Contemporary Buddhism

An Interdisciplinary Journal

ISSN: 1463-9947 (Print) 1476-7953 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcbh20

Greek Buddha: Pyrrho’s encounter with early

Buddhism in central Asia

Stephen Batchelor

To cite this article: Stephen Batchelor (2016): Greek Buddha: Pyrrho’s encounter with early
Buddhism in central Asia, Contemporary Buddhism, DOI: 10.1080/14639947.2016.1189141

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14639947.2016.1189141

Published online: 06 Jun 2016.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 6

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rcbh20

Download by: [RMIT University Library] Date: 19 June 2016, At: 19:36
 Contemporary Buddhism, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14639947.2016.1189141

REVIEW ARTICLE

GREEK BUDDHA: PYRRHO’S ENCOUNTER WITH

EARLY BUDDHISM IN CENTRAL ASIA
Stephen Batchelor
Independent scholar, La Sauve, France
Downloaded by [RMIT University Library] at 19:36 19 June 2016

ABSTRACT
In his book Greek Buddha: Pyrrho’s Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia
(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015), Christopher Beckwith
argues that not only was the Buddha a Scythian from Central Asia, but that the
earliest reliable record of Buddhist teaching is to be found in a text attributed to
Pyrrho, the Greek founder of philosophical scepticism, cited by the third-century
Christian bishop Eusebius. This review considers these claims in the light of
epigraphical, textual and archaeological evidence. It then offers an alternative
account of Pyrrho’s possible encounter with Buddhist ideas during his stay in
India as part of the entourage of Alexander the Great in the fourth century bce,
and considers the formative role that the teaching of Democritus and his followers
may have had in the evolution of Pyrrho’s sceptical attitude to life.

With the ease of travelling by air to places all over the globe, we tend to assume
that people of antiquity led geographically confined existences on account of
their lacking the means to cover comparable distances. While this may have
been true for the majority of labourers and peasants (as is largely still the case
today), it fails to recognize the extent of traffic along sea and land routes that
criss-crossed the ancient world from long before the time of the Buddha. Just
because such journeys would have taken much longer and involved greater
hardship does not mean that people did not make them. If worthwhile profits or
conquests were to be made, then traders and generals would undertake what-
ever arduous travels were needed to achieve their goals. Similarly, if a renowned
teacher were rumoured to be active in a faraway land, then students would walk
for hundreds of kilometres to hear what he had to say.
A discourse in the Pali Udāna tells of a monk called Soṇa, who walked 900 km
from the kingdom of Avantī to Sāvatthi to see the Buddha on behalf of his
teacher Mahākaccāna, apparently for advice on the modification of monastic
rules. Udāna. 5.6. The Pali Vinaya likewise relates how Jīvaka, the doctor to the
Maghada court and personal physician to the Buddha, travelled around 1600 km

CONTACT  Stephen Batchelor  agnostic@club-internet.fr

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 2    S. Batchelor

from Rājagaha to Taxila (the capital of Gandhāra, then a satrapy of the Persian
Achaemenid empire (550–330 bce)) in order to study medicine. Mahāvagga.
VIII, 1. 8–13.
Likewise Greeks routinely covered such distances at the time of the
Achaemenid empire and, after its defeat by Alexander, during the Hellenistic
period. According to Herodotus, in 515 bce the third Achaemenid emperor Darius
I employed Scylax, a Greek mariner from Caryanda in Asia Minor (Turkey), to
ascertain the course of the Indus and where it issued into the sea (Herodotus,
4. 44, quoted in Panchenko 1998). Scylax subsequently wrote an account of
his travels, which has been lost but is quoted in other Greek histories. Dmitri
Panchenko (1998) has recently argued that Scylax may well have sailed along
the Ganges, passing between Kosala, Magadha and Vajji, exiting into the Bay of
Downloaded by [RMIT University Library] at 19:36 19 June 2016

Bengal, then heading down the coast until he reached Sri Lanka before return-
ing to Persia to report to Darius. This would imply that Darius not only had his
eyes on Gandhāra but, like Alexander after him, the entire Indian subcontinent.
Thus 40 years before Gotama was born, a Persian ruler used the services of a
Greek sailor to prepare for the invasion and conquest of India. After the incor-
poration of Gandhāra as a satrapy of the Persian empire, Darius’s son Xerxes
recruited Indian troops from the region into the army that attacked mainland
Greece in 483 bce, around the estimated time of the Buddha’s birth. This would
have entailed these soldiers travelling either overland or by sea approximately
5000 km from their homeland.
As the subtitle suggests, Christopher I. Beckwith’s Greek Buddha advances the
thesis that Pyrrho (c.360–c.270 bce), the philosopher who founded the school
of scepticism on returning to Greece after having accompanied Alexander to
India, based his ideas on the teachings of early Buddhism with which he became
acquainted during his time in Bactria and Gandhāra, i.e. modern Afghanistan
and Pakistan. This thesis is not new. It was first suggested by Friedrich Nietzsche
who declared in the posthumously published The Will to Power (1901) that:
‘Although a Greek, [Pyrrho] was a Buddhist, even a Buddha.’ More recently, Adrian
Kuzminski (2008) has argued in Pyrrhonism: How the Ancient Greeks Reinvented
Buddhism that Pyrrho drew his key ideas from Buddhism.
Whether and to what degree Pyrrhonism––and, by implication, the sceptical
tradition of Western thought––was influenced by Buddhist ideas has been much
debated by scholars but so far there is no consensus among them. Most would
maintain that Pyrrho’s ideas are primarily drawn from and develop on the work
of Greek predecessors, while admitting that a certain Buddhist flavour might
be detected here and there. Beckwith goes much further than this. In doing so,
he challenges a great deal of received opinion about the person of the Buddha
himself as well as what constituted his earliest teachings.
To make his case, Beckwith has to overcome a number of objections. The first
of these is that, according to scholars of Buddhist history, Buddhism is unlikely
to have been established in Bactria and Gandhāra during Pyrrho’s time there.
 Contemporary Buddhism   3

There is no textual, epigraphic or archaeological evidence to support such a

claim. Yet given the distances people were willing to travel at this time, I do not
find it difficult to imagine the presence of wandering Buddhist monks in the
areas through which Alexander’s army and philosophers would have passed. The
Pali commentaries (admittedly a late source) maintain that Pasenadi, Bandhula,
Mahāli and Angulimāla, contemporaries of Gotama, who lived in the Eastern
Gangetic basin and came from the same social background, studied at the uni-
versity in the Gandhāran capital of Taxila. In Confession of a Buddhist Atheist I
argued that Gotama himself may also have studied there, an idea, however, that
has yet to be accepted by Buddhist scholars (Batchelor 2010, 245–251).
Beckwith proposes that the presence of the powerful Achaemenid empire
may well have influenced the worldview and even religious thinking of peoples
Downloaded by [RMIT University Library] at 19:36 19 June 2016

