15 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: Did Emperor Ashoka really exist?
Just a note, this sounds a lot like what is the case with Kanishka the Kushanite some 350 years later - he's hailed as a Buddhist in some texts, but material evidence shows that what flourished was a syncretism with worship of not only deities such as Zeus-Bel-Ohrmazd, but also recurring is some sort of Indra-Shiva figure depicted with a jar (symbolizing fortune or auspiciousness, the literal meaning of Shiva), a trident (symbolic of Rudra, Shiva's wrathful aspect), and a vajra (symbolic of Indra).
Comment by yodatsracist at 08/04/2020 at 11:09 UTC
9 upvotes, 1 direct replies
It’s a general problem because we today have a very Middle Eastern Monotheism view of religion where you *are* something, or worse you *believe*/*have faith in* something rather than you *do* something. It’s exclusivist and generally anachronistic. One anthropologist summed up the colonial encounter for a lot of group as they are taught that not only they have this thing called “religion” (which is not just “culture” or “knowledge), but also more importantly they have the wrong one. To put it in fancy anthropological terms, for most of the world religion was an etic (external) category rather than emic (internal) one.
Buddhism is particularly interesting in this regard because it did have an idea of specific religion/philosophy/teaching (dharma/dhamma) that could be exclusive... but it didn’t have to be. During the Nikaya period, some have argued to me, the only real “Buddhists” were the renunciates, the monks and the nuns. They were exclusively Buddhist whereas the lay people (like Asoka) might believe in Buddhist principles or sympathize with the renunciates and believe them to be trusted holy people, but wouldn’t necessarily think of themselves as “Buddhist” or “not Buddhist”.
Certainly, by a certain point we are talking about Buddhist societies (often with an acculturated substrate of what’s sometimes called “folk religion, famously Bon in Tibet), but we still find the mixing at official levels in many places. The relationship between Shinto and the Japanese Buddhist schools is complex, and sometimes they’re separate and sometimes they’re pretty explicitly mixed, but often they’re kept separate but for example before the Meiji Restoration, a Buddhist monastery might run a Shinto temple or vice versa. Like even when separation of worship, there’s not necessarily a separation of authority.
Philip Almond wrote this book called *the British Discovery of Buddhism* which argues pretty convincingly that, subsequent to the fall of India as Buddhist center, only British colonialism “discovered” (his term) that there is this global thing called Buddhism that’s practiced differently in Sri Lanka and Burma on one hand, and China and Japan on another, and Tibet and Mongolia on a third hand, but it’s all really One Thing. Oh and the British also decided that actually Buddhism was sort of Asian Protestantism (a logical reform on the decadent and therefore Catholic-like Hinduism), and you see things like the book length epic poem called *The Light of Asia*. But that’s getting far off topic.
Our idea of religion is not a culturally specific that travels pretty well between Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Baha’i, etc, but the further we get away from those, the worse it works. Realizing that puts into question a lot of old assumptions about what Buddhism was in Asoka’s time, so I was wondering what the current state of this was. This reunderstanding of religion globally started in the 80’s, but really picked up in the 90’s and 2000’s.