i’m pretty sure I’ve got an old picture of it somewhere. I’ve been through our old photo albums from the days before we started taking digital photos. But I can’t find it. (Maybe in one of those shoe boxes never opened since our last move?) Nonetheless, the photo is in my mind.

Just before the photo, the pearl diver swam out into the lake to retrieve a bunch of oysters from a kind of fence structure in the water, where they were being cultivated. He opened them one by one in front of the crowd of tour­ists, all Chinese, except for me. (West Lake is immensely popular among the Chinese.) I fell immediately in love with that huge pearl, but the Chinese tour­ists apparently weren’t interested. Surprised, I stepped forward and started to pull some yuan out of my wallet. The pearl diver waved me off. The pearl was misshapen and therefore worthless, he said through someone in the crowd who could translate. I thought the misshapenness made it more interesting and more valuable, and told him that through the friendly man who was trans­lating. I began again to take out some yuan. No, he said. You can have it. Keep it as a memory of China. I did, passing my camera to a tourist to take my now- lost photo.

Delighted, I continued my walk around West Lake to the road up to Ling- yin Temple. I had a map, but hardly needed it. The people were all streaming that way. I took the turnoff to the right, flowing along in a human river as I would do many years later when I visited the Vatican. The road was lined with vendors. Most of their wares were the kind of plastic tourist junk that China makes for the world, but also for its own tourist sites. Mixed in were open-air tea roasters, stirring and sifting mounds of dragon well tea by hand in huge bronze woks. The original dragon well tea comes from a village in the next valley over, so is famous to the area. Its sweetness scented the crowd.

Lingyin lived up to the hype, despite the overabundance of souls seeking retreat. The Grand Hall of the Great Sage was stunning, with an eighty-one- foot-tall wooden statue of a seated Buddha covered in gold leaf. I tried to get a picture, but like the statue of Jesus outside Notre Dame des Doms in Avignon, it was very hard to get in one frame. I leaned against the far corner of the back wall. Not enough. I took off my backpack to get a few more inches. Still not enough, but all I was going to get. I snapped what I could, and headed off to see some of the other sights.

I was particularly taken by the statue of the Laughing Buddha, carved into a grotto right into the rock of a nearby cliff face. I found myself laughing along with him. There is such a release in that image. I sometimes think of it today if my mood sours or if I have to put up with something like a flu shot. It helps.

But hang on! Where's my backpack? Must still be in the Grand Hall. Damn! I think I even left my wallet in it. And the pearl. Idiot!

I went racing back, which took about five minutes of dodging through the crowd. I hurdled up the steps, ducked in, and veered to the corner. There it was! I picked up my backpack. I looked through. Everything was in it. The pearl and the wallet, still stuffed with yuan.

The pulsations of material desire clearly course through the veins of Chi­nese society, as they do my own American society. It doesn't take a visitor with a shrewd eye to pick up on that. But this doesn't mean Chinese people are entirely comfortable with their surging acquisitiveness and class hierarchy. This, perhaps, is the main retreat they seek for the soul at Lingyin: release from desire, as the Buddha advised, including desire for a tourist's forgotten backpack.

Although I’ve lost the photo with the pearl diver, I still have the pearl. I keep it in a little embroidered cloth box I bought in China. I just went down­stairs to get it from the knickknack shelf. I took out the pearl and fingered its lustrous smoothness in contentment. Now it’s sitting beside the computer as I type this sentence. I think again of the diver. Did our encounter serve as his own moment of release from desire? So it seemed. I guess, though, still pearl- smacked, I need to work more on my own.

What I find most significant here about these encounters with desire in China— including my desire for the pearl, a reminder of the many material lusts I must confess I feel—is that I am not alone in being troubled by such thoughts. I am not alone in my own country. I am not alone across the world. I am not alone up and down the ladder of time. So many faith traditions have provided solace to so many through their help in guiding people through these doubts. We heard from Christianity in the previous chapter. In this chapter we hear from six more traditions and their many resonances of concern: Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Jainism, Platonism, NewJudaism (or what is more commonly called Rabbinic Judaism), and Gnosticism.

As we listen to these resonances, we will also see striking commonalities in the shapes of their moral instruments, even if the techniques for playing them vary considerably. Played together, they yield a massive key change. As with the rise of Christianity, what we will find in these shifts is a transition from the kin­based societies of pagan life to the class-based sensibilities of bourgeois life made possible by mounting urban wealth and widening separation in rural and urban ways. The root note of that moral key change is the desire for a manner of conscience—of other, self, and us—beyond politics: a desire not to desire.

The change is nowhere smooth nor complete. It always seems to jangle on in the ear, a tinnitus of discontent. By the end of this book, I hope to have pointed to a more consonant way.

Siddhartha Gautama was one who heard this key change early. Wealth, we are often told, is what we want. And twenty-five hundred years or so ago, Siddhartha had it all, and all that comes with having it all. Nonetheless, he chucked splendor aside and walked out the door, leaving his comfortable life of luxury behind—what Buddhists call the “Great Departure.”

Historians can’t be sure the stories about the man who was born Prince Siddhartha Gautama are based on a real person. They probably are. He is at least as likely to have been a real person as Jesus. But as with Jesus, people were either very impressed by the things that a real person did, or impressed by things they wished a real person did. That much we know for sure.

As amazed as we are today that a prince would walk out on his riches, and instead lead a simple and plain life devoted to teaching others how to avoid and resolve suffering, people of the time were equally amazed. They passed on his teachings orally for hundreds of years, and eventually wrote them down in a corpus of holy writings that is many times larger than those of either Judaism, Christianity, or Islam.

Those messages had many facets, as I'll come to, but the central one people took from the story of this remarkable man was that the root of people's trou­bles lay inside themselves, in their wanting. Don't go looking for wealth, for wealth actually makes you poor, he taught. That is to say, what you desire makes you poor, because you always feel a lack. It is wanting that leads to want—that leads to the suffering of lack.² The same is true for all our desires and attachments, not just for wealth, explained this deeply centered man that people came to call the Buddha, the “awakened one.” Extinguish the flame of those desires, he taught, and you will be released from the suffering that comes from not attaining and holding on to them.

People found this message relevant because of a major transition taking place in north Indian society, and the society of the region we now call Nepal, where Siddhartha likely was born. While we don't know the details of the political history of the time, we do know that the region saw rapid growth in the century before Siddhartha. New and larger kingdoms—mahajanapadas— were forming out of the tribally based city-states of the past. Jana meant tribe in Sanskrit, and janapada meant the “foothold” of that tribe, where it had set­tled down and established a permanent city-state out of the seminomadic life characteristic of the earlier time that historians call the Vedic period. A maha- janapada was an aggregation of these city-states into something approaching what we would call a state today. Some sixteen mahajanapadas had formed by the sixth century BCE, each a substantial region.

Then as now a larger state both facilitates and depends upon the expansion of bourgeois society. To have a state, there have to be people to collect taxes, to keep records of who paid, to discipline those who didn't pay, and to trade the production of one region with that of another so as to hopefully attain enough surplus to pay those taxes. And there have to be people to train those people, house and furnish those people, and feed those people with the production from the land that they have little time to manage themselves. Plus when a few smaller regions come together into something larger, the choice of who will lead this centralized authority is seldom settled purely by reasoned discussion. Rather, it is generally settled by force or the threat of force—that is, by who has the strongest military. In short, there need to be soldiers. It helps if at least some of those soldiers are permanent, an employed class, and not occasional conscripts from the countryside.