far beyond its borders, a theme that has largely been neglected in studies of the
Buddha and early Buddhist history. By shifting attention away from Gotama’s
traditional homeland in the eastern Gangetic basin, Beckwith brings into focus
the greatest empire the world had yet known to reveal a highly cosmopolitan
society that drew Greeks and Indians alike into its realm. It likewise served as
a centre of trade and learning, drawing merchants, scholars and teachers from
as far afield as China. This relocation of the centre of cultural gravity at the
Buddha’s time is the most notable feature of Greek Buddha. Most of the theses
developed in the course of the book stem from this reimagining of the cultural
geography of the time.
Yet whatever merits Beckwith’s proposals may have for our broad under-
standing of Indian thought at this period, I think he goes too far in his claim that
the Buddha was a Scythian––a nomadic people of Central Asia––who would
have been born within the borders of Achaemenid territory. To account for the
difference of Buddhist teaching from that of other Indian schools, particularly
Brahmanism, he argues that this is because ‘Early Buddhism resulted from the
Buddha’s rejection of the basic principles of Early Zoroastrianism, while Early
Brahmanism represents the acceptance of those principles’ (43), thereby claim-
ing that two of the most influential movements of Indian religious thought
were not Indian at all but had their origins in Persia. As to why Gotama would
subsequently choose to travel from this centre of philosophical, religious and
cultural vitality to a remote, uncivilized region (as Beckwith imagines it) of the
eastern Gangetic basin in order to teach a Dharma founded on the rejection of
a Persian religion that no one would have heard of is left unanswered.
A far more plausible explanation for the difference between early Buddhism
and Brahmanism has been proposed by Johannes Bronkhorst in his books
Greater Magadha (2007) and Buddhism in the Shadow of Brahmanism (2011),
which Beckwith includes among his sources. Bronkhorst’s thesis is that Gotama
was born, grew up and taught in areas of the eastern Gangetic basin, which had
its own distinctive culture, one that was not influenced by Brahmanical social
or religious ideas. Since a fourfold class (varṇa) system, belief in a Creator God
 4    S. Batchelor

and the notion of an eternal soul were simply not part of Greater Maghadan
culture, Gotama’s teaching was neither informed by such ideas nor was it pri-
marily a reaction against them. For Bronkhorst, the distinctive character of Early
Buddhism, therefore, is not due to its having originated further west in Central
Asia, as Beckwith supposes, but in a region much further to the east that had
not yet been ‘Brahmanized’.
The primary piece of evidence that Beckwith provides for the Buddha being
Scythian is that the epithet Śakamuni, in its Gāndhārī spelling, could be inter-
preted to mean ‘Sage of the Sakas’, i.e. an eastern branch of the Scythian people,
rather than the usual ‘Sage of the Sakyans’, i.e. a clan that lived on the border of
present day Nepal and India (a tradition ‘full of chronological and other insuper-
able problems’). From this speculation, we jump to the confident assertion that
Downloaded by [RMIT University Library] at 19:36 19 June 2016

‘the Buddha is the only Indian holy man before early modern times who bears
an epithet explicitly identifying him as a non-Indian, a foreigner’ (39). And since
the Scythians are nomadic, this leads Beckwith to infer that ‘it is thus quite likely
that Gautama himself introduced wandering asceticism into India, just as the
Scythians had earlier invented mounted steppe nomadism’ (40).
A significant difficulty with this thesis is that around 250 bce, a nine-me-
tre pillar of hard sandstone was cut from a quarry at Chunar, near Benares,
and transported some 500 km north and erected near the village of Lumbini
(in present day Nepal), bearing the inscription:
King Piyadasi, the beloved of the devas, in the twentieth year of the coronation,
himself made a royal visit. Buddha Sākyamuni having been born here a stone
railing was built and a stone pillar erected. The Bhagavan having been born here,
Lummini Village was tax-reduced and entitled to the eighth part. (Bidari 2004, 120)
King Piyadasi is understood to be the emperor Aśoka (304–232 bce), who erected
similar pillars to mark the site of the Buddha’s awakening (Bodh Gaya) and his
first teaching (Sarnath). Not only have these and 17 other inscribed pillars
survived, they are believed to have been erected within about 150 years of the
Buddha’s death. To defend his thesis that the Buddha was born at least 1600 km
further west in Central Asia, Beckwith has to account for a considerable body of
epigraphic evidence, which constitutes the earliest known written inscriptions
in the Indian sub-continent. To do this, he provides a 50-page appendix ‘On
the Early Indian Inscriptions’. This close reading and study of the Aśokan
pillar and rock edicts is not without interest. He highlights a number of problems
and inconsistencies in these texts that scholars have discussed over the
years, and demonstrates that we need to be cautious in taking them at face
value.1 But to throw into question the very existence of an emperor called Aśoka,
for example, goes beyond what can reasonably be deduced, to my mind, from
the evidence. So intent is Beckwith on demonstrating the Scythian origins of the
Buddha that he is prepared to disregard a unique body of text cut into stone in
favour of a dubious etymology of the Gāndhārī epithet Śakamuni, which even
he acknowledges can be no earlier than the first century ce.
 Contemporary Buddhism   5

Beckwith also chooses to ignore the findings of recent archaeological work at

Lumbini, published in 2013, undertaken by Dr. Robin Coningham and his team
from the University of Durham, who uncovered wooden remains beneath the
layer of the Aśokan pillar, which have been carbon-dated to the sixth century
BCE (Coningham et al. 2013). Although the archaeologists drew the unjustified
conclusion that this ‘proves’ that the Buddha was born much earlier than schol-
ars (including Beckwith) believe and constitutes the earliest known Buddhist
shrine – a claim that was given much fanfare in the international press when
the findings were published – all it shows is that a wooden structure that was
already there was subsequently replaced by a pillar and a stone railing. The
archaeologists suggest that this structure may have originally been a tree shrine.
Yet whether or not it was such a shrine, the excavation’s most significant finding
Downloaded by [RMIT University Library] at 19:36 19 June 2016

is that the pillar was erected on a site that was already revered as the place of
Gotama’s birth.
In order to consider Beckwith’s thesis that the teachings of Pyrrho represent
those of Early Buddhism, it is first necessary to quote the passage cited and
analysed in detail in Greek Buddha to support this claim. This is how it appears
in Long and Sedley’s translation:
Pyrrho of Elis … left nothing in writing, but his pupil Timon says that whoever
wants to be happy must consider these three questions: First, how are things by
nature? Secondly, what attitude should we adopt towards them? Thirdly, what
will be the outcome for those who have this attitude? According to Timon, Pyrrho
declared that things are equally indifferent, unmeasurable and unarbitrable. For
this reason neither our sensations nor our opinions tell us truths or falsehoods.
Therefore for this reason we should not put our trust in them one bit, but we
should be unopinionated, uncommitted and unwavering, saying concerning each
individual thing that it no more is than is not, or it both is and is not, or it neither
is or is not. The outcome for those who actually adopt this attitude, says Timon,
will be first speechlessness and then freedom from disturbance (ataraxia)… (Long
and Sedley 1987, 14–15)
This passage is quoted by the fourth-century Church Father Eusebius in
a polemical tract Getting Ready for the Gospel (Praeparatio Evangelica) from a
now lost work of a second-century ce Peripatetic philosopher called Aristocles
of Messana. Adrian Kuzminski points out that the ‘meaning and reliability’ of
this text ‘remain subject to dispute’ among scholars of Greek philosophy, partly
because Aristocles was a dogmatic thinker who was antipathetic to scepticism in
general and thereby unlikely to represent it fairly (Kuzminski 2008, 39). Beckwith,
however, maintains that this passage is not only a reliable record of Pyrrho’s
teaching but also ‘the absolutely earliest known bit of Buddhist doctrinal text’
(83, italics in original).
The basis for this claim lies in Beckwith’s interpretation of Pyrrho’s ‘indifferent,
unmeasurable and unarbitrable’ as being identical to the Buddha’s three marks
of being (trilakṣana): impermanent, suffering and not-self. ‘Both the Buddha and
Pyrrho’, he says, ‘make a declaration in which they list three logical characteristics
 6    S. Batchelor

