harishsubramanian

The presense of Greeks in India is well known.Even today there is one village in Northern India ,where there are people who worship greek gods and there is a temple of ancient greek godess still in use.The people in that village claim that they are the descendants of Alexander's soldiers.The people in that village do not marry or mix with people of even neighbouring villages..In fact anyone from outside that village is not even supposed to touch them,or the things in the village.Yet it is difficult to make them out as greeks ,as they are of the same colour as any of the other Indians.People worshipping greek gods in India, is difficult to imagine when greek gods are not even worshipped in Greece.Anyway these Greeks are not buddhists.But here is some link to information on greek buddhists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhism

For all those who dont have time to read the entire page:
Here are some excerpts-
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1.
The interraction between Hellenistic Greece and Buddhism started when Alexander the Great conquered Asia Minor and Central Asia in 334 BCE, going as far as the Indus, thus establishing direct contact with India, the birthplace of Buddhism.

Alexander founded several cities in his new territories in the areas of the Oxus and Bactria, and Greek settlements further extended to the Khyber Pass, Gandhara (see Taxila) and the Punjab. These regions correspond to a unique geographical passageway between the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush mountains, through which most of the interaction between India and Central Asia took place, generating intense cultural exchange and trade.

2.

Buddhism flourished under the Indo-Greek kings, and it has been suggested that their invasion of India was intended to show their support for the philhellenic Mauryan empire, and to protect the Buddhist faith from the religious persecutions of the Sungas.

3.

Menander, described on his coins as the "Saviour king", seems to have converted to Buddhism, and is described in Buddhist texts as a great benefactor of the religion, on a par with Ashoka or the future Kushan emperor Kanishka. He is famous for his dialogues with the Buddhist monk Nagasena, transmitted to us in the Milinda Panha. Upon his death, the honour of sharing his remains was claimed by the various cities under his rule, and they were enshrined in stupas, in a parallel with the historic Buddha (Plutarch )

4.

During the reign of Menander, the Greek (Pali: Yona, lit: "Ionian") Buddhist monk Mahadhammarakkhita (Sanskrit: Mahadharmaraksita) is said to have come from “Alasandra�? (thought to be Alexandria of the Caucasus, the city founded by Alexander the Great, near today’s Kabul) with 30,000 monks for the foundation ceremony of the Maha Thupa ("Great stupa") at Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka, indicating the importance of Buddhism within Greek communities in northwestern India, and the prominent role Greek Buddhist monks played in them:






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harishsubramanian

YEAH Friends,i have forgotten to add one more point.Most of the greek-buddhist art was destroyed by the Taliban.

Yeshi

yes, these are relatively well know issues.

here is an excellent site on king Milinda's dialogues with sage Nagasena:

Nagasena dialogues

Also of note is, that the earliest buddha statues were made in the likeness of Alexander the Great (together with the hairknot and facial features) and in the best tradition of fine greek sculpture art.

DCC

I have also read that Apollo was used as the model for the Buddha in some statues.

Another thing that interests me about these interactions is that Pyrrho, who came with Alexander, is said to have been influenced by the "gymnosophists" he encountered in India. Sextus later writes his "Outlines of Pyrrhonism" which still later becomes one of the more influential books of the Enlightenment. Which leads to us.

Just something fun to think about...for me, anyway.

muon

Gymnosophists were probably not Buddhist per se. The name refers to a naked philosopher, something that maybe would fit some Jain sects better. Buddhist monks generally preferred to be fashionably arrayed in corpse rags.

DCC

Thanks for mentioning this. I should have been more clear. I didn't include anything about The Buddha's pre-awakening days as he went from practice to practice. I did not mean to imply Pyrrho was influenced by Buddhists so much as that he was influenced by the same sort of philosophical environment in which Buddhism had arisen and existed. I just find this bit of cross-exposure fascinating stuff.

gurugeorge

This is indeed a fascinating little corner of thought.

Actually, I think there are some larger implications, and some possibilities one can speculate on, principally: it may be the case that there are some common roots to certain aspects of what later became Gnosticism, and what later became the Mahayana.

If you look at the austerity of early Buddhism, the Buddha's Buddhism, and compare it with the rather elaborate cosmologies of the Mahayana, it's possible to see an influence from the complex angelologies and heirarchical cosmologies of proto-Gnostic thought of the Middle East, as (perhaps) carried further East in the wake of Alexander's conquests.

I think there's also a similarity in tone between the evangelism of the Mahayana and the evangelism of Gnosticism.

IOW, influence might have gone both ways.

bagong

Well, the elaborate cosmologies are already present in early Buddhism; the heavens, hells, Brahmaa-worlds of form & non-form, the cosmography of Mount Sumeru and the four continents, etc. are all mentioned many, many times in the Paali Canon. In that respect, Mahaayaana made no innovations.

But on the original subject, I'm honestly puzzled by the fact that Buddhism didn't have more of an impact on the Hellenistic world west of Bactria. Buddhists were the world's first great proselytisers and extremely flexible in incorporating local gods/spirits into the Buddhist scheme of things, the Hellenestic world was extremely open to foreign cults (witness the popularity of Egyptian and Persian deities throughout the region), and Buddhism provided a genuine marriage of sophisticated religious philosophy, mysticism, and popular folk religion that I imagine would have been attractive to the Greeks/Hellenised peoples. It all adds up to ideal conditions for Buddhism spreading like wildfire throughout the Hellenistic world.

I love useless little counterfactual thought exercises, and the possibility of a firmly Buddhist Graeco-Roman world by 1 AD is one of the most tantalising.

premjan

I think the Persian mythos was stronger for the Greeks (e.g. Alexander and Cyrus), and definitely so for the Romans (e.g. Mithraism) than the Indic one.

bagong

Yes of course, that's why I said "counterfactual" (i.e. didn't really happen). Along the lines of "What if Hitler died in that car crash in 1927?", "What if Napoleon won Waterloo?" etc. I enjoy imagining what history COULD have been like if you change one slightly plausible variable.

Except in this case I am genuinely puzzled why my fantasy scenario didn't actually happen - from the Graeco-Buddhist base in Bactria, Buddhism would go on to become arguably the dominant religious tradition in China for the next 1000 years (and a major one to this day), so why didn't it happen in the other direction along the Silk Road? To me, it seems like the conditions for the spread of Buddhism were even better in the Hellenistic world than in Han-dynasty China.