Greco Buddhism

Yeah, but i also love greek art - so if we combine greek art and buddhism i would be very happy.

...

>Chögyam Trungpa
forgot to mention that vajrayana buddhism is not ideal. Vajrayana seeks buddhahood, theravada seeks enlightenment

What do you mean? care to elaborate?

here
>"Buddhahood is the state of an enlightened being, who having found the path of cessation of suffering,[5] is in the state of "No-more-Learning"." - from wikipedia.

so... what is the difference?

bumpe bumpe parabumpe parasambumpe bomphi soha

greek paganism is unlike what many people believe very similar to paganism.

both belief in reincarnation, atleast some Greeks did. So i suspect its just Buddhism + Greek gods

sadly there arent any sources ( to my knowledge)

*buddhism

Greeco-Buddhist is different from Theravada as it is the hub where Buddha was deified. Its the hub of Mahayana buddhism as well and gained the face/look of Buddha, through a Greek description of themselves.

Buddhism and Orphism share so much in common I wonder if they also share an ancestor.

i think you mean Pythagoreans

yeah could be

Pythagoreanism was heavily influenced by Orphism when it comes to concepts like the transmigration of souls, abstaining from meat, wearing pure white garments, the spiritual/corporeal dichotomy etc.

oh thank you for the info user. even plato mentioned the transmigration of souls. very interesting

Yeah Plato's Myth of Er is essentially a summary of the Orphic afterlife. Even if he didn't study it directly he definitely at least knew about it through the Pythagorean reforms of the same ideas.

there are many other greeks who have mentioned reincarnation. its even a theme in the old myths. hades who marries persephone, thus we have 6 months of winter and autumn (death), and 6 months of summer and spring (life).

Shape of Ancient Thoughts covers this topic.

The hypothesis is ancient Indian dharmic tradition propagated into Greek pre-socratic philosophy roots. Greek during the time was occupied partly by the Persians on the west and the Persians also occupied parts of India at the same time. This why the pre-socratic philosophy has so many parallels to Indian religions.

thats odd considering that pre socratic philosophy predated the arrival of persians.

it could be that greeks and indians had the same ancestors. Indo-Europeans bla bla

after i learned that greeks did not literally believe in their myths, i suspect that reincarnation was also a greek belief

Only by half a century for the first of the pre-socratic philosopher. However those ideas don't really click with the Indian contemporaries. It was only during the Persian Empire does the pre-socratic philosophies resemble the Indian religions/philosophies.

However historians are fairly certain that the Rig Vedas was composed close to 1000 years before the first pre-Socratic foundations were laid.

There's no transmigration of souls in the Rig Veda, that idea doesn't become important in Indian philosophy until the Upanishads.

The transmigration of souls(as well as karma/liberation(nirvana/moksha) arose out of Sramana(ascetics) tradition in India, a contemporary of Vedic culture. Some say its more of a rejection of the Vedic culture or a pre-Vedic, a harappan, tradition.

The influences you talk about from Hinduism in western Civilization is due to Zoroaster, who himself wanted his own tradition from the vedic traditions. Subsequently, many proto-philosophers in Magna Grecia were born in Asia Minor, where they came into contact with the teachings of Zoroaster within the Achaemenid empire, that had is as an official state religion

But a lot of the middle east was also buddhist - isis is fx. destroying a lot of buddhist monuments and temples lately. There was the middle eastern empire of oddiyana where Padmasambhava came from, and as described in his biography a lot of their customs seem pre muslim, though at the time of Padmasambhava the country was buddhist. Today scholars don't agree on where exactly Oddiyana was else than it is close to the border of tibet.

Interesting. I knew the Greco tradition was thought to be the earliest one to produce statues / images of the Buddha. I didn't know they spearheaded his deification, or the Mahayana tradition. Interestingly I've always kind of seen Mahayana as the Roman Catholicism of Buddhism, if you get what I'm saying.

The tibetan tradition sure is in structure - but i would say their authority is more earned than the catholic leaders. Morover i think east asian mahayana is quite christian in it's... i would call it psychology but that word already means something else - the buddhist edition of theology - metaphysics?

Was Grecobuddhism Mahayana or Therveda?

Greeco-Buddhism played a large role in deification of Buddha, so its more closer to Mahayana.

here
by east asian i mean china japan etc.

But the goal of Theravada is Arhathood, "inferior" to Buddhahood?

Do buddhist give up sex and Masturbation?

Monks do - everyone else not, from my understanding some ngakpas even have tantric sex with their ngakpafus, so it really depends on your practice what sexual misconduct mean.

here
but i think masturbation is discouraged, and the power of sex as something that encourages desires and grasping warned against - moreover in sexual union you exchange energy, and can thus create a lot of negativity for yourself if you don't look out for who you have sex with.

here again
But one should not avert nor be attached so for someone who has a lot of sexual aversion sex could be positive while for someone with a lot of sexual attachment sex could be negative.

Buddhism is literally the anti-thesis of Hinduism

Itself a sinthesis between Indo-Aryan belief in sun worship and the concept of eternity from the Harrapan civilization.

Any truth that Jesus was influenced by Buddhism?

Oh yeah. At least if you ask the Japs.

>ngakpas
ngakpas are not monks, they are high level lay practitioners

>greeks did not literally believe in their myths
Fucking debatable. I'd agree if you said cynics/stoics/epicureans/probably platonists/neo-platonists didn't believe in myth so much as it represented literal reality (while not rejecting it out of hand) but don't confuse educated philosophical groups with the general population. The neo-platonic idea of myth as a sort of archetypal wisdom is divorced from the basic religions of the common people - Julian is a prime Greco-roman example, and the (admittedly roman) seneca explicitly bemoans the belief in myth by commoners as justifying decadent behaviour.

tl;dr the greeks weren't fucking vulcans

He sure liked to slam back whiskey and fuck loose bitches, like a real westerner.

>I'd agree if you said cynics/stoics/epicureans/probably platonists/neo-platonists didn't believe in myth so much as it represented literal reality (while not rejecting it out of hand) but don't confuse educated philosophical groups with the general population.
but they all had "almost" the same vision of gods ( i know there are differences). i doubt it just came out of nowhere. Though it wouldn surprise me if the populace held different beliefs.

>Julian is a prime Greco-roman example,
i havent read his works. What was different in his beliefs than of philosophers?

>and the (admittedly roman) seneca explicitly bemoans the belief in myth by commoners as justifying decadent behaviour.
i think its fair to put both peoples together. romans did participate in greek athletic games.
do you remember in which part he said that?