. Moreover, one of their key teachings mentioned by Megasthenes is that there is no real difference between good and bad, a key teaching of Early Buddhism in general that is also attested in Early Taoism,142 [See Chapter Three.] as well as in Pyrrhonism.

Nevertheless, with respect to the opponents of Aristotle who denied the Law of Non-Contradiction, and the madcap behavior described in the Metaphysics (and based on it, in Antigonus's putative account of Pyrrho), there is again no reason to connect such people to the Pre-Pure Land practitioners in the early Greek accounts. The key point is that in Aristotle and Antigonus, the individuals in question-because of their philosophical position -- do not care what happens to them. However, that is simply not true of the Pre-Pure Land practitioners143 [For discussion of theories about the possible non-Indic origins of Pure Land, see Halkias (2012).] in Megasthenes, nor even of Calanus. Both cared very much, and spent their entire lives preparing for death, which they considered rebirth into a true, happy life. Pyrrho's teachings and practices are all directed specifically toward freedom from passion, and eventually undisturbedness, but that is hardly "uncaring". Moreover, there is not a single suggestion in any authentic testimony that shows Pyrrho being "uncaring" in this sense. His practice of being "uninclined" about "matters, affairs" in order to be calm and undisturbed is ample proof that he cared, and is further supported by the fact that, like Buddha, he went to the trouble to teach others the secret of how to achieve the same passionlessness and internal peace.

2. The Corrupt Account of Pyrrho and His Sister's Offering

Another problematic narrative is the story, also deriving from Antigonus, about Pyrrho losing his temper at someone who broke a promise to help Philista, his sister, in connection with a temple sacrifice. As in the narrative about the dog, he is said to violate his own advice or principles, though the main point seems to be, again, that he was not perfect, he had to work to control his human nature, and he cared -- in this case, about his sister. As with the authentic and textually unproblematic narratives in general, this one also has a concluding statement by Pyrrho explaining the event in the context of his philosophy.

However, although the narrative does seem to have been originally as authentic as the others,144 [I.e., excluding the fake "careless Pyrrho" story in Antigonus, which evidently derives from the same source drawn on by Aristotle (or more likely by an Aristotelian of his school) for the argument in his Metaphysics discussed above in this chapter.] something happened to the text very early in Antiquity, so that the two surviving versions give significantly different concluding statements, one of which (the longer version in Aristocles) seems to support Pyrrho and the other (the shorter version in Diogenes Laertius) to criticize him. Although Brunschwig has argued cogently in favor of the former,145 [Brunschwig (1992).] in fact the texts of both accounts are problematic and unclear, as concluded by Bett.146 [See Bett (2000: 66n9).] They must therefore be set aside until or unless someone is able to solve this problem.
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