"There are just too many similarities between the Big God and karmic religions to postulate their independent evolution." Can you elaborate? As far as I can see Christianity and Buddhism are an example of convergent evolution. Their fundamental rationales are wholly different as you note even as their conclusions (missionary, world-renouncing, asceticism, celibacy) are similar. Both value sustaining and spreading their memeplexes above all, the biological vehicles and their reproduction becoming secondary. It would be interesting to have evidence of shared influence between Mideast East and India.
Right, the similarity could be as a result of only a narrow set of narrative structures actually being capable of helping a civilization propagate itself through time.
> Their fundamental rationales are wholly different
Their fundamental rationales are identical: inter-elite warfare (Buddha was a prince, and Jesus a rich kid whose dad could afford to marry a virgin from a good family). The target in both cases was a dominant priestly caste (Brahmins, Pharisees).
> It would be interesting to have evidence of shared influence between Mideast East and India.
The Greeks discovered that the monsoon will blow you from Egypt to India and back with no rowing. This is usually attributed to Hippalus about the time of Jesus' death but he may just have been the first to advertise it. If so, when Jesus was living in Egypt as a boy there certainly would have been Gujarati Buddhist sailors there, as they came to eventually dominate that trade. Buddhist artifacts catering to them made by Roman artisans have been found at Berenike and Alexandria. The trade was then in its infancy but some centuries later Plutarch complained that all of Rome's silver was draining to India for silk, spices, and fine furniture, and southern India remains possibly the best place outside of Italy to dig for Roman coins. Similarities are unlikely to be coincidence.
But why do they necessarily "stem from a single root"? All people in the world needed and continue to feel the moral need to direct people's behavior in a certain direction. All of them. That's where the similarity of approaches came from. In addition, there has always been a borrowing of the views of neighbors.
“The Tao, which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgments. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgment of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or…ideologies…all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they posses."
Here's what I wrote in my chapter in Seshat History of Moralizing Religion:
"Mesopotamia and North India had been in close cultural contact at least since the Third Millennium BCE Interaction Sphere (Robbins Schug et al. 2012). In the middle of the first millennium BCE they became part of a single political-military network, “Central PMN” (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997), with a central role played by the Achaemenid Empire, which stretched from Egypt and Anatolia to Sogdiana and northwest India. It stands to reason that cultural elements originating in different religions within this Central PMN mixed and recombined promiscuously, giving rise to new forms that competed against each other. Striking similarities between the West Asian and South Asian transcendentalisms—beliefs in punishment/reward in the afterlife, internalization of moral norms, and an emphasis on salvation, liberation, or enlightenment (Strathern 2019)—coupled with their nearly simultaneous rise in closely culturally connected regions, argue against independent evolution."
You might be interested in Beckwith's theory that there was a prehistoric Scythian empire that influenced religion and philosophy from western China to Greece. https://amzn.to/45Iu4Hi
Another could be that the space of functional narrarives that actually work to keep a civilization alive is extremely narrow, and so memetic selection eventually lands on the same story every time.
I am a buddhist who keeps it simple and limits my practice to things like trying to comprehend the 4 noble truths. The diamond sutra can be helpful with that. I think this fascination with a cruel punishing afterlife may just be a human reaction to experiences of injustice that make us wish for such afterlife punishment. It doesn't fit easily into the 8 fold path that can be used to guide our way to a life of diminished suffering, or a life of happiness.
Good point about halos, Nick. Also see my response above about close connections between southwestern and south asia. There is a lot about Egypt in SHMR, in fact the image on the cover illustrates judgment of the dead:
From reading about the Tibetan Book of the Dead (reading *about* it; it would be very difficult for a layperson to actually read it), the heaven and hell of Buddhism are like karmic processing stages before reincarnation. I always figured it would be like a dream experience, mostly forgotten after rebirth.
My understanding of the heavens and hell in the Tibetan book of the dead is that they are realms that one can be reborn into and potentially remain in those non-human realms for centuries or millennia. In fact, it is more likely than you are in a non-human realm than in a human one for most of your trajectory through the cycle of rebirth. Landing in a human realm is considered a great opportunity to become liberated from the cycle, which is apparently not possible in any of the other realms. I think the clearest exposition of the Tibetan book of the dead perspective on this is Robert Thurman's commentary.