of all discrete “(ethical) things, affairs, questions”, but they give them exclusively
negatively, that is, “All matters are non-x, non-y, and non-z”’ (83). But this is bla-
tantly untrue. While ‘impermanent’ (anicca) and ‘not-self’ (anattā) are prefixed
with the privative ‘a-’, ‘suffering’ (dukkha) is not.
Beckwith is not at all happy with the translation of dukkha as ‘suffering’,
and insists that it means ‘uneasy, unsatisfactory, unsteady’, thereby introduc-
ing, in English at least, negative terms to accord with the Aristocles fragment.
Despite his strenuous philological efforts to demonstrate how dukkha needs
to be understood negatively as the absence of happiness etc., it does not alter
the brute fact that dukkha is an affirmative term. For Buddhist ethical practice,
this is crucially important. First and foremost, dukkha refers to the existential
condition of birth, sickness, aging and death. A child’s agonized death from an
Downloaded by [RMIT University Library] at 19:36 19 June 2016

incurable disease is not uneasy and unsatisfactory but tragic and painful. And
only by acknowledging and embracing this reality is the path of the Dharma
able to unfold as a response to dukkha.
In contrast to his emphasis on Pyrrho’s ethics and scepticism, Beckwith’s read-
ing of the three characteristics is jarringly metaphysical in tone. Not only does
he want to read dukkha as an ontological rather than ethical category, he also
interprets anattā as meaning ‘No (innate) Self (-Identity)’ rather than ‘not-self’
(the term favoured by most translators of Buddhist texts today), which simply
implies that the self is not identical to its physical and mental components (the
five upādānakandha). Both these tendencies are characteristic of later meta-
physical doctrines of Buddhist philosophy but find little support in the earliest
discourses. Yet so convinced is Beckwith of the primacy of the trilakṣana doctrine
to what he considers to be Early Buddhism, that he pays scant attention to what
most other scholars consider to be the most striking parallel of the Aristocles
fragment to Buddhism: that ‘each individual thing that it no more is than is not,
or it both is and is not, or it neither is or is not’. This tetralemma is found both in
the Pali suttas and, most famously, in the Madhyamaka philosophy of Nāgārjuna.
But Beckwith dismisses it as pertaining to what he calls ‘Normative Buddhism’
and thereby not worthy of consideration when it comes to proving that Pyrrho
endorsed the earliest teachings of the Buddha.
On what grounds, however, is Beckwith able to support his claim that the
trilakṣana doctrine constitutes the Buddha’s ‘earliest attested teaching’ (343)
and on which ‘Pyrrho’s teachings … are manifestly based’ (313)? Logically, to
demonstrate that the teachings of P are based on the teachings of B, one would
need to provide an example of B’s teaching that can be reliably shown to have
preceded an example of P’s teaching. Beckwith acknowledges this in declaring
that while Pyrrho’s ‘tripartite statement’ is without precedent in Greek thought,
it ‘is not merely similar to Buddhism, it corresponds closely to a famous state-
ment of the Buddha preserved in canonical texts’. To provide an example of this
famous statement, Beckwith cites a text from the Pali Canon, Aṅguttara Nikāya
III, 136, even while declaring in a footnote that such texts reflect ‘Normative
 Contemporary Buddhism   7

Buddhism’, which he regards as ‘a product of the Saka-Kushan period’, i.e. far

later than the time of Pyrrho (125, fn. 28).
Moreover, he quotes this sutta text not from the original Pali or even a
respected English translation but from a reference made in a popular book called
Buddhism: Introducing the Buddhist Experience by Donald W. Mitchell (2008).2
But since Beckwith has already said that he considers such texts to be dated
to a time later than Pyrrho they can hardly serve as sources on which Pyrrho’s
teaching are ‘manifestly based’.
A more appropriate citation for Beckwith to have chosen, which, to my mind,
would have a greater claim to predating the arrival of Pyrrho in India, is found
in the pericope:
‘What do you think, bhikkhus? Are your body, feelings, perceptions, inclinations
Downloaded by [RMIT University Library] at 19:36 19 June 2016

and consciousness permanent or impermanent?’

‘Impermanent, sir.’
‘Does what is impermanent give rise to happiness or suffering?’
‘Suffering, sir.’
‘Is it right to think of something impermanent and fickle, that gives rise to suffering
as: ‘This is mine. I am this. This is my self’?’
‘No, sir.’ Saṃyutta Nikāya. 22.59; Mahāvagga. I. 6, 38–47.
This passage, which is found in what is regarded by tradition as the Buddha’s
second discourse and cited throughout the Nikāyas, shows that these three
‘characteristics’ constitute a sequence of personal insights, one leading to the
next, aimed at bringing the practitioner to disengagement, dispassion and lib-
eration (nirvana). They are questions about first-person experience, not abstract
descriptions of reality. In this regard, they have no obvious correlation to Pyrrho’s
‘equally indifferent, unmeasurable and unarbitrable’ marks of ethical matters,
even in Beckwith’s preferred translation of ‘equally undifferentiated, unstable,
and undecided’.
So what does Beckwith mean when he says that the three characteristics are
the Buddha’s ‘earliest attested teaching’? Where exactly is this ‘attested’? The
answer to the question is found in the epilogue ‘Pyrrho’s Teacher: The Buddha
and his Awakening’. In the sub-section ‘Elements of Early Buddhism’ we find
a table with two columns, the first listing elements found in ‘Early Buddhist
period texts’ and the second in ‘Normative period texts’. However, the only Early
Buddhist period text cited here as a possible source for the three characteristics
turns out to be the Aristocles fragment itself. In other words, the three char-
acteristics are the earliest attested teaching of the Buddha because they are
attested to in a Greek text on Pyrrhonian philosophy that Beckwith interprets
as the earliest attested teaching of the Buddha. Pyrrho’s teaching, therefore,
turns out to be manifestly based on Pyrrho’s teaching.
A professor of Central Asian Studies at Indiana University, specializing in
linguistics (he has degrees in Chinese and Tibetan), Beckwith makes no claim
 8    S. Batchelor

to be an expert either in early Buddhist studies or Hellenistic philosophy. This

becomes more and more apparent as one picks apart the smoke-and-mirrors
scholarship of Greek Buddha. The detailed linguistic analyses of technical terms
may impress one with Beckwith’s skill in interpreting arcane textual data, but
this often serves as a smokescreen that enables him to then make sweeping
generalizations with little or no foundation. This is a great pity because, at root,
I believe that Beckwith is on to something important that could indeed lead to
a revision of our understanding of the origins of both Buddhism and Western
Scepticism.
Beckwith’s unconvincing attempt to demonstrate how Pyrrho was teaching a
version of the trilakṣana leads him to marginalize a far more compelling poten-
tial Buddhist source for Pyrrho’s philosophy. This is the Aṭṭhakavagga (‘Chapter
Downloaded by [RMIT University Library] at 19:36 19 June 2016

