"Pourquoi pas? Et pourquoi pas l'inverse?": Edgar Morin and Robert Thurman's challenge on the sense of influences between Christianity and Mahāyāna
When I contacted Edgar Morin, his kind secretary sent me this reply:"Why not? And why not the reverse?" :"Pourquoi pas, et pourquoi pas l'inverse?". In the same vein, in May 2018, in the Tibet House in NewYork that he had founded with the Dalai Lama, actor Richard Gere and composer Philip Glass, Robert Thurman, the Columbia University professor, the first Western monk ordained by the Tibetan spiritual leader (and father of actress Uma Thurman), after listening to me and realising that I was not a hidden Christian missionary, dropped the sentence quoted at the opening of this book:"Jesus and Avalokiteshvara are the same person, that's for sure" adding that the geographical direction of the influence remained to be determined.
I replied to Edgar Morin and Robert Thurman that Gandhāra, the birthplace of Mahāyāna, spoke Greek and Aramaic and was strongly Hellenised by Alexander's conquests, while the Mediterranean world bore no signs of buddhisation.
It was the thesis of Raphaël Liogier5, a lecturer at Aix-Marseille University and director of the Observatoire du religieux between 2006 and 2014, that Jesus, recognised at birth by the Magi as the 'son of Amitābha', had been commissioned to bring the Dharma to the West. But University of Strasbourg professor Guillaume Ducoeur6 rightly pointed out that the author's quotations fromJésus, Bouddha d'Occident mixed up the Theravāda, i.e. the Buddhist schools in the historical continuation of the teachings and early disciples of the Buddha since the 6th century B.C. (with their already existing divisions), and the Great Vehicle, without taking into account the chronology of the texts, of paramount importance. Instead, the scholar - Indian, it must be emphasised - K.S. Dwivedi7 does not hesitate to speak ofGreco-Buddhism, quoting Richard C. Foltz, professor of religion at Columbia University in New-York8:"The key influences in the formation of the early developments of the Mahāyāna and Pure Land movements (...) must be sought in the earlier encounters of Buddhism along the Silk Road".
Moreover, when one looks at the birth of Christianity within Judaism, no Buddhist elements are evident. Nor in the Qumrān manuscripts, if one thinks of an influence of the Dead Sea Essenes community on Jesus and his cousin John the Baptist before him. Instead, what appears to be innovative in Buddhism within the Kushana Empire in the 1st century A.D. bears a striking resemblance to the history and message of Christ. However, there remain facts prior to the birth of Christianity and Buddhism that cannot be eluded.
The Therapeutae of Alexandria and Buddhism according to Clement of Alexandria
"In the West, the Buddha's name first appears in Clement of Alexandria," recalls Giuseppe Tucci9. In fact, Adriano Olivieri10 explains:"Some of Ashoka's emissaries were Greek Buddhist monks while some communities in the Hellenistic world followed the practices of Buddhist asceticism. Thus that of Alexandria in Egypt, mentioned by Clement of Alexandria (c. 150 A.D.-215 A.D.), who recognised the influence of the Bactrian Buddhists and Indian Gymnosophists on Greek thought and the pre-Christian order of the Therapeutae mentioned by Philo of Alexandria." An influence that also applied to the Scepticism of Pyrrhon (c. 365 B.C. - c. 275 B.C.) and his philosophical doubt about the reality of the world and the knowledge we can have of it. The Stoicism of Zeno of Centius (336 - 335 BC - 263 BC) may also bear the marks of an Eastern influence with its desire to control the body, the desires, the belief in reincarnation, the eternal return of things and the palingenesis (the cyclical destruction and recreation of the world). Although such concepts were present as far back as the Presocratics and pervaded all of An