How, then, is a society going to keep all of these social classes coordinated together underneath a centralized authority? Through cities, the most powerful organizing tool ever invented. And indeed, this was a time ofwidespread urban growth in the Indian subcontinent. With that urban growth came bourgeois society, and with bourgeois society came more urban growth, and all the trou­bles and accomplishments of individualism, careerism, and new inequalities.³

Central to those conflicts in the Indian subcontinent was the development of castes, a particularly hardened form of hierarchy in which class position is inherited and marriage is endogenous—that is, limited to within it. Class and kinship go together in caste hierarchies, rather than colliding in the provision and denial of material security and social power. By the time of Siddhartha, the four basic varna or “colors” of caste were already firmly in place. Then as now there were three upper castes: the Brahmins—the priests, teachers, scribes, and record keepers; the Kshatriyas—the rulers and soldiers; and the Vaishyas—the merchants, landowners, and bankers. But by far the largest group, composing about 85 percent of all caste members, was the lower caste: the Shudras—the laborers and servants. There was also a fifth group, not even defined as a caste, but kept out of the system of advantage and thus becoming the most disadvantaged of all: those who have come to be called the Dalits, and more widely known in English as the Untouchables, expected to do the very worst work. Each caste was further divided byjatis or sub-castes that followed the same pattern of inherited and endogenous class.

Such an approach, however, did not resolve the new tensions of an increas­ingly centralized and bourgeois life. Growing disparities in wealth only exaggerated the conflicts, including among those in the upper castes. Central­ization of wealth followed on from centralization of religion, government, and settlement, advantaging Brahmin, Kshatriya, and Vaishya in various complex and often contradictory ways.

An idea that vastly promoted the formation of bourgeois society elsewhere also occurred to the newly emerging mahajanapadas in northern India: the issuing of minted coins. Like in Europe and the Middle East, minted coins took off in the sixth century BCE. Commodity exchange through commodity money (like a standardized weight of silver) and through barter was still the major part of the economy. But coins came on strong at this time, beginning with the purana⁴ It was a heady period, full of new wealth but also its many con­flicts, as social inequality expanded with the new ease of accumulating riches.

Perhaps it was the Brahmins that were doing best out of all this. The histor­ical record isn't certain. But what is certain is that Siddhartha was not Brah­min. He was a prince, and thus Kshatriya. And going along with his concern about wealth, he was strongly anti-caste. It also seems that he and his followers were especially concerned about the growing power of Brahmins in particu­lar—a point I'll pick up on later, especially in the next chapter when I discuss Hinduism.

Wealth was not the only form of desire that Siddhartha walked out on in his Great Departure, however. The extremes in its distribution seem to have been central to his imagination of our troubles, and has ever been a central metaphor of his life. But he also left behind sex and family: his harem, his wife Yasodhara, and his new son Rahula. The Buddhist canon is often quite vivid in its description of Siddhartha's earlier attachments to sexuality, noting that in his palace he was “constantly attended by entrancingly beautiful women who danced, sang, and played instruments” in order to “amuse, delight, and seduce him.”⁵ Endogenous marriage within castes may have been a response to the rise of bourgeois sex that challenged kinship lines, but it didn't prevent deep concern about sex and its transgressive powers.

The ancient sources also relate that Siddhartha was born of a kind of immaculate conception, without sex—a theme common to the birth stories of Jesus and important figures in several other bourgeois faiths, as I'll come to.⁶ In the case of Siddhartha, his mother, the beautiful Queen Maya, had made a vow of celibacy, swearing off sex's disruptive potential. She “never desired any man whomsoever,” and despite her beauty “neither did any man feel lust in [her] presence.”⁷ As well, “she was untroubled by attachment, anger, or delu­sion.”⁸ One night, the future Buddha decided it was time for his final rebirth. He had a look down at the Earth, and he observed that Queen Maya was “not lustful, or corrupt as to drink.”⁹ Therefore he chose her to be his mother, and he descended into her womb in the form of a six-tusked elephant, entering her right side. Ten months later, he emerged from her right side, as Queen Maya stood holding the branch of a sala tree.

But not only did Siddhartha overcome the desires of sex, wealth, and status. His Great Departure was also a great awakening about the woes of the world. Because of a prophecy made at his birth, Siddhartha’s father, King Sud- dhodana, tried to shield his son from knowing about the everyday troubles that beset us all. Yet, in the end, the king’s efforts failed. The reasons why make for one of the key narratives of Buddhist tradition.

After Siddhartha’s birth, King Suddhodana invited eight Brahmin wise men to predict the future of the new baby.¹⁰ All eight said that he would become either a great king or a great holy man. One wise man, though, went so far as to predict that Siddhartha would grow to be the Buddha—and therefore to renounce his wealth, position, and family. Alarmed, the king resolved to protect the young Siddhartha from all knowledge of suffering, surrounding him with every pleasure, including three palaces and the harem, in addition to arranging his marriage to the beautiful Yasodhara.n

It worked until, finally, at the age of twenty-nine, Siddhartha figured out how to elude his father’s protections. On a series of trips out of the palace, he encountered four people who changed his impression of life: a person who was sick, a person who was old, a person who had just died, and a traveling ascetic who lived in poverty. Shocked to discover that there was suffering in the world, one night Siddhartha made his Great Departure and left the palace permanently, renouncing the pleasures and ties that had formerly held him, including his wife and son, in order to seek better answers.

He began by experimenting with extreme poverty and austerity. He resolved to only eat “one sesame seed, one grain of rice, one jujube [a kind of date], one pulse pod [meaning a lentil pod], and one bean” per day, and to sleep outdoors on darbha grass (which is not noted for its relative com­fort)?² He also practiced self-mortification. After six years of these austerities, Siddhartha nearly died. Weak and emaciated, he accepted a meal of milk and rice pudding from a local village girl, and decided that such a path of extreme rejection and denial was no more correct than the wealth and indulgence of his former life.

So he sat under a tree, a bhodi tree, and meditated, resolving to find the truth.

He meditated for forty-nine days, seeking the true character of the good. As Siddhartha sat there, cross-legged in the posture that is now world-famous, his awakening as the Buddha steadily developed.

But then the demon Mara, the “Evil One,” approached him and asked “who is your witness” of your supposed Buddha-hood, with all the good deeds of your past lives. According to tradition, Siddhartha replied “the earth is my witness.”¹³ The Earth Goddess appeared and confirmed this truth. Then Mara sent his “three daughters, Lust, Desire, and Passion. With their young intox- icatingly attractive bodies, bedecked in divine garments, they stood in front of [Siddhartha] and began to display their feminine charms.” But Siddhar­tha used his emerging magical abilities to deny their transgressive power, and turned them into old hags. Next Mara sent thirty-six million demons to attack Siddhartha with lances and spears and arrows. Siddhartha did not counter­attack. Rather, he meditated on tranquility and metta, or loving-kindness, “and all those weapons were transformed into beautiful blue, red, yellow, and white lotus flowers and fell around him.”1⁴ Thus Mara was defeated, and Siddhartha was transformed into the Buddha. He awoke from his meditation truly awake in the deepest possible way.

The Buddha began traveling the countryside giving sermons on what he had learned. Most famous is his “Sermon at Benares,” the Indian holy city on the Ganges River—which is roughly the equivalent to Jerusalem for the Brah- manic faiths, as it is holy to Buddhists, Hindus, and Jains alike. The principles he articulated there remain the core of Buddhist thought today.

The first is the principle that the Buddha called the “middle way.” This idea is easy to state but great in significance for Buddhists. The middle way is simply the idea of avoiding extremes, such as wealth or austerity, which are themselves each forms of desire, the Buddha taught. Buddhism is sometimes believed by Westerners to be an ascetic tradition of denial. But severe renun­ciation was not the Buddha's message.

The second principle is the “four noble truths.” The first is the truth that dukkha, or suffering, exists. This was the truth the Buddha had realized when, as Siddhartha, he left his father's palaces and saw old age, disease, death, and poverty. But suffering also includes the loss of our happiness through lam­entation, pain, and grief over others, the Buddha taught. As well, it includes separation from what one likes and association with what one does not like. Plus suffering can also be the pain of not getting what one wants.

