Dharma

Actually the split between the Mahayana and what you called, ahem, primitive Buddhism, Hinayana started exactly after 100 years of the Buddha's parinirvana in the second council at Vaishali, where the Hinayana and Mahayana schools separated. The third council was held during Ashok's time, so many of the "supernatural" stories of the Buddha were developing by 400-350 bce and were complete by the time of Ashoka and continued developing--- Christianity had a very, very late start by comparison.

http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/buddhahist.html

Ashoka sent missionaries all over India and beyond. Some went as far as Egypt, Palestine, and Greece. St. Origen even mentions them as having reached Britain. The Greeks of one of the Alexandrian kingdoms of northern India adopted Buddhism, after their King Menandros (Pali: Milinda) was convinced by a monk named Nagasena -- the conversation immortalized in the Milinda Pañha. A Kushan king of north India named Kanishka was also converted, and a council was held in Kashmir in about 100 ad. Greek Buddhists there recorded the Sutras on copper sheets which, unfortunately, were never recovered.

GakuseiDon

Origen never made it to sainthood, AFAIK.

Do you have a source for Origen talking about Buddhists?

andrewcriddle

The page referenced above says Which is basically what I was saying.

In other words The distinctive doctrines of Mahayana are considerably later than Ashoka.

Andrew Criddle

Toto

One web page gives this:

Also referenced here. But these pages also assert that Jesus was in India.

yummyfur

Also there were Jews in India, possibly before the destruction of the first Temple, the community known as the Bene Israel, so Judaism could have influenced Buddhism as well as vice versa.

andrewcriddle

Not only did Origen fail to be acknowledged as a Saint he was formally Anathematized in the 6th century.
http://human-threshold-systems.whitl.../mgEcces1.html says I have no idea whether this is reliable but at least Origen's Commentary on Ezekiel is a reference that could be checked.

Andrew Criddle

Toto

Not much of Origen's 25 books of commentary on Ezekiel has survived. Peter Kirby's site does not list it.

I wondered why Origen would say anything about Britian in a commentary on Ezekiel, but he is in the habit of wandering off topic (so to speak) and has a long discourse on pearls in Britain in his commentary on Matthew.

yummyfur

There is nothing in the small section from book Twenty that survives in "THE PHILOCALIA OF ORIGEN". So if the reference exists it must be in the 14 homilies translated by Jerome, but I haven't found these anywhere online or in my books.

Here's the chapter in Philocalia that has an excerpt from Origen's commentray on Ezekiel

http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/or...2_text.htm#C11

yummyfur

Ok I found a reference to Origen's Commenetary on Ezekiel and a reference to Britain, in this source Origen is saying that Christians had spread to Britain in the Commentary of Ezekiel. So how someone gets buddhists out of that, is beyond me.

The source is Roman Britain, by Edward Conybeare 1903, pg 258

"Neither legendary nor historical sources tell us of any further development of British Christianity till the latter days of the 2nd century. Then, however, it had become sufficiently widespread to furnish a common-place for ecclesiastical declamation on the all-conquering influence of the Gospel. Both Tertullian and Origen[406] thus use it"

Footnote 406 reads

" Homily 4 on Ezechiel, 6 on St. Luke."

So it can be checked in Jerome's translation of Origen's Homily 4 on Ezekiel, but this seems to suggest, and it seems more probable, that this is merely a reference to the spread of Christians to Britain.

Toto

quoted here