If you end up in hell, that sucks. If you end up in heaven it's supposedly pretty awesome. However, ironically being trapped in heaven doesn't give you much progress along the spiritual path. It's also my understanding that this concept of nonhuman realms as places where one may be reborn actually originated in India thousands of years before the birth of Christ. You might be trapped there for longer than the Christian or Islamic religions have existed. Perhaps this is why those religions perceive the soul as having only one human life and going to either heaven or hell permanently. For the entire history of those religions, that's exactly what happens to humans from the Tibetan perspective. You need a much longer arc to see how the full drama plays out. And you might just actually be worm food.
Declaration: I write from a naturalistic viewpoint and consider that there is no supernatural, although there may be natural things that we do not understand.
Consider Carl Yung and his Archetypes. You can spend pleasant hours trying to work out to what degree they are 'real' or just useful fictions. My suspicion is that they have no existence in themselves but achieve a vicarious life through the continuing behaviours of people. So yes, people can confirm that a Father Archetype exists in their beliefs, a Mother Archetype, and so on.
But these archetypes are founded upon human predispositions which arise out of the evolutionary processes working on a social animal.
So if there is an evolutionary predisposition to obey the troop leader, another predisposition to desire punishment for social villains, a desire to explain natural events, and an even more fundamental predisposition to avoid unclean food/water/diseased people then the idea of a supernatural being who should be obeyed and can correct 'bad things' is most likely to arise in many different societies.
Add on the predisposition to align with others' social beliefs and you have a situation where organised supernatural thinking is almost inevitable.
As I'm sure you know, the period when the Christian view of hell was formed was one of extensive contacts between Christians, Buddhists and Daoists, the primary vector being the Church of the East ("Nestorian" Church), but far from the only one. The silk roads are mainly a long series of small local exchanges - in trade, tools and ideas. So this may not be surprising.
It would be interesting to know the date when these images were created in Thailand. Not being an expert in this field, I would check the "reverse hypothesis" about the partial influence of Christianity (Islam?) on the eschatological views of the Thais.
According to Etienne Couvert and several other French religious scholars, the official buddhist chronoloy is false and Buddhism is actually a Christian heresy called Manicheism. The thesis is
1) Buddhism cam later than actually thought
2) Asia was evangelized much earlier than actually thought and the original Christian teachings were distorted and morphed into buddhism
The articles below make a convincing case and I don't know if similar research exist in English:
The world religions also should include Zoroastrianism. And this ancient faith of Central and West Asians is devoid of any “Hell” or “Heaven”. Unfortunately, the followers of this universal faith (had the potential) were either forced to becoming Muslim (Iran) or refusing which, emigrated to India (the Parsees. The Tata family is Parsee).
There are some 30,000 Zoroastrians left in Iran and India and their numbers are declining due to the strict proscription of accepting converts.
"There are just too many similarities between the Big God and karmic religions to postulate their independent evolution." Can you elaborate? As far as I can see Christianity and Buddhism are an example of convergent evolution. Their fundamental rationales are wholly different as you note even as their conclusions (missionary, world-renouncing, asceticism, celibacy) are similar. Both value sustaining and spreading their memeplexes above all, the biological vehicles and their reproduction becoming secondary. It would be interesting to have evidence of shared influence between Mideast East and India.
I elaborate in my chapter in Vol. I of the Seshat History of Moralizing Religion
… which costs $40. Can you summarise briefly here why you reject convergent evolution?
Right, the similarity could be as a result of only a narrow set of narrative structures actually being capable of helping a civilization propagate itself through time.
> Their fundamental rationales are wholly different
Their fundamental rationales are identical: inter-elite warfare (Buddha was a prince, and Jesus a rich kid whose dad could afford to marry a virgin from a good family). The target in both cases was a dominant priestly caste (Brahmins, Pharisees).
> It would be interesting to have evidence of shared influence between Mideast East and India.
The Greeks discovered that the monsoon will blow you from Egypt to India and back with no rowing. This is usually attributed to Hippalus about the time of Jesus' death but he may just have been the first to advertise it. If so, when Jesus was living in Egypt as a boy there certainly would have been Gujarati Buddhist sailors there, as they came to eventually dominate that trade. Buddhist artifacts catering to them made by Roman artisans have been found at Berenike and Alexandria. The trade was then in its infancy but some centuries later Plutarch complained that all of Rome's silver was draining to India for silk, spices, and fine furniture, and southern India remains possibly the best place outside of Italy to dig for Roman coins. Similarities are unlikely to be coincidence.