The second noble truth is that the cause of suffering is, most fundamentally, our desires and the attachments they create—our desires to be rich and our desires for sex, as well as our attachments to others and the world that these desires create. The material world—the aspects of existence that the West often calls nature—is the source of our troubles and the origin of our wants, the Buddha taught, articulating a third nature view of materiality as the origin of our politics of wanting. The inability to overcome these politics is what leads to yet another round of reincarnation through the continuance of samsara, the continuous flow of birth, death, and rebirth. Like other Brahmanic traditions, Buddhism does not see reincarnation as a good thing—another common point of misunderstanding in the West. It does not see reincarnation as a way to beat the sting of death. Rather, reincarnation means subjecting yourself to another round of the suffering and suffocating politics that constitute the nature of material life.

The third noble truth is that we can end our suffering and suffocating by “blowing out” our desires, like the extinguishing of a candle. When we do, we enter Nirvana—which means, quite literally, “blowing out.” With no desires and attachments, no effort to gain what we want or to hold on to what we have, Nirvana also means the blowing out of politics. Here we exist as a con­sciousness without object and desire in which the distinction between body and mind, self and other, is finally fully transcended. There is no class or caste. There is no pull of sex and its aspirations and obligations. There is no nature.

The fourth noble truth is the path of action the Buddha called “skillful,” a path that will enable one to blow out desire and end the cycle of samsara so we may reach Nirvana: the “eightfold path.” These eight components are right views, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.

The eightfold path is itself the third major principle of Buddhism, and is often visualized as an eight-spoked “wheel of dharma’’ In its most general sense, dharma means what one ought to do to uphold rightness. And it also can mean the body of teachings about rightness taught by the Buddha—what Buddhists will sometimes call The Dharma or Buddhadharma to distinguish it from dharma in the more general sense.

Dharma is closely related to karma, the universe’s measure of a sentient being's intended actions in relationship to dharma. In the briefest terms, dharma is what we ought to do; karma results from what we actually do. The relationship of karma to dharma determines one’s progress along samsara’s flow of reincarnation toward attainment of enlightenment, escape from mate­riality, and entry into Nirvana.

Herein lies the Buddhist natural conscience. It is not a natural conscience based on nature, though. It makes no second nature argument for a first nature that is beyond politics and therefore good. Although Westerners sometimes today look to Buddhism as a basis for environmental ethics, it offers no “unified vision of the sanctity of the natural world,” at least in the original texts, the Buddhist scholar Malcolm David Eckel has observed. Rather, notes Eckel, “if anything, there is the opposite,” the view that I have been calling third nature: nature as the morally problematic origin of our political desires.¹⁵ Instead, it is dharma that gives a natural other, a standard that is beyond human politics. And it is karma that reckons with the natural me—with the human struggle to enact that standard beyond politics?⁶

Although the eightfold path might seem rather individualistic in its orien­tation, the Buddha stressed the importance of understanding what he called anatman, or no-self, in which the distinction between self and others collapses. The natural me merges into the natural we. As a consequence, “a person who loves the self should not harm the self of others,” for they are one and the same—the Buddha's version of the golden rule?⁷

Tradition says that the Buddha delayed his ascent into Nirvana so he could help others discover the four holy truths and the natural conscience of the eightfold path. He spent the next forty-five years traveling and developing his dharma—his teachings about what people ought to do—and developing the Buddhist sangha, or community. Give up your ties of class and caste, of sex and kinship, and reground yourself in the natural we of the Buddhist family, he taught. He was a fabulous organizer and developer of what in the previous chapter I called the quasi-kinship of faith, a community of the Buddhist good. He set up a system of monasteries supported by the giving of dana, or alms, by which lay people could gain good karma and a sense of commitment to the sangha, becoming good by doing good. (Monasteries remain central to Buddhist practice today.) Finally, at age eighty, the Buddha announced that he would die and pass on to Nirvana. He urged his followers not to be sad about his passing. He took off his robe, lay down, and said “do not break into lamentations after I am gone, for all karmically constituted things pass away. Seek your own liberation with diligence.’^⁸ And then he died.

In the aftermath, the Buddha's relics were distributed around and became sites of pilgrimage, and remain so to this day.

It's a compelling history, and hundreds of millions today continue to find great truth and release in the natural conscience it provides. Buddhism ranks as the fourth largest religion in the world, after Christianity, Islam, and Hin­duism, with roughly five hundred million adherents, mainly in Nepal, China, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, and Sri Lanka. (There are only a few Buddhists in India today.) As of 2010, Buddhism also numbers as the third largest religion in the United States, after Christianity and Judaism, with nearly four million people identifying as Buddhists, as well as the third largest in Europe, after Christianity and Islam, with another million or so Buddhists.¹⁹

In addition, various aspects of Buddhism are widely practiced by those of other faiths. Take for example mindfulness-based stress reduction, or MBSR, for which you can actually get a prescription from your doctor in many places, including in my own city of Madison. As of 2016, some 36 million Americans, or 11 percent of the adult population, practice yoga and some 28 percent of Americans report having taken at least one yoga class.²⁰ (Yoga in America mainly draws from Hinduism. But it is in part Buddhist.)2i A number of faiths have also emerged that blend Buddhism and other traditions together, most notably Baha’i, Unitarian Universalism, and the various New Age religions. It is not uncommon to hear some quote from the Buddha mentioned on a popular website. Even without including the quoting of Buddha, one could probably make a reasonable case that roughly a third of the US adult popula­tion has practiced some aspect of Buddhism.

Some of what makes Buddhism so attractive to a dominantly Christian coun­try like the United States are the striking parallels between the story of Jesus and the story of the Buddha, giving an intuitive appeal or resonance to their blend­ing. Consider the list in Table 6.1, and the parallels in their life histories, per­sonal characters, and teachings—and the parallels in what they didn’t teach. It’s really a very long list. And there are more than what I include in the table.22 Of course, there are also some striking differences. But given this list, some have wondered if maybe there is some syncretism at work here—that Chris­tianity incorporated elements of the older faith, Buddhism, or was at least in­fluenced by it, and that Buddhism in time came to be influenced by Christianity. And possibly so, at least to some degree. We can’t say for sure that there was any direct borrowing. But we do know that Buddhist ideas were around and about throughout the eastern Mediterranean in the centuries before the time of Jesus. And we know that peoples from the eastern Mediterranean were around and about in India well before the time of Jesus as well.

Two great figures of antiquity worked to ensure this encounter of traditions. A century or so after the death of Siddhartha Gautama, another remarkable prince was born in south Asia: Prince Ashoka, who was emperor of the Mau- ryan Empire at the time of its greatest extent. His grandfather, Chandragupta Maurya, had conquered nearly the entire Indian sub-continent, putting almost all the mahajanapadas into one political unit. Ashoka finished the job shortly table 6.1. Parallels between Jesus and the Buddha

Parallels in their life stories

Each had an immaculate conception that required no sexual act.

Each had wise men attend their birth.

Each lived a life of poverty, but not asceticism.

Each walked out on family life and its ties.

Each is presented as being beyond sexual desire.

Each was tempted alone in the wild by a devil figure.

Each has an immaculate death, which he faces without fear, and asks his followers not to lament his passing, for he is going to a better place where he is ordained to go.

Each is associated with a prophecy of a return one day of a messiah figure who will bring enlightenment and goodness to the world at the end of time—although in the case of Buddhism, that figure, called the Maitreya, will be another Buddha, not Siddhartha Gautama himself.

Parallels in their personal characters

Each occasionally displayed miraculous powers, including healing powers.

Each traveled around giving sermons with wise sayings, and is presented as a monological figure of authority who has unique insight far beyond that of anyone else.

Each is shown learning but never actually making a mistake and virtually never having his mind changed by others through argumentation.

Each is a figure who is divine but has a human form that can and does die, and provides an immanent presence in relics and places one can still visit, yet all the while representing and communicating universal, transcendent, and absolute themes.

Each is male.

