Western Buddhism: The First Wave

That the first Western author to mention the Buddha by name was an Alexandrian, the Christian writer Clement (c. 150–215 CE), is perhaps no accident. He might have had a sangha in his backyard. 

Stunning new discoveries at the Hellenistic port city of Berenike, on the Red Sea in Egypt, have confirmed what scholars have long suspected—that Buddhism spread west of India as well as east during the earliest periods of its dissemination. The finds at Berenike, including a finely carved Buddha statue—the first found west of Afghanistan—also invite fresh speculation about the identity of a mysterious community of religious practitioners that thrived in this area at the turn of the first millennium. Long assumed to be a Jewish sect, this group may, in fact, have made up the earliest settlement of Buddhists in the West.

The Buddha of Berenike

In 2022, a joint Polish and American team was excavating a temple of the Greco-Egyptian goddess Isis at Berenike and, to their immense surprise, unearthed an exquisite, two-foot-tall marble statue of the Buddha. It is the first ancient Buddha image ever found west of Gandhara—the birthplace of the Buddha image—yet it is sculpted in a markedly Gandharan style. The figure stands facing forward, fully clothed, and gestures to the viewer with his left hand. The Buddha’s ushnisha is stylized as a topknot, and the halo enveloping his head is inscribed with sunrays.

Alexandria was a major center of commerce in the ancient world. Founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BCE, the city was situated just north of Lake Mareotis, where a mysterious religious community—possibly Buddhist—once lived. Berenike was founded in 275 BCE by Ptolemy II, roughly 700 miles to the south. Vigorous trade was conducted between the two cities via caravan and via the Nile. | Map by The Voyager’s Workshop.

Berenike, Egypt’s gateway from the Red Sea to Alexandria in the Nile Delta, was an affluent, culturally diverse city. Merchant ships carried parcels and people via Berenike to and from the Malabar Coast of India and from the port of Alexandria to the rest of Europe and the Levant via the Mediterranean. An Egyptian papyrus dated to the mid-2nd century CE shows that trade between Roman Egypt and India was vibrant and lucrative. One side of the document consists of a two-party contract for a maritime loan to fund a round-trip voyage between Alexandria and Muziris, an ancient emporium in the present-day Indian state of Kerala. The other side of the papyrus preserves a shipping manifest that lists the cargo and value of goods on board the vessel, called the Hermapollon. The consignment included many tons of black pepper, ivory, spikenard, and textiles. The Hermapollon must have been a gigantic ship, but just one of hundreds that coursed this route each year. The total value of its berth was listed as 7 million sesterces. That’s seven times the minimum net worth required for eligibility in the Roman Senate.

The Muziris Papyrus, held at the Austrian National Library in Vienna, is an important 2nd-century CE shipping contract that documents the scope of Indo-Roman trade between Egypt and the ancient port of Muziris on the Malabar Coast (modern-day Kerala, India). | Images via Wikimedia Commons.

Indian Buddhist activity in Berenike continued for at least the next hundred years: “In the sixth year of King Philip,” a Sanskrit inscription found in the same Isis temple reads, referring to the year 249 CE, “the kshatriya Vasula gave this image for the welfare and happiness of all beings.” An abbreviated version of the dedication is also written in Greek: “Vasula set this up.” The image referred to has yet to be discovered, but it, too, was likely a buddha. “King Philip” is the Roman emperor Philip the Arab (204–249 CE). Kshatriya refers to Vasula’s caste status. The dedication “to the welfare and happiness of all beings” is unmistakably Buddhist in sentiment. The Berenike Buddha was clearly not a one-off.

Acculturation Is a Two-Way Street

Compared with the metropolis of Alexandria, Berenike was a backwater. Alexandria was built from scratch by the ancient world’s captains of industry—the Macedonian king Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE) and his generals, who conquered vast swathes of territory from Egypt to India and founded new cities and Hellenistic (“Greek-inflected”) kingdoms in their wake. Over the course of a mere decade of conquests, Greek cultural forms, artistic styles, and language got a foothold in non-Greek locales.

This standing Buddha from Gandhara, housed in the Tokyo National Museum, dates to the 1st–2nd century CE. The first representational images of the Buddha were produced in Gandhara, an area in present-day Pakistan and Afghanistan. The artisans in this region were influenced by Greek sculptural techniques. | Image via Wikimedia Commons.