of Eights’) from the Pali Sutta Nipāta, which on linguistic and other grounds
scholars broadly agree to belong to the earliest stratum of the Pali Canon.3
Beckwith is aware of this text and cites it on occasion to support his thesis but
seems reluctant to grant it the significance it deserves in providing a basis on
which Pyrrho’s teaching could be based. According to K. R. Norman, the emi-
nent specialist in Indo-Aryan Prakrits, since only four of the 16 chapters of the
Aṭṭhakavagga (nos. 2, 3, 4 and 5)
have aṭṭhakasutta in their names and eight verses, in the Trisṭubh metre, which is
generally speaking an old metre in Pāli, we might reasonably suppose that these
four suttas are the core of the Aṭṭhakavagga, to which other suttas have been
added. (Norman 1992, 323)
Putting to one side for the moment Beckwith’s reluctance to grant authority
to the Pali Canon, out of all the hundreds of Pali suttas, these four eight-verse
discourses could best lay claim to being the earliest example of Buddhist teach-
ing to have come down to us. To distinguish them from the Aṭṭhakavagga as a
whole, I will refer to them as the Four Eights.
What is immediately apparent on reading the Four Eights is that they are
strikingly devoid of any classical Buddhist doctrines such as the Four Noble
Truths, the links of dependent origination, the jhānas, nirvana etc. And let alone
as part of a triad of ‘characteristics’, the individual terms anicca, dukkha and
anattā do not occur even once. Instead, we have a series of verses that present
a profoundly Pyrrhonian view of life and the world. Here are some examples:
Wrong-minded people do voice opinions
as do truth-minded people too.
When an opinion is stated, the sage is not drawn in—
there’s nothing arid about the sage.
Nowhere does a lucid one
hold contrived views about is or is not.
How could he succumb to them,
having let go of illusions and conceit? He’s uninvolved.
 Contemporary Buddhism   9

He does not take up or discard any view—

he has shaken them all off, right here.
Dropping one, you clutch the next—
urged ahead by self concern
you reject and adopt opinions
as a monkey lets go of a branch and seizes another.
The priest without borders
doesn’t seize on what he’s known or beheld.
Not passionate, not dispassionate,
he doesn’t posit anything as ‘ultimate’.
He lets go of one position without taking another—
Downloaded by [RMIT University Library] at 19:36 19 June 2016

he’s not defined by what he knows.

Nor does he join a dissenting faction—
he assumes no view at all.
He’s not lured into the blind alleys
of is and is not, this world and the next—
for he lacks those commitments
that make people ponder and seize hold of teachings. Sutta-Nipāta. 780, 786, 787,
791, 795, 800, 801
The sage or priest mentioned in these verses could easily describe Pyrrho him-
self, who according to Diogenes Laertius,
seems to have practiced philosophy in a most noble way, introducing that form of
it which consists in non-cognition and suspension of judgement…. For he would
maintain that nothing is honorable or base, or just or unjust, and that likewise
in all cases nothing exists in truth; and that convention and habit are the basis
for everything that men do; for each thing is no more this than this… (Long and
Sedley 1987, 13)
Now consider the passage in the Aṅguttara Nikāya that Beckwith refers to (but
does not cite in full) to present a canonical example of the trilakṣana doctrine:
Whether Tathāgatas arise or not, there persists that law, that stableness of the
Dharma, that fixed course of the Dharma: ‘All conditioned phenomena are imper-
manent,’ … ‘All conditioned phenomena are suffering,’ … ‘All phenomena are not-
self.’ A Tathāgata awakens to this … and then explains it and elucidates it. Aṅguttara
Nikāya. III, 136.
Here we have a series of unequivocal dogmatic statements that purport to
describe the essential nature of reality that remains true irrespective of whether
anyone is around either to understand or proclaim it. This is almost the exact
opposite of the attitude to life proposed by the Aṭṭhakavagga and Pyrrho. If
we take the Aṭṭhakavagga to represent early Buddhism, then this text from
the Aṅguttara Nikāya would serve as a good example of what happened as
the dharma evolved from a sceptical and pragmatic ethics into a metaphysical
doctrine.
 10    S. Batchelor

The Aṭṭhakavagga is also one of the few canonical texts that is referred to
by name in other suttas, which implies that it was already in existence when
those later suttas were taught. There are three instances of this, all of which
are associated with a senior disciple of the Buddha called Mahākaccāna who
came from and lived in the land of Avantī. Saṃyutta Nikāya. 22.3; Udāna. 5.6;
Mahāvagga. V. As mentioned above, the Udāna recounts the story of a monk
called Soṇa, who is told by his preceptor Mahākaccāna to go from Avantī to
Sāvatthi to pay homage to the Buddha, whom Soṇa has not yet met in person,
and ask his advice about modifying some of the minor rules. On arriving at his
destination, the Buddha asks him ‘to recite Dhamma’. In response, Soṇa recites
from memory the 16 chapters of the Aṭṭhakavagga, and the Buddha praises
him for knowing the text and chanting it well. Now Avantī lay around 900 km
Downloaded by [RMIT University Library] at 19:36 19 June 2016

south-west of the eastern Gangetic area where the Buddha lived and taught,
in the modern Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, its capital Ujjain (Pali: Ujjeni)
being one of the oldest cities in India, founded around 600 bce. The Buddha is
not recorded as having been to Avantī, but, apparently with some difficulty, a
small community of monks formed there during his lifetime under the leader-
ship of Mahākaccāna.
This means that the Buddhist teaching that I believe to be most closely aligned
with the teaching of Pyrrho was present in a western area of India, not far from
modern Jaipur, and thereby much closer to those parts of the sub-continent
which Alexander’s army and its philosophers would have reached. Assuming
that Pyrrho accompanied Alexander to the Beas river (in modern day Himachal
Pradesh) where the troops revolted and the army turned back, he would have
been about 1200 km from Ujjain. Given the distances from Greece that he had
already travelled, this was not very far (by comparison, the distance Soṇa would
have covered to Sāvatthi to see the Buddha would have been about 900 km.)
Since Ujjain was already renowned as an important city of trade and learning, it
is possible either that Pyrrho met philosophers from there or even that he chose
to go to Ujjain himself––conceivably en route to the coast where he could have
commenced his return journey to Greece by sea.
Scholars have also noted that the language of the Aṭṭhakavagga contrasts
both in style and terminology from the bulk of texts found in the Pali discourses.
Might this be because its author was not in fact the Buddha himself, but his dis-
ciple Mahākaccāna, who, due to his being cut off from the rest of the monastic
community, evolved a distinctive teaching style of his own? For the Buddha to
acknowledge that the Aṭṭhakavagga was a legitimate teaching of the Dharma
does not entail that he himself composed it but that it accords with what he
taught. That buddhavācā––the Buddha’s word––is not equivalent to the word of
Gotama is clear from numerous other discourses where the speaker is someone
other than the Buddha himself.
One other discourse that likewise accords closely with what we know of
Pyrrho’s philosophy is the Kaccānagotta Sutta. This opens with ‘the good
 Contemporary Buddhism   11