Parallels in their teachings

Each strongly articulated a natural conscience, a vision of goodness derived from motives claimed to be free of human politics.

Each warned of the troubles of material and sexual desire.

Each asked his core followers to give up wealth and sex and to leave their families behind.

Each articulated a natural we via an ethics of faith-based quasi-kinship and religious community.

Each established monastic orders, separated by gender.

Each established a tradition that often had things to say about women and gender relations that many today would regard as unsympathetic and discriminatory.

Each articulated a version of the golden rule.

Parallels in what they didn't talk much about

Each had very little to say about nature in the ways we understand it today, at least not directly, and is not portrayed as an embodied presence in nature. Indeed, nature is often described as the source of our desires, and as something to be overcome.

Each had little to say about our ecological needs for sustenance. after taking the throne in 269 BCE.²³ Ashoka became a key figure in the spread of Buddhism to the south, north, east, and west—even as far as the Mediter­ranean region.

According to the stories that have come down to us, Ashoka wasn't a very nice fellow, at least not at first. He had an infamously bad temper. He was renowned for “Ashoka's Hell,” a series of torture chambers he had built dis­guised as a beautiful palace. He was renowned as well for murdering ninety- nine of his hundred brothers (his father, the Mauryan emperor Bindusara, had a lot of wives), including tricking his father's chosen successor into walk­ing into a pit of live coals. And he was renowned for pursuing a war against Kalinga, a small kingdom of fertile land on India's eastern coast, roughly the area of the state of Odisha today. By the end of it, some hundred thousand had been killed and some hundred fifty thousand deported as slaves?⁴ Plus there was widespread burning and looting of towns and villages. The carnage was apparently so great that it gave pause to even a hardhearted, ambitious, maniac for power like Ashoka. For the legends say that, after touring the aftermath of the war, he cried out,

What have I done? If this is a victory, what's a defeat then?... Is it valor to kill innocent children and women? Do I do it to widen the empire and for prosperity or to destroy the other's kingdom and splendor?2^s

So great was Ashoka's remorse that he sought refuge and release in the teachings of Siddhartha, the Buddha, and the notion of dharma and its rules of right conduct. The sense of peace he gained was worth urging upon his entire empire, he felt. So he set about commissioning the carving of the “Edicts of Ashoka” into rock walls, caves, and specially built pillars—edicts that basically ordered people to follow his own idea of dharma. (That may not sound very Buddhist, but emperors can be like that.) Some forty-nine of the edicts still survive. The edicts often read a bit like a political ad campaign, promoting the benevolence and goodness of Ashoka himself. Alongside telling readers about the dharma, they explain that “I have had banyan trees planted so that they can give shade to animals and men” and have had “wells dug, rest-homes built, and in various places I have had watering-places made for the use of animals and men.”2⁶ His religious convictions may well have been sincere, but Ashoka also seems to have found some propaganda value in a universal religion of the good. A religion that applied to everyone, and that made Ashoka appear motivated by beneficence and not by politics, likely served him as rhetorical tools for holding an empire together.

Whatever his motivations, Ashoka didn't stop with having edicts carved in his own territories. He sent emissaries south into Sri Lanka, east into Myan­mar, north into China, and west as far away as Greece. Their efforts took sig­nificant hold in some places. Sri Lanka, Burma, and China are all Buddhist to this day. Buddhist ideas didn't take so strongly in the Mediterranean countries, and were later overwhelmed by Christianity. But there were some successes there too, in part because of the other great figure of antiquity I have in mind.

Fifty years before Ashoka reached out to the West, the West had already come to India. In 326 BCE, Alexander the Great crossed the Jhelum River into the Punjab at the head of an army of thirty thousand, drawn from Macedo­nian Greeks that had been with him for ten years—especially the Hetairoi, the elite cavalry who were sworn lifelong companions of Alexander—and supple­mented with soldiers from the regions he had earlier conquered.²⁷ Alexander's army had been battling their way across Asia for eight of those ten years, after first consolidating Alexander's hold on Greece and the Balkans, following the assassination of his father, King Philip (who was possibly killed at Alexander's direction)?⁸ They started with the Persian Empire, taking Anatolia (modern- day Turkey) from the Persians. Then they headed on down the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, conquering Syria, Judea, Egypt, and other lands that the Persians had held. In 331 BCE, Alexander turned his army east, headed for the heartland of the Persian Empire, what is now Iraq and Iran. After several dramatic battles, and some ugly politics, the Persian Empire fell completely into Alexander's hands in 328 BCE. The next year, Alexander headed for India, threading his forces through the Hindu Kush Mountains in a bloody effort to conquer the entire known world. In 326 BCE, they arrived and accomplished yet another of Alexander's amazing victories against a much larger army.

It was as far as he would go. The Macedonians in Alexander's army had been away from home for eight years. They refused to budge further east. Reluc­tantly, Alexander agreed and turned his army back west—only to die three years later in Babylon of a fever following a night of drinking with a friend, per­haps brought on by a viral or bacterial infection, but maybe instead by poison in the wine. (Hardly a year passes without another new theory of his cause of death.) What followed was another incredible mess of politics, with forty years of war and murder. By the end of it, Alexander's three wives, his son, his mother, and his uncle had all been murdered, and many others too. It was a true Game of Thrones affair. Although still often admired today, more than two millennia later, Alexander was one of the great monsters of history, and created conditions that inspired the monster in many others. He was the cause of a staggering amount of bloodshed. People at the time greatly esteemed his character, finding him noble, modest, generous, honest, and sympathetic. “Yet the fact is,” as one ancient chronicler of his life put it, “that in battle he was a berserker, as addicted to glory as men are to any other overmastering pas­sion.”²⁹ And violence typically leads to more violence.

Eventually, by about 275 BCE, Alexander’s short-lived empire had sort of stabilized into three main chunks. A much reduced Macedonian Empire con­trolled Greece and some surrounding areas. The Ptolemaic Empire, named after Ptolemy, one of Alexander’s generals, held the pharaoh’s flail and crook over Egypt and its surrounding lands, including Judea. And the Seleucid Empire, named after Seleucus, another ofAlexander’s generals, had sway over the rest clear across to India.

In the process, several hybrid forms of culture emerged which we can track in the historical and archaeological record. Greco-Bactrian. Greco-Indian. Even Greco-Buddhist. All ofwhich Alexander would have applauded. Despite his remarkable appetite for violence, he was apparently fascinated by the differ­ent peoples and social customs of the places he conquered. He sought not only to unify the world politically but also culturally, so as to promote greater world harmony—a more pleasant side effect of his megalomania, perhaps. As he urged in his will, read to his soldiers upon his death, his followers should seek the “transplant of populations from Asia to Europe and in the opposite direc­tion from Europe to Asia, in order to bring the largest continent to common unity and to friendship.”³⁰

In short, there was plenty of opportunity for Christianity and Buddhism to influence each other?¹

But to the sociologist, establishing historical precedence and cultural con­nection is potentially beside the point. We don’t want to turn the history of religion into a game of gotcha—that what you thought was an idea original to your faith really came from elsewhere. If you hear an idea that sounds good to you, what the sociologist most wants to know is not where the idea came from but why it sounded so good. For most seeds fall on infertile and unwelcoming soil.32 That’s why plants make so many of them. It is indeed illuminating to know the original plant, and how the seeds dispersed. But it is the context of their quickening that is the most decisive for growth.

The sociologist, then, is less concerned about proving the existence of syn­cretism between different faiths. Besides, with the sparse evidence that over two thousand years of historical accident has allowed to survive, proof of syn­cretism is challenging to establish to the satisfaction of a reluctant jurist—an adherent of a demonstrably younger faith, perhaps. Making a case for contex­tual parallels in religious form and religious situation is enough for the argu­ment I am trying to make here. Any borrowing, and any directionality to that borrowing, for sure is interesting, but less important. Moreover, you probably can't have syncretism without parallels of context, or any syncretic ideas would not be welcomed. But given human creativity in the face of need, similarities may well emerge without syncretism, if the context urges it. So contextual parallels are more decisive.