But acculturation is a two-way street. The populations colonized by the Greeks got back theirs, after a fashion, by exerting an enormous influence on the arts and ideas, especially through the medium of religion. Syncretism, the mixing of cultural elements, characterized all religious expressions during this period well into Roman imperial times. That’s how a Buddha statue winds up in a Greco-Roman temple of the Egyptian goddess Isis.

In what is now Afghanistan/Pakistan, for example, a Greco-Buddhist culture emerged over several generations in what was then called Bactria. A Buddhist text set in this region, The Questions of Milinda, preserved in Pali, recounts a conversation between the Greek king Menander I (“Milinda”), who ruled Bactria c. 150–130 BCE, and a Buddhist sage named Nagasena. Cast in a form not unlike a Platonic dialogue, the treatise pits Nagasena against Menander in philosophical debate. Monk and king discuss matters both mundane and metaphysical. In one exchange, the Ship of Theseus, an ancient Greek philosophical puzzle about identity, becomes a vehicle for the Buddhist doctrine of no-self.

Deep in the Swat and Peshawar valleys, beyond the Khyber Pass, a philosophical paradox of good Greek pedigree has been reformulated as a cardinal teaching of Buddhism. Or vice versa.

The Greek version, preserved by Plutarch (c. 45–120 CE), asks whether the ancient ship that Theseus, mythological king of Athens, commissioned to send offerings every year to Apollo at Delos was the “same” ship still in use at Athens if all its parts had been replaced due to wear and tear. In The Questions of Milinda, Nagasena illustrates this conundrum by pointing to the chariot that conveyed Menander to their meeting place. Is what we call a chariot to be identified with any of its component parts? Does it exist apart from the components that make it up? It does not, Menander concedes, and Nagasena declares the same to be true of the human personality: A self is but the sum of its parts. Since the parts themselves are perishable and constantly changing, there is nothing compared to which a self, a ship, or a chariot can be regarded as the “same.” Deep in the Swat and Peshawar valleys, beyond the Khyber Pass, a philosophical paradox of good Greek pedigree has been reformulated as a cardinal teaching of Buddhism. Or vice versa. In either case, it is a sign of the times.

Westward Ho! 

Before the turn of the first millennium, Buddhism in India was still in its formative stages, yet it also had behind it a storied, venerable history. After the Mauryan king Ashoka (reigned 268–232 BCE) converted to Buddhism in an act of contrition for his warlording over neighboring Indian states, he proclaimed the dharma as law of the land, as it were, and sent missionaries in the ten directions, to all points of the compass. That’s how Buddhism got to Sri Lanka, for example, to become the national religion. The edicts of Ashoka that pronounce these and other executive orders—inscribed in Prakrit, Greek, and Aramaic on pillars and rocks throughout the Mauryan empire—are the first tangible evidence we have for Buddhism, predating the earliest written texts by some 400 years. A handful of Hellenistic kings in the West are named in these inscriptions, including Tulamaya—likely a reference to Ptolemy II of Egypt (308–246 BCE). That Ashoka’s Buddhist emissaries did in fact reach Egypt is suggested by the archaeological finds at Berenike, a city that Ptolemy II founded and named after his mother. A passage from an ancient biography of the itinerant Pythagorean holy man Apollonius of Tyana (c. 15–100 CE) all but confirms it.

The Ashokan Pillar at Vaishali. During his reign, King Ashoka issued numerous edicts promoting dharma throughout his empire, many of which were carved into rocks and pillars. These edicts were strategically placed along the edges of the empire, along trade routes, and close to major cites. | Image via Wikimedia Commons.

According to this text, Apollonius, whose worldwide travels include a long sojourn in India, visits Egypt to confer with so-called Gymnosophists (“Naked Philosophers”), the standard Greek term for a Buddhist or Jain. He meets a young man among them named Nilus, who tells Apollonius his life’s story: how his father was a ship’s captain on trade voyages to India (the very sort we find described in the Muziris Papyrus); how he acquired an interest in Indian wisdom from his father’s reports of the sages he had met there; and how some dark-skinned settlers in Egypt called “Ethiopians”—from Aithiopes, Greek for “burnt-faced”—were not black Africans but rather Indian immigrants. 

Nilus had joined this group of Egyptian ascetics of Indian extraction, possibly Buddhists, only to be disappointed that they had largely abandoned their Indian heritage and adopted the local language and customs. What Nilus had hoped, he admits, was to have been able to experience Indian culture, philosophy, and religion at home, in the Egyptian Delta, without having to brave the Indian Ocean like his father. As things turned out, however, as is often the case with immigrant communities to this day, the Egyptian Gymnosophists had assimilated, making it difficult to distinguish them from the dominant culture. They had, as it were, “gone native.” Assimilation, of course, is itself a form of syncretism. 