Kaccānagotta’ approaching the Buddha and asking him to explain what he

means by ‘complete vision’ (sammā diṭṭhi). Gotama replies:
‘By and large, Kaccāna, this world relies on the duality of ‘it is’ and ‘it is not.’ But one
who sees the arising of the world as it happens with complete understanding has
no sense of ‘it is not’ about the world. And one who sees the ceasing of the world
as it happens with complete understanding has no sense of ‘it is’ about the world.
‘In these respects his vision is complete.
‘Everything is’ is the first dead-end. ‘Everything is not’ is the second dead-end.
The Tathāgata reveals the Dhamma from a middle that avoids both dead-ends.
Saṃyutta Nikāya. 12:15.
Again, the emphasis is on the need to suspend judgement as to whether some-
thing either ‘is’ or ‘is not’. The categories of language are inadequate to capture
Downloaded by [RMIT University Library] at 19:36 19 June 2016

the arising (samudaya) and ceasing (nirodha) of the world (loka). Or, as Timon
describes Pyrrho’s teaching in the Aristocles fragment:
neither our sensations nor our opinions tell us truths or falsehoods. Therefore for
this reason we should not put our trust in them one bit, but we should be unopin-
ionated, uncommitted and unwavering, saying concerning each individual thing
that it no more is than is not…
Could Kaccānagotta (He of the Kaccāna Clan) and Mahākaccāna (Kaccāna the
Great) in fact be the same person, the more generic ‘Kaccānagotta’ being his
name before he became a follower, and ‘Mahākaccāna’ being his title after he
was ordained and became a renowned teacher? This is given some support by
the traditional commentary to the Aṅguttara Nikāya, which describes his parents
as brahmins ‘of the Kaccāyana clan’ (Thera, Hecker, and Bodhi 2003, 216).4 We
could then understand the Kaccānagotta Sutta as the teaching the Buddha gave
that led to Mahākaccāna’s conversion, and the Aṭṭhakavagga as Mahākaccāna’s
poetic expression of his understanding of that teaching.
In any case, this pithy discourse provides another Buddhist source that could
serve as a basis for Pyrrho’s teaching. It is also the only discourse mentioned
by name in the Mūlamadhyamaka-kārikā of Nāgārjuna, thereby making it the
sole explicit source text for the ‘Middle Way’ philosophy that he founded.5
Yet Beckwith appears to be entirely unaware of its existence. Even Adrian
Kuzminski, whose study of Pyrrho and Buddhism focuses on the parallels
between Pyrrhonian scepticism and Madhyamaka thought, does not mention
the Kaccānagotta Sutta despite its prominence in Nāgārjuna’s key work.
Beckwith attributes the failure of Classicists to understand Early Pyrrhonism
to their misunderstanding ‘of the Buddha’s teachings attested in the Early
Buddhism of the fourth century BC, as shown by the hard data, unlike the
late, traditional, fantasy-filled picture that too many continue to think is ‘Early’
Buddhism’ (53). We have seen that for Beckwith ‘the hard data’ primarily means
the Aristocles fragment, whereas was the ‘late, traditional, fantasy-filled picture’
refers to the Pali Canon and other ‘normative’ Buddhist texts. While exhibiting
little if any first-hand knowledge of Pali materials (his bibliography contains not
 12    S. Batchelor

a single entry for a Pali source either in English or Pali), Beckwith follows scholars
such as André Bareau and Gregory Schopen, who are loathe to admit that such
sources might contain anything of historical relevance. Since the Pali texts were
preserved as an oral tradition for four hundred years before being committed to
writing and since the earliest actual written examples date to several centuries
after that, for these scholars this means that they are disqualified from having
anything pertinent to say about the historical conditions of the Buddha’s time.
This, to my mind, is a position just as extreme and untenable as that of Theravāda
traditionalists, who maintain that every word in the Pali canon is a verbatim
record of what issued from the Buddha’s mouth.
Behind the views of such sceptical (in the conventional sense of ‘deeply sus-
picious’) scholars can be detected the prejudices of those raised in a culture
Downloaded by [RMIT University Library] at 19:36 19 June 2016

that venerates the written word. Oral tradition, for them, is little more than a
game of Chinese whispers, where information is liable to be misrepresented
each time it is passed on from one person to the next. If this were the case, it
would follow that were two groups of monks who had no contact with each
other over centuries entrusted with the memorization of a body of texts, then
this would result in two quite different ‘canons’. Yet by comparing the discourses
in Pali, preserved in Sri Lanka, with another body of the discourses preserved
in the Chinese translation (the Āgamas) of a lost Sanskrit original preserved in
North India, for example, we find an extraordinary degree of concordance. To
be sure, they are not word-for-word identical and there is material in one that
is lacking in the other and vice versa, but they are indisputably versions of the
same original material. Since the Pali materials were preserved on an island that
was unaffected by the intra-Buddhist disputes that developed on the Indian sub-
continent, it could be argued that they are more likely to have survived intact.
A more troubling scholarly prejudice, though, is the unstated belief that peo-
ple in oral cultures do not take the preservation of their traditions seriously.
(Because, if they did, surely they would write everything down like we do.) This
Eurocentric bias looks down on pre-modern peoples as somehow culturally
and intellectually deficient. But, as we saw in the example of Soṇa, monks at
the Buddha’s time were already expected to memorize texts and be judged on
how well they could recall and recite them. (Unless, of course, we regard this
story as something inserted by a cunning editor at a later date to dupe gullible
readers into believing in the authority of oral tradition.)
A middle way approach, which we find in the work of scholars such as
Richard Gombrich and his students, would argue for a far more careful, critical
and nuanced reading of these texts, in which one undertakes the painstaking
task (like that of generations of Biblical scholars) of differentiating with precise
philological and hermeneutic tools the various strata, styles and voices of these
materials in order to gain a clearer picture of what might be original and what
might be a later addition.
 Contemporary Buddhism   13

Beckwith’s derogatory description of these texts as ‘fantasy-filled’ only con-

firms how unfamiliar he must be with them. While ‘fantasy-filled’ would be a
reasonable description of Mahāyāna discourses such as the Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa
or the Lotus Sūtra, anyone who has spent time studying the Pali suttas will have
found themselves drawn into a quirky and tawdry human world very much like
our own. These discourses introduce us to a wide range of distinctive charac-
ters, are replete with details of everyday life, and paint a vivid picture of the
social, political and economic milieu in which Gotama and his followers lived.
Above all, most of this information is entirely incidental to the main purpose of
the texts, which is to preserve the teachings of the Dhamma. While one might
expect later editors to redact points of doctrine (as can indeed be shown from
close comparisons between the Pali and Chinese versions of the texts), it is
Downloaded by [RMIT University Library] at 19:36 19 June 2016

hard to see why they would tamper with details that are doctrinally irrelevant.
Because of the way the texts were organized into Nikāyas (‘Volumes’), much of
the incidental detail about characters and places has become scattered haphaz-
ardly throughout thousands of pages. Yet when one reassembles these details,
they turn out to be largely compatible with each other. For example, the three
instances where the Aṭṭhakavagga is mentioned in the canon are separated by
hundreds of pages (one in the Saṃyutta Nikāya, one in the Udāna, and one in
the Mahāvagga of the Vinaya), yet on each occasion the text is associated with
the country of Avantī and the figure of Mahākaccāna.6 Is this just accidental?
Does it reveal some unknown vested interest of an editor at a later date, who
carefully tracked down the relevant passages and changed each one of them?
Or could it point to an actual historical event?
To ignore the testimony of the Pali Canon in order to elaborate a picture of
the Buddha is comparable to ignoring the New Testament in order to construct
a portrait of Christ. One might justify this on highly reductive scholastic grounds,
but the amount of ‘hard’ evidence that remains available (a handful of Greek
and Chinese fragments in Beckwith’s case) is almost vanishingly small. Since this
is woefully insufficient as a basis on which to build a coherent biography of a
historical figure and his teaching, this means that, despite himself, Beckwith is
frequently obliged to accept the authority of the Pali texts. Toward the end of his
book, he concedes that ‘as with the historical Jesus, we can probably accept the
non-miraculous and non-scripted parts of the account of [the Buddha’s] death
as generally historical’ (Epilogue, 332). But once this concession is made, where
do you draw the line? What about all the non-miraculous and non-scripted parts
of the Buddha’s and other characters’ lives that are scattered throughout these
texts? And what about the passages in the suttas that conflict with the teachings
of ‘normative’ Buddhism, thereby fulfilling the criteria of ‘difficulty’ and ‘disconti-
nuity’ that Biblical scholars regard as evidence for a teaching being that of Jesus?
While Beckwith casually dismisses the Pali texts as untrustworthy for his pur-
poses, he has no hesitation in erecting his thesis on a fragment of Aristocles,
which appears in Eusebius’ fourth century CE Getting Ready for the Gospel. Having
 14    S. Batchelor