What we should be noting foremost, then, are the parallels between the European and India contexts during these centuries, and placing the parallels in religious ideas within those commonalities. There are four pretty striking ones:

1. The growth of massive empires emanating out of both Europe and India

2. The development of urban centers for administering them and allocat­ing their riches

3. The dividing of society into vertical and horizontal inequalities, a double conflict that assured taxes would be paid, armies provisioned, peasants disempowered, and elites rewarded for their allegiance to the central state

4. The relative decline in the power of tribal-based kinship

Europe and India were not the first regions to experience large empires, though. Nor were they the first to see great departures in religious ideas—departures toward faiths that emphasized a unified god of the good for everyone, with strong cautions about the presence of desire and politics in human affairs.

Zoroastrianism—or, as its adherents sometimes prefer to call it, Mazda- yasna—is one that predates both Christianity and Buddhism.³³ Scholars aren't certain exactly how old Zoroastrianism is. Our earliest accounts date from Herodotus's writings in the fifth century BCE, but there is indirect evidence that Zoroastrianism had been going for some time by then—maybe since the tenth century BCE, if not earlier?⁴ It was once one of the world's largest reli­gions, and is still practiced by two hundred thousand to two million or so faithful (estimates vary widely) mainly in India, Pakistan, Iran, and the United States. Probably the best known Zoroastrian in the West was Freddie Mercury, lead singer of the rock group Queen. Its main symbol is a guardian angel figure embedded in a sun with wings, called the faravahar.

The name Zoroastrianism derives from Zoroaster, the Greek form of the name Zarathustra, a prophet from ancient Persia who had some revolutionary revelations. Zoroastrianism is sometimes regarded as the oldest monotheistic religion, but that's probably not quite right. As I discussed in chapter 4, the short-lived veneration of Aten in Egypt in the fourteenth century BCE very well may predate Zoroastrianism on that score, depending on when Zoro­aster actually lived. No, what is the most remarkable innovation is Zoroaster's sense that this one god—a god Zoroaster called Ahura Mazda, or the “wise being”—was a god of the good. As far as we know, no religion had had such a vision before.

The term Mazdayasna means the worship of Ahura Mazda, an uncreated creator who has no form. In English, we generally call Ahura Mazda a “he.” But as Ahura Mazda has no form, gendering isn't theologically accurate. Still, Zoroastrians describe Ahura Mazda as “fathering” six physical emanations, the “divine sparks” or Amesha Spenta who assist Ahura Mazda in creating and maintaining order in the world. Three of the Amesha Spenta are male, and three are female. Together with Ahura Mazda, they form a Holy Heptad.

Zoroastrians envision a constant divine battle between order and truth, called asha, and disorder and falsehood, called druj. This battle takes place between Ahura Mazda and an evil spirit of disorder and falsehood, Angra Mainyu, who was also uncreated. Ahura Mazda has the Amesha Spenta on his side, and Angra Mainyu gets help from a large group of violent evil spirits. But humans can support Ahura Mazda through acting on three moral principles: Humata, Hukhta, and Huvarshta—Good Thoughts, Good Words, and Good Deeds. If we do, Zoroastrians say, eventually Ahura Mazda will prevail over Angra Mainyu. Then time will end and the dead will be revived. All souls will be cleansed and united with the divine. This final moment of cosmic reunifica­tion and renovation will be heralded by the arrival of the Saoshyant, the agent on Earth of Ahura Mazda. Born immaculately from his virgin mother, Eredat- Fedhri, when she enters a lake to bathe—a lake that preserves the semen of Zoroaster—the Saoshyant brings about the final victory.

It is not hard to see some strong parallels here with Buddhism and, even more strongly, with Christianity. A transcendent god of the good who has physical children who do his good work. A constant divine battle with a figure of evil. The prophecy of an end time when good wins over evil, and the dead rise and join with the divine. The end time ushered in by a messiah-like figure born of a virgin mother.³⁵ There are also parallels with Judaism, which like Christianity and Buddhism stresses that a divine savior will arrive one day to usher in a time of unity and goodness (although Christians believe this arrival will also be a return).

Zoroastrianism isn't the same as Buddhism, Christianity, and Judaism. It has plenty of differences. For example, we could say that Zoroastrianism isn't really monotheistic, given the Amesha Spenta. But, then again, the Amesha Spenta are only manifestations of the one transcendent divine, Ahura Mazda. And besides, when you think about it, Buddhism and Christianity aren't all that strict about their monotheism either. Consider the Trinity and the many semidivine saints in Christianity, and the many bodhisattvas—semidivine humans who have reached enlightenment but hold off their entry into Nirvana so they can help others—in some forms of Buddhism?⁶

A more telling difference, I think, is that Zoroastrians see each Amesha Spenta as being responsible for a different ecological factor: plants, animals, water, fire, earth, and minerals. There is a place for the female divine as well; the Amesha Spenta for earth, water, and plants are all regarded as female. Plus Zoroastrianism shows less concern with issues ofwealth and sexual desire. Zoroaster's focus was more on peace and ending warfare with other Persian tribes, a loyalty theme, useful for building a state out of a tribal society. And in Zoroastrianism, the divine is definitely not all powerful. The divine needs our help.

But it is hard not to suspect some syncretism, given how similar many of these notions are to both the Brahmanic and the Abrahamic faiths. And once again, there was plenty of opportunity for these ideas to spread around. Darius I, the Persian emperor who followed shortly after Cyrus the Great, was an ardent Zoroastrianism follower. Zoroastrianism remained the main faith of the Persian state until the time of Darius III, when Alexander the Great conquered Persia. Although the Jews had mostly returned to Judea by that time, and had rebuilt the Temple, they were still part of the Persian Empire. The Jewish elites had to have heard of Zoroastrianism and its religious inno­vations. No doubt they had heard of it long before the Babylonian exile as well. Given the power of Persia throughout the first millennium BCE, we can well believe that many Jews during these times were impressed by Zoroastri­anism's association with political success. And indeed, the latter books of the Old Testament—especially Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, which were written between the eighth and sixth centuries BCE, and likely revised and edited for hundreds of years onward—make similar prophecies about the end time, prophecies that many Christians and Jews believe a messiah will one day fulfill.

Plus the New Testament makes a striking allusion to Zoroastrianism: Mat­thew’s description of the “three wise men from the East” who come looking for “the child who has been born king of the Jews.”³⁷ The original Greek for the “wise men” is μάγοι, sometimes translated into English using the Latin, which is magi. Starting with the Greek historian Herodotus in the fifth cen­tury BCE, the term μάγοι or magi was widely used to refer to Zoroas- trian priests. The term soon evolved a parallel use to mean the kinds of acts and rites that μάγοι or magi did: which is to say magic (μαγικός in Greek and magicus in Latin). But the usage here in Matthew seems pretty clearly to describe a blessing from Zoroastrian priests “from the East” at Jesus’s birth.

Still, the evidence for Christian, Jewish, and Buddhist syncretism with Zoroastrianism is mainly circumstantial. Which is exactly how we should treat it. It is the parallels and differences in the context, the circumstances, of these ideas that should catch our eye most. Zoroastrianism arises in a more pagan society, struggling to centralize, and speaks to pagan concerns from a bourgeois center, much as does the Old Testament. In short, Zoroastrianism too is a pagan monotheism, but with a more developed natural conscience than early Judaism.

Others were to take these and similar ideas further, perhaps developing and expanding from Zoroaster’s insights, or reinventing them on their own.

