The Ancient Greeks Who Converted to Buddhism
It would hardly be notable to make the acquaintance of a Greek Buddhist today. Despite having originated in Asia, that religion — or philosophy, or way of life, or whatever you prefer to call it — now has adherents all over the world. Modern-day Buddhists need not make an arduous journey in order to undertake an even more arduous course of study under a recognized master; nor are the forms of Buddhism they practice always recognizable to the layman. What’s more surprising is that the transplantation into and hybridization with other cultures that has brought about so many novel strains of Buddhism was going on even in the ancient world.
Take, for example, the “Greco-Buddhism” described in the Religion for Breakfast video above, the story of which involves a variety of fascinating figures both universally known and relatively obscure. The most famous of all of them would be Alexander the Great, who, as host Andrew Henry puts it, “conquered a massive empire stretching from Greece across central Asia all the way to the Indus River, Hellenizing the populations along the way.”
But “the cultural exchange didn’t just go one way,” as evidenced by the still-new Buddhist religion also spreading in the other direction, illustrated by pieces of text and works of art clearly shaped by both civilizational currents.
Other major players in Greco-Buddhism include the philosopher Pyrrho of Elis, who traveled with Alexander and took ideas of the suspension of judgment from India’s “gymnosophists”; Ashoka, emperor of the Indian subcontinent in the third century BC, an avowed Buddhist who renounced violence for compassion (and proselytization); and King Menander, “the most famous Greek who converted to Buddhism,” who appears as a character in an early Buddhist text. It can still be difficult to say for sure exactly who believed what in that period, but it’s not hard to identify resonances between Buddhist principles, broadly speaking, and those of such widely known ancient Greek schools of thought as Stoicism. Both of those belief systems now happen to have a good deal of currency in Silicon Valley, though what legacy they’ll leave to be discovered in its ruins a couple millennia from now remains to be seen.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.