dismissed ‘normative’ Buddhist texts as unreliable because they are ‘a product

of the Saka-Kushan period’, it is odd that here he relies on a polemical Christian
tract that is later than that period (the last Kushan emperor died ca. 230 ce)
and therefore postdates Pyrrho by around 600 years. Moreover, the Swiss cul-
tural historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897), a senior colleague of Nietzsche at
Basel, described its author Eusebius as ‘the first thoroughly dishonest historian of
antiquity’. Two chapters before the Aristocles fragment appears, Eusebius admits
that for the sake of converting pagans to Christianity ‘it will be necessary some-
times to use falsehood’ Eusebius. Praeparatio evangelica. 12. 31. Yet in contrast
to this piece of supposedly ‘hard data’ that Beckwith considers the ‘absolutely
earliest known bit of Buddhist doctrinal text’, when he encounters genuinely
hard data in the form of inscriptions cut into rock that happen to conflict with
Downloaded by [RMIT University Library] at 19:36 19 June 2016

his thesis, he will tirelessly devote himself to discrediting them.

Beckwith argues that the teachings of Pyrrho are essentially Buddhist in ori-
gin and outlook. This view is rejected by the majority of Classicists, who insist
that all of Pyrrho’s ideas are Greek in origin. Even such a sympathetic author as
Thomas McEvilley, whose work The Shape of Ancient Thought provides numerous
instances of the cross-fertilization of Greek and Indian ideas, concludes that
the essentials of Pyrrhonism were already to be found among the followers of
Socrates and Democritus in the late fifth and early fourth centuries bce, well before
Alexander’s visit to India. If Pyrrho encountered such doctrines in India, they must
simply have reminded him of doctrines that had been common in Greece for a
hundred and fifty years and which his own teachers had taught him. (McEvilley
2002, 495)
While Beckwith acknowledges that Pyrrho may have been inspired by
Democritus, Socrates and Plato, ‘they cannot be shown to have a taught a sys-
tem even remotely like his, and that is, after all, the real problem’ (450, italics in
original). Before considering whether, on the basis of precious few fragments,
we can credit Pyrrho with a ‘system’, it will first be helpful to provide a clearer
picture of Pyrrho’s Greek ‘lineage’, something Beckwith omits to do.
The obvious place to begin is with Pyrrho’s mentor/teacher Anaxarchus
(c.380–c.320 bce) with whom he accompanied Alexander to India.
Anaxarchus belonged to the lineage of Democritus (c.460–c.370 bce), a native
of Abdera in Thrace (now part of Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey), known as the
‘Laughing Philosopher’. According to Diogenes Laertius, Democritus accepted
a smaller share of his inheritance in cash in order to be able to travel in search
of wisdom. He set out for
Egypt to see the priests there, and to learn mathematics from them; and proceeded
further to the Chaldeans (in modern Iraq), penetrated into Persia, and went as far
as the Persian Gulf. Some also say that he made acquaintance with the gymnos-
ophists in India. Diogenes Laertius, IX, 35
If Democritus did reach India, then he would have done so prior to the inva-
sion of Alexander and during the lifetime of the Buddha.
 Contemporary Buddhism   15

‘When he returned from his travels’, reports Diogenes, ‘he lived in a most
humble manner; and that on account of his poverty, he was supported by his
brother Damasus’. Other witnesses report how ‘he cut off for himself a small
portion of the garden that surrounded his house, in which there was a small
cottage, and shut himself up in it’. A certain Antisthenes recalled how ‘he used
to practise himself in testing perceptions in various manners; sometimes retir-
ing to solitary places, and spending his time even among tombs’. Although he
visited Athens, ‘he despised glory and did not desire to be known. He became
acquainted with Socrates, without Socrates knowing who he was’ Diogenes
Laertius, IX, 35.
The practical goal of Democritus’ philosophy was the attainment of joy
(euthymia), flourishing (eudaemonia) and untroubledness (ataraxia), but he was
Downloaded by [RMIT University Library] at 19:36 19 June 2016

also a materialist: the first Greek thinker fully to develop an atomic theory of the
universe. This view led him to cast doubt on the reliability of our senses or reason
as means of ascertaining truth, since neither is capable of apprehending the
atoms themselves. The later sceptic philosopher Sextus Empiricus (c. 160–210 ce)
quotes him as saying: ‘by convention sweet, by convention bitter, by convention
hot, by convention cold, by convention colour: in reality atoms and void’ Sextus
Empiricus. Against the Professors, 7. 135. Because of a philosophy that was
grounded in the physical world and the senses, Democritus was condemned
by the idealist Plato, who sought to have his work suppressed and burned.
Aristotle also considered him a rival in natural philosophy and wrote a critical
monograph on his views.
Whether Anaxarchus agreed to join Alexander’s expedition in order to emu-
late the example of Democritus of travelling to India, we do not know. He not only
belonged to the Democritean tradition but hailed from Abdera, the city in Thrace
where Democritus was born, which constituted the westernmost part of the
Achaemenid empire. It is also puzzling why Alexander, as a student of Aristotle,
would have invited a follower of Democritus, whose doctrines both Plato and
Aristotle rejected, to accompany him on his campaigns. Was the young emperor
rebelling against his teacher? Or did he regard Democritean philosophy to be
more suited for establishing a widespread Hellenistic culture than the teachings
of Aristotle, who saw philosophy as the exclusive preserve of a noble elite?
Anaxarchus is said to have trained with Diogenes of Smyrna, a pupil of
Metrodorus of Chios, who was student of Democritus himself. From the little
we know of Metrodorus, he emphasized the sceptical element in Democritean
atomism. Sextus Empiricus says that he ‘abolished the criterion [of truth]’ by
claiming that: ‘We know nothing, nor do we even know just this: that we know
nothing’, which goes much further than Socrates’ famous dictum: ‘I know one
thing: that I know nothing’ Sextus Empiricus. Against the Professors, 7. 87–88;
Long and Sedley (1987), 14. Such radical not-knowing would underpin the
sense of wonder suggested in another saying attributed to Metrodorus: ‘A s­ ingle
ear of wheat in a large field is as strange as a single world in infinite space’
 16    S. Batchelor