One such thinker was Vardhamana or, as he later came to be known, Mahavira, which means “Great Hero” in Sanskrit?⁸ Vardhamana was born in 497 BCE, a few decades before Siddhartha Gautama. Like Siddhartha, he was also a prince, a Kshatriya, and he also came to doubt the princely life of luxury, wealth, and bourgeois excess. He left it all behind at age thirty—almost exactly the same age, twenty-nine, when Siddhartha left his family and palace. In fact, wealthy men leaving it all behind to become wandering ascetics was pretty common at the time. Shramanas, people called them, “strivers” for enlight­enment. The ascetic that Siddhartha saw on his fourth trip out of the palace sounds like one such shramana.

Just as Siddhartha was later to do, Vardhamma strived unusually strongly for enlightenment. He became chaste, practiced meditation, and abstained as much as he could from food. He abandoned all forms of wealth, even clothing, and went about naked. After twelve and a half years, Vardhamma succeeded in reaching enlightenment, say ancient sources. (Siddhartha took only six years, the Buddhist canon reports. We may perhaps sense here a Buddhist claim of precociousness, like having Siddhartha’s great departure at twenty-nine instead of thirty.)³⁹ Vardhamma’s moment of realization came while sitting under a tree—a sala tree instead of a bodhi tree like Siddhartha. (But Sid­dhartha’s mother gave birth to him under a sala tree, say the Buddhist sources, perhaps symbolizing that his teachings supplant Vardhamma’s.)⁴⁰ For the next thirty years, the one we should now call Mahavira traveled across South Asia, counseling that our problems start with attachment and desire, establishing a community of followers—a quasi-kinship of faith in the good—and, like the Buddha, founding orders of monks and nuns. (The Buddha traveled around preaching and organizing for forty-five years.)

With his teachings, Mahavira crystalized the natural conscience of the tra­dition we now call Jainism, from the Sanskrit word jina, meaning conqueror. But a Jain does not try to conquer others. A Jain tries to conquer the inner self, and the desires and attachments that lead us astray, and thereby develop a natural me. The six million or so Jains of today are guided by three main principles, derived from Mahavira’s teachings. Rather than orienting faith toward the gods and their needs for ritual and sacrifice, Mahavira focused on Ahimsa (non-violence), Aparigraha (non-possessiveness), and Anekantavada (non-absolutism)—that is, welcoming multiple perspectives on all matters of importance. Jains are also known for their belief in the presence of varying degrees of jiva, or life, in all matter, including matter most Westerners would regard as inanimate. Here Jains come the closest of all bourgeois traditions to a second nature sense of the goodness of first nature. Most Jains practice strict vegetarianism and are concerned not to harm even insect life, because of their view that all life is bound together through mutual support and inter­dependence. Jain monks and nuns sometimes carry a broom and sweep the ground ahead of them as they walk, so as not to step on any insects. Jains also revere Brahmacharya or abstinence, including both abstinence of sexual thoughts and thoughts about material desire—thoughts that they argue are connected to sexual thoughts, as both Buddhism and Christianity also often argue. For layJains, this means practicing chastity outside of marriage, and for Jain monks and nuns this means practicing celibacy, much as with Christianity and Buddhism today.

Mahavira had a more ascetic take on the question of desire than did the Buddha, however. Although Jains do revere jiva, Mahavira took with stag­gering seriousness the goal of conquering third nature too—conquering the materiality of our desires—and thereby finally escaping samsara, the cycle of reincarnation. In 425 BCE, at the age of seventy-two, he achieved complete liberation from desire by freeing himself of even the need to eat, and even­tually died of starvation. Jains do not counsel such a route to liberation for everyone—only for those suffering from a terrible disease or who are clearly approaching the end of their lives, and also for those rare few who are ready across the span of their own passage through samsara to attempt such an escape from it. This sounds a lot like suicide to many observers, but Jains don't see it that way, regarding it more as an ethic of self-dignity.

To the Buddha—who surely knew about Jainism, for it was already in wide­spread practice among the urban classes of his time—such strong asceticism apparently was a bit much. The Buddha seems to have formed his notion of the “middle way” in direct contrast to Jainism. Many other elites during the Bud­dha's time evidently agreed with him. At least, Jainism never received anything like the imperial support that Buddhism received from both the Mauryan and Greek empires.

But like Buddhism, Jainism does not speak much to the agroecological con­cerns for sustenance of villagers laboring in the fields, who can little afford such caution about animal lives lost through the struggle to get a crop out of the ground. To this day it remains dominantly an urban religion of the middle and upper classes, providing a natural conscience of other, self, and commu­nity—of thee, me, and we—that adherents view as beyond politics.⁴¹ It is a dominantly bourgeois tradition with some hints of pagan sensibilities, such as the notion of jiva.

And like Buddhism, from the start it staunchly opposed the caste system and the power of Brahmin priests—a conflict I will return to in the next chapter.

Two or three years before the death of Mahavira (historians aren't completely sure of the dates) another aristocrat was born who would have a huge impact, but in this case on the thought of the peoples of the Mediterranean. In fact, his name was Aristocles—about as aristocratic a name as one could imagine—a descendent of a king of Athens. He was an excellent wrestler as a young man, something that was highly honored in ancient Greek elite society. Because of his wide frame and ability to use it in pinning opponents, his coach nicknamed him Plato, meaning wide and plate-like. The nickname stuck and even became the professional name that he used in writing his famous letters and dialogues based on the character of his philosophy teacher, Socrates.

Plato in time came to run his own school of philosophy, set up in an olive grove on the outskirts of Athens. People called the grove Akademia for Acade- mus, an Athenian hero buried there, from which we get the English words “aca­deme,” “academic,” and “academy.” But Plato's school was not merely academic. He was deeply involved in politics. He once even got sold into slavery because of his politics, only to later get bought out of slavery by an admirer—again because of his politics.⁴² (The winds of the political were as shifty then as now.)

All of this got him thinking deeply about the good. Athens was a huge city, the biggest in the world at the time, with something like a quarter of a million people, the fruit of finally beating Sparta in 387 BCE—the year after Aris­tophanes's premiered his play Wealth (which I discussed at some length in chapter 3). The Athenians promptly set up the Second Athenian League of city-states, a kind of re-creation of the old Delian League, an association of about two hundred city-states convened to fight off the Persians but also to stimulate trade. The Delian League had essentially been an Athenian empire, with Athens using the league's navy to pursue its own agenda. Eventually, other Greek city-states came to resent Athens's power and wealth, leading to the two big wars with Sparta: the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE), which Sparta won, and the Corinthian War (395-387 BCE), which Athens won. The Second Athenian League was set up so Athens would not have as much control as before, but nonetheless the money and people were once again pouring into the city, resulting in some of the most wonderful art, architecture, and philos­ophy ever conceived.4³ The money also led to much competition and manip­ulation. Plato saw politics, politics, and politics everywhere, and went looking for an alternative foundation for motivation and truth—for his own vision of a supernatural basis for a natural conscience. Upon this foundation, he hoped to design a society of the good and thus a good society.

His solution was to reject the nature-before-nature poly-divinity of the ancient Greek myths and to propose a new kind of god, not just a god of the good but a god who simply is the good. Had he picked up the idea from the Zo­roastrianism of the Persians, or from Buddhism somehow? Maybe. There were certainly some marked similarities. Like dharma and Ahura Mazda, Pla­to's divinity of the good had no material manifestation—no shape, no gender. Yet from it came all material manifestations through the crafting of the world to emulate what Plato called the “forms” of the good. The forms for Plato were sort of blueprints of the perfect, and he regarded these as eternal and a higher reality than the passing world of the material we take to be real, a notion that bears more than a passing resemblance to the Buddha's conception of dharma—albeit with a more dualist flair, the ideal versus the material^ Taken together, the forms gave a deep logic or logos to the world, a kind of divine language of the perfect. (Indeed, the word logos meant “word” or “speech” when not used in this special philosophical sense.)