While tangential, Sanskrit and Aramaic as repositories of religious/spiritual thoughts have interesting overlaps.
The single root:
"Prosocial religions as folk-technologies of mutual policing"
https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=ZHpmcFYAAAAJ&sortby=pubdate&citation_for_view=ZHpmcFYAAAAJ%3ARGFaLdJalmkC&inst=6416714965532506866
Yes, I know this article (and most authors) (and they cite our work)
I wonder what you make of it -- and even more so, what you make of the general "ecological approach to culture" of which it's an instance:
https://fresh-cnrs.org/2025/05/04/new-theoretical-paper-the-ecological-approach-to-culture-by-baumard-andre/
Would be cool to see you among commenters on it at E&HB:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1956040455536240877&as_sdt=4005&sciodt=0,6&hl=en&inst=6416714965532506866
But why do they necessarily "stem from a single root"? All people in the world needed and continue to feel the moral need to direct people's behavior in a certain direction. All of them. That's where the similarity of approaches came from. In addition, there has always been a borrowing of the views of neighbors.
“The Tao, which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgments. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgment of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or…ideologies…all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they posses."
― C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
Not enough credit is given to the idea that ideas traveled in antiquity. https://ataraxiaorbust.substack.com/p/its-time-to-take-seriously-greek
Here's what I wrote in my chapter in Seshat History of Moralizing Religion:
"Mesopotamia and North India had been in close cultural contact at least since the Third Millennium BCE Interaction Sphere (Robbins Schug et al. 2012). In the middle of the first millennium BCE they became part of a single political-military network, “Central PMN” (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997), with a central role played by the Achaemenid Empire, which stretched from Egypt and Anatolia to Sogdiana and northwest India. It stands to reason that cultural elements originating in different religions within this Central PMN mixed and recombined promiscuously, giving rise to new forms that competed against each other. Striking similarities between the West Asian and South Asian transcendentalisms—beliefs in punishment/reward in the afterlife, internalization of moral norms, and an emphasis on salvation, liberation, or enlightenment (Strathern 2019)—coupled with their nearly simultaneous rise in closely culturally connected regions, argue against independent evolution."
You might be interested in Beckwith's theory that there was a prehistoric Scythian empire that influenced religion and philosophy from western China to Greece. https://amzn.to/45Iu4Hi
https://peterturchin.com/the-scythian-empire/
Always nice to know that I got something right. ;)
One hypothesis I could be they share a single
Historical root.
Another could be that the space of functional narrarives that actually work to keep a civilization alive is extremely narrow, and so memetic selection eventually lands on the same story every time.
I am a buddhist who keeps it simple and limits my practice to things like trying to comprehend the 4 noble truths. The diamond sutra can be helpful with that. I think this fascination with a cruel punishing afterlife may just be a human reaction to experiences of injustice that make us wish for such afterlife punishment. It doesn't fit easily into the 8 fold path that can be used to guide our way to a life of diminished suffering, or a life of happiness.
I am a Zen Buddhist.
and a modern spin on hell
that's it a place where we put ourselves.
Most of us have experienced suffering which
we do to ourselves.
There is a lot to be said about cross-cultural
connections between Buddhism and western art and
religion. If you look at the difference between
Buddhist and Hindu art (especially sculpture) the
Greek influence on Buddhist art is obvious. Early
Buddhism flourished in North India and Afghanistan,
which were on the edge of the Hellenistic world.
The clearest cultural connection between Christian
and Buddhist iconography for me is the halo.
Christian saints and Bodhisattvas both have halos,
and it's hard to imagine that as convergent evolution.
I don't find the connection between a "big God" and karma
very convincing. In the first a personal deity decides
to punish you or not, and the second should be thought of
as a law of nature.
Peter:
Have you tried to bring ancient Egyptian religion into the
story? Certainly Osiris judges the dead, but I don't think
the Egyptians had a big central god.