Aetius. Placita Philosophorum. i.5.4. Sextus Empiricus states that Anaxarchus

also renounced the criterion of truth, though in his case because he ‘compared
existing things to stage-painting and took them to be experiences that occur
in dreams or insanity’ Sextus Empiricus. Against the Professors, 7. 87–88; Long
and Sedley 1987, 14.
As is clear from these examples, scepticism clearly formed part of the
Democritean tradition that Pyrrho would have learned from his own teacher
Anaxarchus. He likewise would have understood such an attitude to be a prac-
tice aimed at healing one’s soul and achieving ataraxia. Yet, in contrast to his
teacher, who had a reputation for enjoying luxury and was reproached by an
Indian sage for ‘paying court to kings’, Pyrrho seems to have led an exemplary
life of renunciation, detachment and equanimity. It is here, in his lifestyle, on
Downloaded by [RMIT University Library] at 19:36 19 June 2016

which many contemporaries commented, that we might detect the influence

of Buddhist mendicants. From what we know of his thought, Pyrrho makes no
mention of Democritean atomist theory and embraces a total and pure scepti-
cism. Since early Buddhism is not only devoid of an atomist theory but avoids
all forms of speculative metaphysics, Pyrrho may have been led to reject the
dogmatic aspects of Democritean thought by his exposure to Buddhist ideas.
As with the Buddha, Pyrrho is not concerned with providing an accurate
account of ‘truth’ or ‘reality’, but in cultivating an ‘appropriate attitude’ (cf. sammā
diṭṭhi) towards life that will result in a radical change in how one lives in the
world. Rather than interpret the terms ‘indifferent, unmeasurable and unarbi-
trable’ in the Aristocles fragment as referring to the trilakṣana, as Beckwith does,
I would suggest that they point to something like the essential ‘unfindability’
or ‘emptiness’ of persons and things as found in Madhyamaka philosophy. In
contrast to Buddhist philosophers, Pyrrho would not claim this emptiness to be
an ‘ultimate truth’, since such would be an act of closure incompatible with his
open-ended enquiry (skepsis). Pyrrho’s approach would be closer to the early
Buddhist idea of emptiness as the dwelling or abode of a ‘great person’ rather
than a final truth to be known by an enlightened saint. Majjhima Nikāya. 121.
Pyrrhonian scepticism fails to provide the consolations of certainty. It is a prac-
tical way of life that releases one from opinions and views into a condition of
speechlessness (aphatos). This wordless unknowing and wonder is the key to
coming to rest in a still and untroubled state of mind (ataraxia), which is strik-
ingly similar to the experience of nirvana as a radiant, open-hearted equanimity,
unconditioned by the reactive fires of greed, hatred and delusion.
Just as Gotama declared that ‘everything’ (sabbe) was constituted of the
experience of the six senses alone and that to claim there was anything more
‘would be a mere empty boast’ Saṃyutta Nikāya. 35.23, so Pyrrho is remem-
bered for his use of the Democritean expression ‘no more’ (ou mallon), and his
disciple Timon for the phrase: ‘appearance prevails everywhere, wherever one
goes’ (Long and Sedley 1987, 15). In each case, one trains one’s attention to
focus on the immediacy of what is before one’s senses while letting go of any
 Contemporary Buddhism   17

belief or hope that there might be ‘something more’ waiting to be uncovered

in a moment of mystical revelation. All these thinkers reject any split between
appearance and reality. Not only is it unjustified to posit anything more ‘real’
behind or beneath what appears, in clinging to such beliefs one blinds oneself
to what is hidden in plain sight before one’s eyes.
As with nirvana, the deathless, and the unconditioned, ataraxia is not an
end in itself, the final resting place of one’s philosophical practice. When no
longer troubled by opinion and the resultant disturbing emotions, one is freed
to respond to situations in creative, spontaneous and unpredictable ways.
According to Sextus Empiricus the experience of ataraxia was said to have fallen
on the Greek artist Apelles while he was trying to paint the foamy saliva of a
horse. He was so unsuccessful that, in a rage, he gave up and threw the sponge
Downloaded by [RMIT University Library] at 19:36 19 June 2016

he was cleaning his brushes with at the painting, thus producing the effect of
the horse’s foam. In the very act of giving up, of suspending judgement and
self-conscious effort, ‘ataraxia, as if by chance, followed him as a shadow follows
a body’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism, 1.25–29. Cf. Nussbaum 1994, 287.
On returning to Greece, Pyrrho appears to have lived a reclusive life, following
the principles of his teaching, and supported by a growing number of disciples.
His student Philo of Athens recalled how ‘he referred above all to Democritus,
and secondly to Homer, constantly quoting: “As is the generation of leaves, so
too is that of men” (Iliad 6.146)’ Diogenes Laertius. IX.66–67. Some accounts
present him as one who literally suspended judgement about everything, so
that ‘he avoided nothing and took no precautions, facing everything as it came,
wagons, precipices, dogs, and entrusting nothing to his sensations’ Diogenes
Laertius IX.61–62. But this is probably an exaggeration, if not a caricature. A
certain Aenesidemus said that ‘although [Pyrrho] practiced the suspension of
judgement, he did not act carelessly in the details of his daily life’ Diogenes
Laertius IX.61–62.
Timon’s recollections of his teacher Pyrrho perhaps provide a more credible
picture: ‘Such was the man I saw, unconceited and unbroken by all the pressures
that have subdued the famed and unfamed alike, unstable bands of people,
weighed down on this side and on that with passions, opinions and futile leg-
islation’ Eusebius 14.18.19; Long and Sedley, 1987, 18. In a different context, this
could just as well have been a description of the Buddha.
In revisiting the history of Greek encounters with India and Buddhism during
the Hellenistic period, we recover the sense of an ancient world that was yet to
be divided by the familiar tropes of ‘East’ and ‘West’. During the Buddha’s life-
time, the Achaemenid empire extended all the way from Thrace (in Europe) to
Gandhāra (most of modern Pakistan). The Abderan philosopher Democritus was
not only a contemporary of the professors of Taxila who taught the Maghadan
court physician Jīvaka medicine, but a subject of the same Persian emperor.
Seventy-five years after the Buddha’s death, Alexander’s defeat of the last of
these rulers, Darius III, expanded this territory still further, and led to a flourishing
 18    S. Batchelor

Hellenistic culture, elements of which would survive for another eight hundred
years.
Rather than speculate about whether early Buddhist ideas of emptiness influ-
enced the emergence of Pyrrhonian scepticism or whether Greek reasoning
influenced the development of dialectical thought in India, I prefer to leave
these questions open. Given the paucity of evidence, it is unlikely that they will
ever be definitively settled. In addition, such scholarly debate can often serve
to advance a chauvinist agenda for cultural supremacy, with both Europeans
and Indians eager to show that their tradition might have exerted a formative
influence on the other.
The world of the fifth and fourth centuries bce that extended from Athens
to Pāṭaliputta was in many respects a single, interactive cultural sphere. Ideas
Downloaded by [RMIT University Library] at 19:36 19 June 2016

and goods were transmitted from one end of this world to the other along
well-established trade routes that were sustained by rulers who employed
peoples with different languages and religions to run their administrations
and serve as troops in their armies. Aśoka not only claimed in his second rock
edict to have sent dharma emissaries to the Greek king Antiochos in Syria, but
to have provided him with ‘medical herbs, roots and fruits’ for the treatment
of humans and animals in his realm. These embassies, therefore, might have
been like modern trade missions, designed to showcase Mauryan medicine
and other products as much as Aśoka’s dharma. Likewise, the names of two
Greek donors called Sihadhaya and Dhaṃma are carved on a wall of the rock-
cut temple of Karla, which was built around the first century bce in central India
(modern Maharashtra). Yet both men are said to come from Dhānyakaṭaka, a
major Buddhist centre in south India: the opposite direction from Greece and
its Bactrian and Gandhāran colonies, thus revealing the extent to which Greek
Buddhists were settled on the sub-continent (Lamotte 1988, 512).
None of these people would have thought of themselves as ‘Europeans’ or
‘Indians’ in the way that we use these terms today. While aware of their differ-
ent ethnic origins and languages, culturally they inhabited the same thought-
world. As philosophers or wanderers, they enjoyed equivalent opportunities
and freedoms to engage with the same kinds of questions about the meaning
and purpose of human life. Throughout this world you would come across men
who had opted out of conventional society, cropped their hair, dressed in rags
or sackcloth, went barefoot, gathered to study and debate around teachers,
preached to anyone who would listen to them, and berated those they regarded
as arrogant and foolish. Just as Korakkhattiya, the ‘dog man’ mentioned in the
Pāṭika Sutta of the Dīgha Nikāya, went around ‘on all fours, sprawling on the
ground, and chewing and eating his food with his mouth alone’, Dīgha Nikāya.
24, so the Cynic Diogenes of Sinope (c.404–c.323 bce) lived in a barrel on the
streets and was derided by others as a dog and regarded himself as such––the
word ‘cynic’ comes from kynikos: ‘dog like.’ However much Diogenes set out to
shock (he is said to have defecated, urinated and masturbated in public), he
 Contemporary Buddhism   19

