Thread by @SikotiHamiltonR

1 In his new book Tranquillity & Ruin Danyl McLauchlan tries to make sense of life using both Buddhism & 'Western' academic philosophy. Many Westerners still believe that Buddhism is an exotic ideology, with few historical links to European thought. They're wrong. (thread)

2 Like me, Danyl went to university in the '90s. Like me, he learned that the first Western thinker to dig Buddhism was the gloomy romantic Schopenhauer, in the 19th century. But Christopher Beckwith's startling 2017 book suggests Buddhism went West many centuries earlier.

3 Beckwith shows that, when Alexander the Great invaded India in the 4th century BC, the odd Greek intellectual tagged along. The philosopher Pyrrho of Elis spent time in one of the new kingdoms Alexander established, observed the practices of early Buddhists, & came home.

4 Back in Europe, Pyrrho founded the Skeptical school of philosophy. Pyrrho left no writings, but his students and later followers wrote about the need to achieve ataraxia, a state of freedom from worry. They hoped to do this by suspending judgement about the world.

5 Pyrrho doubted the ability of either logic or empirical evidence to give humans definitive evidence for any general theory about life. He suggested that we should try to be akrandantoi, or unwavering in our refusal to choose one theory over another.

6 Beckwith & other scholars have argued for parallels between Pyrrho's sceptical view of knowledge & the Buddha's teaching that reality is illusory & ungraspable. They link the search for ataraxia to the Buddhist search for nirvana.

7 Pyrrho's influence on Western thought has been immense. His ideas were adopted by the Stoics as well as the Skeptics, & after the end of the Middle Ages he was a goad to thinkers like Descartes, who struggled with the problem of scepticism, & David Hume.

8 If we see Pyrrho as a Buddhist thinker, then the history of 'Western' philosophy suddenly looks much less insular. Beckwith's argument reminds me of a statue at Auckland's museum. Made in Gandhara, a kingdom founded by Alexander, it shows a Buddha with 'Greek' features.

9 Beckwith's research, the statue at Auckland, & McLauchlan's wide-ranging book all appeal to me, because they fly in the face of a tendency, widespread today on both the left & right, to treat Western culture as something insular, something sui generis, something monolithic.

10 The late great Tongan educator Futa Helu, who attempted to fuse Greek and Polynesian thought at his school 'Atenisi, would have enjoyed reading Beckwith & Mclauchlan's tomes. 'The ocean of humanity', said Helu, 'is fed by the rivers of many cultures'.