Good point about halos, Nick. Also see my response above about close connections between southwestern and south asia. There is a lot about Egypt in SHMR, in fact the image on the cover illustrates judgment of the dead:
https://www.amazon.com/Seshat-History-Moralizing-Religion-Perspectives/dp/1967343004/
Incidentally, ma'at was also conceptualized as an impersonal force, similar to karma.
From reading about the Tibetan Book of the Dead (reading *about* it; it would be very difficult for a layperson to actually read it), the heaven and hell of Buddhism are like karmic processing stages before reincarnation. I always figured it would be like a dream experience, mostly forgotten after rebirth.
My understanding of the heavens and hell in the Tibetan book of the dead is that they are realms that one can be reborn into and potentially remain in those non-human realms for centuries or millennia. In fact, it is more likely than you are in a non-human realm than in a human one for most of your trajectory through the cycle of rebirth. Landing in a human realm is considered a great opportunity to become liberated from the cycle, which is apparently not possible in any of the other realms. I think the clearest exposition of the Tibetan book of the dead perspective on this is Robert Thurman's commentary.
If you end up in hell, that sucks. If you end up in heaven it's supposedly pretty awesome. However, ironically being trapped in heaven doesn't give you much progress along the spiritual path. It's also my understanding that this concept of nonhuman realms as places where one may be reborn actually originated in India thousands of years before the birth of Christ. You might be trapped there for longer than the Christian or Islamic religions have existed. Perhaps this is why those religions perceive the soul as having only one human life and going to either heaven or hell permanently. For the entire history of those religions, that's exactly what happens to humans from the Tibetan perspective. You need a much longer arc to see how the full drama plays out. And you might just actually be worm food.
Declaration: I write from a naturalistic viewpoint and consider that there is no supernatural, although there may be natural things that we do not understand.
Consider Carl Yung and his Archetypes. You can spend pleasant hours trying to work out to what degree they are 'real' or just useful fictions. My suspicion is that they have no existence in themselves but achieve a vicarious life through the continuing behaviours of people. So yes, people can confirm that a Father Archetype exists in their beliefs, a Mother Archetype, and so on.
But these archetypes are founded upon human predispositions which arise out of the evolutionary processes working on a social animal.
So if there is an evolutionary predisposition to obey the troop leader, another predisposition to desire punishment for social villains, a desire to explain natural events, and an even more fundamental predisposition to avoid unclean food/water/diseased people then the idea of a supernatural being who should be obeyed and can correct 'bad things' is most likely to arise in many different societies.
Add on the predisposition to align with others' social beliefs and you have a situation where organised supernatural thinking is almost inevitable.
As I'm sure you know, the period when the Christian view of hell was formed was one of extensive contacts between Christians, Buddhists and Daoists, the primary vector being the Church of the East ("Nestorian" Church), but far from the only one. The silk roads are mainly a long series of small local exchanges - in trade, tools and ideas. So this may not be surprising.
It's possible. I'd be curious what evidence we have.
It would be interesting to know the date when these images were created in Thailand. Not being an expert in this field, I would check the "reverse hypothesis" about the partial influence of Christianity (Islam?) on the eschatological views of the Thais.
I always thought that the Muslim prohibition against eating pork related back to Buddhist metaphor of "slaying the pig of ignorance"
According to Etienne Couvert and several other French religious scholars, the official buddhist chronoloy is false and Buddhism is actually a Christian heresy called Manicheism. The thesis is
1) Buddhism cam later than actually thought
2) Asia was evangelized much earlier than actually thought and the original Christian teachings were distorted and morphed into buddhism
The articles below make a convincing case and I don't know if similar research exist in English:
http://salve-regina.com/index.php?title=Gnose_et_Bouddhisme_:_aux_sources_du_Bouddhisme
http://salve-regina.com/index.php?title=Note_sur_les_origines_du_Bouddhisme
Dear Peter,
The world religions also should include Zoroastrianism. And this ancient faith of Central and West Asians is devoid of any “Hell” or “Heaven”. Unfortunately, the followers of this universal faith (had the potential) were either forced to becoming Muslim (Iran) or refusing which, emigrated to India (the Parsees. The Tata family is Parsee).
There are some 30,000 Zoroastrians left in Iran and India and their numbers are declining due to the strict proscription of accepting converts.
Buddhism is not a religion but a philosophy and psychology. dalailama.com