trained his students like Buddhist mendicants, instructing them to ‘crop their hair
close and to wear it unadorned, and to go lightly clad, barefoot, silent, and not
looking about them in the streets’ Diogenes Laertius VI, 31. When asked where
he came from, he refused to identify with any country or city and replied that
he was a ‘citizen of the world’ (cosmopolites).
Pyrrho did not arrive in Gandhāra on a romantic quest for the wisdom of
the East. Like other philosophers and wanderers of his time, he simply sought
wisdom, irrespective of whether one called it sophia or paññā. As we have seen,
his mentor Anarxachus was a pupil of Democritus, whose teachings already
embodied many of the values, goals and practices that we would now tend
to associate more with Indian than Western thinkers. Since Democritus may
have been influenced by gymnosophists, Pyrrho could have joined Alexander’s
Downloaded by [RMIT University Library] at 19:36 19 June 2016

campaign in order to be able to dig deeper into the origins of what he already
saw as his own tradition. On returning to Greece, Pyrrho may have pursued a
way of life that reminds us of that of Indian renunciants, but we forget that such
lifestyles had been adopted among Greeks at least since the time of Pythagoras
(c.570–c.495 bce).
In conclusion, I am unconvinced that Pyrrho drew his most distinctive teach-
ings exclusively from early Buddhism, as Beckwith maintains. Nor do I accept
McEvilley’s claim that when Pyrrho encountered Buddhist ideas, they ‘simply
reminded him of doctrines that … his own teachers had taught him’. I think it
more likely that Pyrrho drew on both sources, yet without thinking of them, in
the way we do today, as belonging to two different, even incommensurable,
cultural spheres. Nor do I accept that we can deduce a system from the few
fragments that remain of Pyrrho’s teaching, let alone that the system is Buddhist
in character. All these attempts to determine who influenced whom serve to
obscure a far more important point: that the philosophical scepticism found
in both Buddhist and Western thought shares a common origin in the ancient
world. Moreover, such scepticism was not metaphysical but ethical in orien-
tation. For both Democritus and Gotama it was first and foremost a practice
(ascesis/sikkhā). When internalized at the core of one’s life, it culminated in the
experience of ataraxia/nirvana, which was not an end in itself, but opened up
radically new possibilities of being in the world.

Notes
1. 
In the case of the Lumbini pillar, Beckwith argues that ‘the language of the
inscription is Prakrit, but the epithet of the Buddha is spelled Sakyamuni,
representing Sanskrit Śākyamuni rather than Prakrit Sakamuni’ (343). Not only
does he mistranscribe the term on the pillar and give a different spelling of
the ‘Prakrit Sakamuni’ from the one he gave previously (Śakamuni), but does
not seem to understand that Prakrit is a generic term for any vernacular Indian
language, of which there are numerous regional spelling variations, e.g. Gāndhārī,
Maghadi, Pali etc. In Pali, for example, the Buddha’s clan is variously spelt Sakyā,
 20    S. Batchelor

Sakka, Sākiyā and Sākya––as in the inscription. So it is hard to see how he can
conclude that the term ‘represents’ a Sanskrit form, which would indicate a far
later date than that of Aśoka, thereby implying that it is either a subsequent
addition or forgery.
2. 
Leaving aside whether it is Beckwith or Mitchell who misidentifies the source as
A. III, 134, the translation of the passage is full of mistakes. While the Pali original
says that all saṅkhāra (conditioned things) are impermanent and dukkha, while all
dhammā (things) are not-self, Mitchell translates ‘all [the world’s] constitutents’ are
‘impermanent, unsatisfactory and lacking a permanent self’. Beckwith helpfully
explains that Mitchell’s ‘constituents’ is a translation of dhammā. See fn. 30, 125.
3. 
An exception here is Ajahn Thanissaro, who disputes this claim. Since Beckwith
cites Thanissaro’s online translations of the Aṭṭhakavagga as his source, this
might explain why he is reluctant to give such prominence to the text. See:
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/atthakavagga.html
Downloaded by [RMIT University Library] at 19:36 19 June 2016

4. 
Also see: http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/bodhi/wheel405.html#ch6.
Mūlamadhyamaka-kārikā. 15: 6–7.
5. 
6. 
Saṃyutta Nikāya. 22.3; Udāna. 5.6; Mahāvagga. V.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor
Stephen Batchelor is a Buddhist teacher and scholar living in South West France. He is
a co-founder of Bodhi College, Devon. His most recent publication is After Buddhism:
Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).

References
Batchelor, S. 2010. Confession of a Buddhist Atheist. New York: Spiegel and Grau.
Bidari, B. 2004. Lumbini: A Haven of Sacred Refuge. Lumbini: B Bidari.
Bronkhorst, Johannes. 2007. Greater Magadha: Studies in the Culture of Early India. Leiden:
Brill.
Bronkhorst, Johannes. 2011. Buddhism in the Shadow of Brahmanism. Leiden: Brill.
Coningham, R. A. E., K. P. Acharya, K. M. Strickland, C. E. Davis, M. J. Manuel, I. A. Simpson,
K. Gilliland, J. Tremblay, T. C. Kinnaird, and D. C. W. Sanderson. 2013. “The Earliest
Buddhist Shrine: Excavating the Birthplace of the Buddha, Lumbini (Nepal).” Antiquity
87: 1104–1123. http://dro.dur.ac.uk/11508/
Kuzminski, A. 2008. Pyrrhonism. Lanham, Plymouth: Lexington Books.
Lamotte, E. 1988. History of Indian Buddhism. Louvain-la-Neuve: Université catholique
de Louvain, Institut orientaliste.
Long, A. A., and D. N. Sedley. 1987. The Hellenistic Philosophers. 2 Vols. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
McEvilley, T. 2002. The Shape of Ancient Thought. New York: Allworth Press.
Mitchell, D. W. 2008. Buddhism: Introducing the Buddhist Experience. 2nd. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Norman, K. R. 1992. The Group of Discourses. Oxford: Pali Text Society.
 Contemporary Buddhism   21

Nussbaum, M. C. 1994. The Therapy of Desire. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Thera, Nyanaponika, H. Hecker, Bhikkhu Bodhi. 2003. Great Disciples of the Buddha.
Boston: Wisdom Publications in collaboration with the Buddhist Publication Society
of Kandy, Sri Lanka
Panchenko, Dmitri. 1998. “Scylax’ Circumnavigation of India and Its Interpretation in
Early Greek Geography, Ethnography and Cosmography.” Hyperboreus 4: 211–242.
Sextus Empiricus. 1933. Outlines of Pyrrhonism. Translated by R. G. Bury. Loeb Classical
Library 273. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Downloaded by [RMIT University Library] at 19:36 19 June 2016