Depending on how you read Plato in his dialogue Timaeus—he was not altogether clear on this point—the good itself had no cause. Perhaps Plato worried that if the good had cause, it would have intention and thus the begin­ning of politics. But the good led to cause by emanating what Plato called the demiurge, the architect or divine craftsman (usually described as male) who fashioned the material world according to the forms. It was a pretty similar idea to the uncreated creator envisioned by Zoroaster who emanated other divinities to do the actual material work of creating.⁴⁵ More syncretism? We'll probably never know. And it doesn't matter. We know the parallels of context were strong: growing urbanism and inequality—based on both class and rural­urban differences—in an imperial society.

And we know that the parallels of context were strong with Christianity, which, in turn, has some marked similarities with Plato's ideas. Here histo­rians are pretty sure the similarities in ideas stem not only from parallels of context but also from actual syncretism. It's quite clear that many of the elites who were centrally involved in shaping Christianity—Paul, Ignatius, Irenaeus, Athanasius, Augustine, and others—had been schooled in the Greek philos- ophers.4⁶ They sometimes even say so?⁷ The writings of the ancient Greeks were deemed central to education throughout this period. Plato's Timaeus cir­culated widely. Many found compelling its conception of a fundamental good behind and above everything, giving a divine logic to our lives.

The New Testament suggests syncretism most prominently in the Gospel of John, which repeatedly uses the word logos in the original Greek. The usual translation in English, though, is “the word,” as in the famous opening of John, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” and his later declaration that with the coming ofJesus “the Word became flesh and lived among us.”4⁸ At the very least, the concept ofJesus as a kind of emanation or personification of the divine good of logos parallels Plato's concept of a demiurge—not to mention Zoroastrianism.

But whether or not we are seeing syncretism here, syncretism won't happen if the ideas don't make contextual sense. Common ideas make sense in com­mon situations, whether or not they arose independently or were brought by a traveler from afar. It's not a matter of syncretism versus contextualism.

Plus there were several other major new religious movements about that time in the Mediterranean region, movements that made great philosophical departures closely related to what became Christianity. Many, many people were having the same kinds of concerns as were Jesus, his followers, and those who developed Christianity afterward. Many were seeking release into the innocence and confidence they found in a supernatural manner of natural conscience.

Prominent among those concerned were the rest of the Jews—the ones who did not become Christians. The Jesus movement was far from Judea's only religious movement with political overtones and undertones. There was plenty of politics at the time. And they did not all lead to what we now call Christianity.

In fact, we learn from the Roman historian Flavius Josephus that the Jews had divided into at least four main political factions, with different stances toward the Roman occupation and its puppet kings: the Zealots, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and Essenes, a spectrum from confrontation to quiet distaste to accommodation to withdrawal.⁴⁹ The Zealots preached armed rebellion against the Romans. The Zealots also had a particularly militant branch known as the Sicarii, the “dagger-men,” who were even willing to assassinate other Jews for cooperating with the Romans.⁵⁰ The Essenes, at the other end of the spectrum, were communalists who withdrew from Roman Jewish society. The Zealots don't make much appearance in the New Testament, except for two quick, tantalizing mentions that one ofJesus's twelve apostles, Simon, was a Zealot. No mention of the Essenes is made at all.

But there is a lot of Biblical talk about the Sadducees and the Pharisees, who were sharply divided. On the one side were the supporters of the Has- monean Dynasty and of King Herod, advocates of a centralized Temple for a centralized Jewish state. These were the Sadducees, and included mostly the wealthy and aristocratic, as well as many priests. They were elites, and they emphasized a literal reading of the Old Testament—a literalism whose inter­pretation was under their control.⁵¹

On the other side were the Pharisees, who felt less commitment to the Temple, the state, and the priestly interpretation of biblical law, and who ranged up and down the class ladder, from elites to those but a small remove from the pagan life of the peasant. The Pharisees briefly took control of the Temple and served as its main priests under Queen Salome Alexandra during her nine-year reign from 76 to 67 BCE. But that had been a century ago. Herod put the Sadducees back in power in the Temple, and there they remained, albeit much constrained by the Romans.

In place of the biblical literalism of the Sadducees, the Pharisees pointed to a different, popular body of law they called the “Oral Torah.” When God gave Moses the Torah on Mount Sinai, the Pharisees argued that he also gave Moses a wealth of interpretation which was never written down but rather transmit­ted by word of mouth, along with interpretation added by the wise through the generations. They still read the Torah, the Jewish term for the Five Books of Moses, the Old Testament’s first five books. But they looked to the Oral Torah for interpreting the written Torah, not to the priests in the Temple. In this task, the Pharisees were helped by local religious leaders they called rabbis—a term still familiar to us since the Judaism of today directly descends from the tradi­tion of Pharisees, what is often called Rabbinic Judaism by scholars. It might also be termed the New Judaism, even though it is now two thousand years old, to remind us of how very different it is from the centralized Judaism the Sadducees advocated and that the Old Testament describes.

Crucially, this NewJudaism was a far more immanent and localized under­standing of faith, brought directly to people’s lives through the debates of local religious leaders about the Oral Torah, as opposed to the universal pronounce­ments of the priests in the Temple. Jews needed a vision like this. The Temple based religious structures of the Sadducees simply couldn’t work, for there no longer was a Temple, the Romans having utterly destroyed it in 70 CE. There­after, the Romans pretty much (although not entirely) drove the Jews out of Judea after the failed Bar Kokhba Revolt, the last act in the Jewish-Roman Wars from 66 to 135 CE. The Romans also gave the region a new official name: Palestina, which derived from an older term that loosely encompassed many of the small territories surrounding Judea. The resulting diaspora spread Jews into hundreds of communities scattered around the Mediterranean, and even­tually the world. In such circumstances, a decentralized religion led by local leaders made practical sense.

But at the same time, this NewJudaism was a faith based on a vision of God as good—as a supernatural basis for a natural conscience. Eventually, around the second century CE, the Oral Torah was written down and combined with later commentaries on it to create the Talmud—a book as significant to Jews as the New Testament is to Christians. The Talmud is a very different book than the New Testament. Its focus is on laws and customs, with little in the way of stories and history. But it parallels the New Testament in represent­ing a major liturgical development beyond the Old Testament—a great departure that equally downplays a scary image of the divine, and that focuses instead on the idea of divine goodness and the troubles that come from our desires.

Indeed, it could be said that Christianity is a branch of these same trends in Judaism—albeit a highly successful branch. Jesus was a Jew. All early Chris­tians were Jews. The political context of Christianity’s emergence was a Jewish context. Central to that context was the same tension over centralization of state and religion versus a more localized approach that distances itself from the center, the tension of Sadducee versus Pharisee. We even have it on Paul’s own authority that he was a Pharisee.⁵² And Jesus is often referred to in the Gospels as a rabbi, and thus by implication a Pharisee.⁵³ In its early years, Christianity was a New Judaism too.

Plus, as Christianity began to develop into a religious tradition in its own right, no longer a faith tradition ofJews and former Jews alone, it did so with great diversity. There are many, many different Christianities now, and there were many, many different Christianities then. Although the New Testament makes a strong effort to give a sense of a tradition that began in considerable unity, impressions of what to make of, and to take from, the teaching ofJesus varied very widely—I may say very, very widely—in the first centuries of the Common Era. Most Christians have heard little about this variety because it was actively suppressed by the Roman state, once the decision was made to make a centralized and unified Christianity its new state religion. “Lost Chris­tianities” some scholars call this suppressed variety?⁴

Scholars wouldn’t know much about these lost Christianities except for a chance discovery in 1945. At base of the cliffs that overlook the Upper Nile the lucky peasant can sometimes find a nitrogen-rich layer in the soil. Local people call it sabakh, and it makes a fine fertilizer. In December of that year, seven fellahin—a North African term for peasants—set out with their camels and mattocks to look for sabakh in the cliffs behind their little hamlet of al-Qasr, a small cluster of houses across the Nile from the town of Nag Hammadi. They hobbled their camels at the base of the cliff and began hacking the ground with their mattocks. One of them hit a human skeleton. Intrigued, they all started digging around near the skeleton. And then the mattock of one Abu al-Magd hit another surprise: the top ofwhat turned out to be a huge clay jar, sealed with bitumen, containing twelve papyrus books and a few pages of a thirteenth, all written in the Coptic Egyptian alphabet.