The First Buddhist Settlement in the West?

The philosopher Philo (c. 20 BCE–50 CE), a Jew from Alexandria writing in Greek, corroborates much of this snapshot of philosophical asceticism in Egypt before the arrival of Christian monastics in the 3rd century CE. In doing so, he provides a glimpse of what the assimilated community of Indian expats that Nilus joined might have looked like. 

Philo of Alexandria was a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher of the 1st century CE who bridged Greek philosophy and Jewish theology. Using interpretive allegory, Philo sought to reveal the deeper spiritual truths within the Hebrew Scriptures. His work On the Contemplative Life had a significant influence on Jewish and early Christian religious thought. | Image via Wikimedia Commons.

In the fascinating treatise On the Contemplative Life, Philo describes a group of men and women who live in a monastic community on a pleasant hill overlooking Lake Mareotis, on the outskirts south of Alexandria. He says they are called Therapeutae and Therapeutrides, using expressly both masculine and feminine forms, but seems unsure exactly what accounts for the name. Either they are “physicians,” he infers, healers of the soul as well as the body, or they are “servants” of God and of truth. Both meanings are related and equally possible in Greek. 

To join the community, prospective members were required to first divest themselves of possessions and personal attachments. “Brothers, children, wives, parents, kinsfolk, and the fatherlands in which they were born,” Philo says, are all forsaken. In settling around the bustling city, he notes, the Therapeutae are following a pattern found throughout the civilized world in his time “among both Greeks and non-Greeks,” adding that this manner of living “is especially common in the districts surrounding Alexandria.” Like the Berenike Buddha, the Therapeutae were not a one-off either. 

For privacy and protection, the Therapeutae live in detached houses but at close quarters, as in a village. Each house, Philo notes, has an inner chamber or cell called a “monastery” (monastērion)—the first recorded use of the word in history—where they pray twice a day, at sunrise and sunset, and recite unspecified “laws, oracles, and psalms.” Between dawn and dusk their days are spent “reading their sacred writings and pursuing their ancestral philosophy.” 

Meals are taken as a group, but, what is highly unusual for the time, the Therapeutae grow, prepare, and serve their own food: “They do not own slaves,” Philo observes, “since they regard the owning of slaves as contrary to Nature.” What is more, he adds, they are strict vegetarians and abstain from wine.

Scholars of early Christianity and Judaism have largely taken for granted that the Therapeutae were a Jewish community, given that they piqued Philo’s interest in the first place and he appears to have known something about them. In this, they are also following the early church historian Eusebius (c. 265–339 CE)—a much later and tendentious source—who paraphrases Philo’s account but is much more explicit that the Therapeutae are Jewish (like the Essenes, a group Philo also writes about). Indeed, Eusebius claims they were Jewish-Christians, the first monastics of the Apostolic Age. Voluminous commentaries have been written on Philo’s text from this angle, and countless inferences have been drawn to support further arguments, creating a Jenga-like edifice that would come tumbling down if a block at the base were removed.

Yet even a casual reading of Philo’s account reveals how few references to Judaica his text contains. The instances where “scriptures,” “law,” or “Moses” are mentioned are not only few and far between but they are vague, tangential to the Therapeutae, or merely analogies. Moreover, while Philo gives the impression of being decently informed about this group, his treatise is clearly no eyewitness account. And he certainly does not sound like an insider describing the Jewish world he knew firsthand. To the contrary, when discussing the Therapeutae, he always speaks of “their” ancestral customs and scriptures, not “ours.” 

What’s in a Name? 

Philo’s signature talent as a philosopher and apologist was as an allegorical reader of Greek and Jewish texts. In On the Contemplative Life Philo puts these talents to work by allegorizing the Therapeutae as followers of Judaism, that is, as morally upright and philosophically minded monotheists like himself. When, however, we put aside the premise that the Therapeutae and Therapeutrides must have been Jewish, these practitioners at Lake Mareotis begin to look a lot like Buddhist monks and nuns.

Observant Jews, for example, do not typically leave family and possessions behind to embark on a life of voluntary poverty, vegetarian austerity, and contemplation. And it would be difficult to celebrate Passover in antiquity without slaughtering a lamb or drinking wine. “Home-leaver,” on the other hand, anagarika, is the boilerplate term for a Buddhist monk or nun. 

