It’s Time to Take Seriously Greek Influences on Buddhism

How did Greek philosophical ideas abruptly appear in Buddhism?

Several legends have been handed down about how Nāgārjuna - an Indian philosopher whose impact on Buddhism was so great he’s been called the “second Buddha” - came to his great philosophical understanding to produce the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (“Root Verses on Middle Way”), initiating Mādhyamaka philosophy. The legends vary in the details, but they involve variations on Nāgārjuna receiving texts from the undersea kingdom of the Nagas (Neale pp. 206-7). In his History of Buddhism in India, compiled in 1608, Tāranātha reports that a monk named Nāgāhvāya, a disciple of Nāgārjuna, traveled seven times to the Nagas’ country. (pp. 123-6)

New archeological findings suggest a location where Nāgāhvāya may have traveled to: the Egyptian town of Berenike - the main port for overseas trade between the Roman Empire and India. The most impressive finding is a statue of the Buddha, made of stone quarried near Istanbul and likely carved in Alexandria. 

The Berenike Buddha

Another find at Berenike demonstrating Indian presence is a bilingual Sanskrit/Greek inscription. We already had evidence that there were Indians who could read Greek. For example, an Indian in Nāgārjuna’s era translated a Greek horoscopy book into Sanskrit, a book known as the Yavanajātaka. Ancient Indian astronomy has terms borrowed from Greek.

We have long known from ancient geographers and historians that a huge amount of trade passed through Berenike. As our sources were Greek, they seemed to imply that it was Greek ships with Greek sailors going to India and bringing back the goods. These new archeological discoveries complicate that view. Indians were far more directly engaged than previously imagined. They were a major presence in Berenike, particularly during the spring when sailors would be waiting for the monsoon winds to reverse the wind’s usual direction and allow ships to sail quickly to India. 

Might a frequent visitor to Berenike, such as Nāgāhvāya, have been interested in Greek wisdom texts? Might he have been impressed enough by some of them that he brought them back to India and discussed them with his teacher, Nāgārjuna? And might Nāgārjuna have been so impressed with them that he re-worked and re-contextualized their ideas to be Buddhist? And might this transmission need to be covered up with legends giving a more suitable source for the ideas?

And if this happened, then wouldn’t Madhyamaka have some tell-tale similarities with its source material?

Yes, and the first person to notice it was Thomas McEvilly, first in a 1982 essay, and who later devoted three chapters of his 2001 book, The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies, to exploring the question. McEvilly compared the works of the Pyrrhonist philosopher Sextus Empiricus (whose works give the only surviving book-length details on Pyrrhonism) with those of Nāgārjuna and concluded, “…the relationship between the Sextan and Nāgārjunan texts is so close that one often can see Sextus’s version as an expansion of Nāgārjuna’s - or Nāgārjuna’s as a compressed form of Sextus’s.” (p. 459) And while Sextus and Nāgārjuna differ in style and feeling tone due to Nāgārjuna’s association with religion, there “is a remarkable parallelism in substance….” (p. 478) “It is hard to identify any significant difference between either the methods or the stated purposes of Pyrrhonist and Madhyamika dialectic.” (p. 484) “The overall stance towards life of the Madhymikas and the Pyrrhonists was similar, indeed, nearly identical; the dialectic which supported this stance was similar, indeed, nearly identical; and the purpose for which this stance was adopted and this dialectic practiced were similar, indeed, nearly identical.  (p. 491)

In 2014, Oxford scholar Matthew Neale followed up on McEvilly’s claims. He systematically cataloged every idea in the works of Sextus Empiricus and looked for a parallel to each of those ideas in the works of Nāgārjuna and his ancient commentators. Neale concluded,

We saw that the Sextan Pyrrhonists and the Mādhyamikas characterize their own projects in remarkably similar ways, such that on almost all criteria they would accept each other as engaging in the same project…. We saw that there was some variety in how close the detailed applications of the two projects were depending on topic. The closest parallels were undoubtedly on beliefs about how or whether we cognize (the criterion of truth, proof, and signs) where about half Sextus’ arguments were found to have close equivalents in Mādhyamaka, on beliefs about causation and change, where almost all had close equivalents, and on beliefs about ethics, where more than half did. (p. 221)

Although it is possible that Nāgārjuna had Sextus’ works, it’s more likely that he had the works of an earlier Pyrrhonist, perhaps those of Sextus’ famous predecessor, Aenesidemus, who cultivated a large following in Alexandria, and whose works were still available in Constantinople in the 10th century. The overlap between Nāgārjuna and an earlier Pyrrhonist text may have been even greater.

As McEvilly points out, “...it is commonly taken for granted by Buddhologists that Nāgārjuna, like Sextus, was the culmination of a long tradition - but there is really no evidence for that tradition.” “...there is inadequate background - almost none whatever - to account for the sudden appearance of the full-blown formal dialectic in Nāgārjuna’s Verses. Nāgārjuna’s work has the whole pattern of the Greek dialectic, with its complex and extensive system of argument which in Greece developed over a period of centuries; yet it arises suddenly, without evidence of developmental stages, in its own tradition.” “The sudden appearance of the whole system in India in the work of a single author suggests input from outside. The situation should lead a historian to look around for channels of diffusion.” (p. 500)

In Berenike, we now have not only a likely candidate for that diffusion, but even an explanation for how a huge amount of Pyrrhonist philosophy came to be incorporated into Buddhism.

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For more on the archeological findings at Berenike, see “A Buried Ancient Egyptian Port Reveals the Hidden Connections Between Distant Civilizations,” Smithsonian Magazine, July/August 2024. 

Matthew Neale’s Madhyamaka and Pyrrhonism: doctrinal, linguistic and historical parallels and interactions between Madhyamaka Buddhism & Hellenic Pyrrhonism is available online from Oxford University. 

Taranatha's History of Buddhism in India, 2nd edition 1990