The details of the group’s religious observances every seventh day—a supposed dead ringer for the Jewish Sabbath according to the usual reading, though never called such by Philo—just as easily describe the celebration of uposatha in Buddhism, which, like the Sabbath, is observed every seventh day of the lunar month, where practitioners, both lay and monastic, deepen their practice and reaffirm their commitment to Buddhism’s ethical precepts (Pali: sila). Indeed, what Philo describes taking place on those occasions sounds like a dharma talk. The Therapeutae, he says, “sit in rows, arranged by age, and maintain a comely mien with their hands inside their robes, the right positioned between the chest and the chin, the left drawn back along the side of the body.” Whereupon, Philo continues, an elder member, “the one with the fullest knowledge of the doctrines they profess,” his voice and demeanor calm, delivers a measured, well-reasoned discourse to which the audience, seated in a fixed posture, responds in silence with approving looks and nods.

The Therapeutae’s chief annual ceremony Philo places as occurring “after seven sets of seven days” from some unspecified date. The timing and terminology approximate Jewish Pentecost but correspond also to Vesak, the annual celebration of the birth, enlightenment, and parinirvana of the Buddha, an observance held from the very earliest times in India at the full moon of the month of Vishakha (Gregorian April, May, or June, depending on the year). 

Ashoka’s rock edicts promoted ethical conduct throughout his empire. Rock Edict XIII, the longest of these, names several contemporary Greek kings and indicates that Ashoka sent emissaries to the Hellenistic world. The edict was inscribed in Greek and Aramaic in Kandahar, present-day Afghanistan. | Images via Wikimedia Commons.

When Ashoka sent his Buddhist emissaries to the West to spread the dharma, as recorded in the Rock and Pillar Edicts, they were charged also with acting as medical missionaries. Could this be the source of the Therapeutae’s name? Buddhist monks and nuns in India might possess special medical expertise that stems from their living as mendicant ascetics who practiced a kind of seasonal human transhumance keyed to the monsoons. In Western India, monastics stayed in rock-cut caves, far from the madding crowd during the rainy season, and traveled to towns and cities to beg for alms and preach in good weather. This lifestyle—along with the premium placed by Buddhism on compassion and alleviating suffering—brought them into regular contact with all strata of society, including the sick and invalid, providing motive and opportunity to develop therapeutic skill.

Entrance to the Bedse Caves in Maharashtra, India. Buddhist viharas were cut directly into solid rock. These monastic complexes are an exceptional type of architecture, dating from the 3rd century BCE to the 7th century CE. They are typically found along the west coast of present-day India. | Image via M.D. Usher

It seems likely, especially given Philo’s waffling, that “Therapeutae” masks a foreign word. Thera/-i means “elder” in Pali, as in Theravada (“the Way of the Elders”), one of the oldest surviving Buddhist schools. While “Theravada” as a term of self-description was a much later coinage, a viable soundalike word for Therapeutae in Pali that captures the notion of heritage is Therapittiya, meaning “Descendent of the Elders.” This is analogous to the oft-used ethnonym sakkapittiya (Skt.: shakyaputriya), “son of the Shakya,” used to describe both literal descendants and nonsanguinary followers of Shakyamuni, “Sage of the Shakya Clan” (the Sanskrit term is still in use by Newar Buddhists in Nepal). If Philo’s group practiced medicine, the semantic shift to Therapeutae, “Healers,” would have been easy for Greek speakers. That Philo refers to members of the group using both masculine and feminine forms of their name is also somewhat unusual in Greek—though it is de rigueur in Buddhist society, where monks and nuns are distinguished by gender as bhikkhus and bhikkhunis, and laypeople as upasakas and upasikas.

But what’s in a name? A rose, after all, by any other name would smell as sweet. So would a lotus flower.

As with most aspects of remote antiquity, it is difficult to know anything for certain. To study the premodern past can often feel like a Zen exercise in not-knowing. The archaeological discoveries at Berenike, however, clearly attest to the presence of Buddhists in Roman Egypt by the 2nd century of the Common Era. Philo’s descriptions of the Therapeutae suggest that Buddhist practitioners may have settled there earlier, perhaps as early as the Ptolemaic period, as Ashoka’s pillars affirm is possible. Considered alongside the Berenike Buddha, Philo’s treatise invites us to engage in another kind of archaeology—not of objects buried beneath the ground, but of a community flourishing above it—the first wave of Buddhism in the West, it would seem, which puts the transmission history of early Buddhism in a new light.