Most of the men were frightened, afraid that they had unleashed a genie. But one of them—a man named Muhammad Ali, as it happens, and the older brother of Abu al-Magd—took the books home anyway, thinking they might be worth something. They were. The books were a collection of scriptures once held divine by a loose-knit variety of early Christianity called Gnosticism.

Scholars knew of these scriptures mostly only from references in the works of other early Christians, who mainly cited them to complain about them, often with considerable distortion. Now scholars had many of the actual original texts.

A huge storm of scholarly debate has since whirled up over the meaning of these texts, and why we almost lost them. The second point of debate turns out to have a lot to do with the first.

Imagine the scene. It's the late fourth century CE, probably the late spring or early summer of 367 CE, and a couple of monks are lugging a three-foot- high clay jar to the base of a cliff. Another couple of monks are just finishing digging a hole. The area is an ancient cemetery, across the river from their monastery in Nag Hammadi. No one pays much notice to the monks, figur­ing perhaps that they are burying a dead child in the jar. A burial is the sort of thing monks do.

But the monks are nervous and work quickly, for what is in the jar is no dead child. Rather, it is a collection of texts they hope to keep alive, even though they are in direct conflict with the Easter letter sent out a few months ago by Athanasius, the Christian archbishop of Alexandria, downriver at the mouth of the Nile, 450 miles away. In his 39th Festal Letter, Athanasius gave a long list of religious texts he deemed “lying and contemptible” and ordered immediately destroyed.⁵⁵ The jar the monks carry is filled with over twelve hundred pages of these heretical texts. There are fifty-two separate works in the jar with titles like The Gospel of Thomas, The Gospel of Philip, The Gospel of Truth, The Secret Book of John, On the Origin of the World, and Thunder, Perfect Mind.^s6 Not just any works: these are works that present radically different understandings from the twenty-seven books that Athanasius declared holy and legitimate. It is a defining moment in Christian history, for those twenty­seven books were what we know today as the twenty-seven books of the New Testament. Athanasius’s 39 th Festal Letter is the New Testament’s first table of contents.

The monks have every reason to be cautious?⁷ Athanasius is a powerful, controversial, and occasionally ruthless fellow. The monks know well of his deep involvement in the Council of Nicaea, the gathering of bishops from all over the Christian world called by the Emperor Constantine in 325 CE to sort out a centralized and unified version of Christianity for a centralized and unified Roman Empire?⁸ One of the big points of contention at the Council of Nicaea had been trinitarianism—the idea that God consists of

three co-equal, co-eternal, and consubstantial divine persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Athanasius won over the council against the advo­cates of what was called Arianism, led by the theologian Arius, who said the three persons were not all of the same order and that Jesus was subordinate to God the Father. Athanasius even got Arius excommunicated. Arius waited for an opportunity for revenge, and ten years later convinced the emperor to exile Athanasius. The next year, Arius suddenly died while out walking in the street—rumored to have been poisoned at the command of Athanasius and his supporters.

So the monks know that crossing Athanasius is hazardous. Many have tried. He is now bishop again, despite having been exiled four more times by four different emperors. He's a survivor and no stranger to the politics of bitter theological fights—and the theological fights of bitter politics. And now Atha­nasius apparently thinks that the moment has arrived when he can safely settle not only the matter of Arianism but also the matter of Gnosticism.

So the monks handle their clay jar with both care and speed. Their monas­tery in Nag Hammadi is one of many that reveres these diverse Gnostic texts, and had even lovingly translated them into Coptic, the common tongue of Egypt, so that others could gain their benefit. Alas, they never were able to get ahold of two important Gnostic texts, the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Judas.^S9 But their local abbot's wish is to protect the ones they do have, burying them in the cemetery until the political winds change. The monks nervously agree. So into the hole the monks lower the jar, sealing its opening with bitumen and a smaller upside down jar, placing a boulder on top of it, and covering it all with dirt and many a prayer.

Those winds do not soon change, however, and the monks never come back.

Winds seem to be more in favor of Gnosticism now. Once seen as heresy, and later as a kind of odd variant of early Christianity mostly founded on reject­ing the material world, scholars are reassessing Gnosticism, and some Chris­tians are trying to revive it.⁶⁰ The year 2003 even saw the publication of The Gnostic Bible, a compendium of Gnostic writings, including both the contents of the Nag Hammadi jar as well as many other allied and long-neglected writ­ings that survived Roman censorship in other ways.

It is difficult to speak in broad brush about any faith tradition, but maybe especially so Gnosticism, as our knowledge of it remains pretty fragmentary and it actually encompasses a wide range of traditions, and not only Christian ones.⁶¹ But four ideas seem central to most of the writings gathered together under this term:

• One, that YHWH is not good and is not the real god, meaning that Jews and Christians have been worshipping the wrong god

• Two, that there is a real god of the good behind YHWH

• Three, that divinity is not only masculine

• Four, that divine truth or gnosis is to be found by looking in, not out

Gnostics—who initially included both bourgeois Jews and those who were starting to call themselves Christians—embraced the bourgeois sense that the one true divine must be good. But the Gnostics were more troubled by YHWH’s thundering ways than other Jews and Christians. If God is good, then YHWH can't be God, they reasoned. They agreed that YHWH was the creator of the material world, as the Old Testament says. And they agreed that YHWH quite evidently thinks he is the one true divine. But he was wrong, according to Gnostics. Rather, YHWH was a flawed emanation of the one true divine, the supremely good Single Principle behind everything. Which was why the world wasn't all good: YHWH wasn't all good.

In this way, the Gnostics grappled with a problem that has long beset tra­ditions of natural conscience based on a vision of divine goodness: how to explain the presence of evil. The problem of theodicy, as scholars call it, is the moral need to account for why an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good god would allow evil to exist. Why would God allow a third nature? A common answer Judeo-Christian traditions give is that we cannot know the mind of God, and therefore what appears to be evil must not be. But that answer is often hard for a seemingly random victim of disaster or disease to accept. Another explanation is that God is testing us to determine who will be eligible for eternal life in heaven. But if God is all-knowing, God must already know who is worthy and should have no need to test us. Besides, a loving and all­powerful god of the good would want to prevent the evil in us to begin with, or so many have pondered.

The Gnostic view side-stepped these problems of theodicy. Since YHWH is flawed, so is the material world. The Single Principle is perfect goodness, but because of YHWH’s imperfections much about the material world is not good. If this sounds a lot like Plato's idea of a demiurge, a creator god that emanates from something deeper, that's probably because it largely is, most scholars agree—although with the important distinction that the Gnostic demiurge isn't fully good.

Gnostics also embraced the idea of many other emanations of the divine. In the vision of Valentinian, a Gnostic thinker that started a tradition well represented in the Nag Hammadi jar, dozens of divine beings issued from the Single Principle. First in time and foremost in power are thirty Aeons, which the Single Principle established in fifteen pairs or syzygies, one male and one female. (Other Gnostic systems have different numbers of Aeons.) Together, the Aeons exist not as bodies but as immaterial forms that manifest thepleroma, the fullness of the divine, and exist in a region of light which lies just above the darkness of the material world. The Single Principle itself has no form at all, not even an immaterial form, and thus no gender. The striking man-in-the-sky masculinism of most natural conscience faith traditions does not sit well with many who are concerned about gender equity, especially in recent decades. Gnosticism’s embrace of female divinity provides a potential alternative, some contend.⁶²

For Christian Gnostics, Jesus was a human emanation of the Single Princi­ple, sent to explain the deep truth of the real. The most important truth is that genuine knowledge of the divine—the knowledge that Gnostics called gnosis, which simply means “knowledge” in Greek—can be found only by looking into one’s inner being, where the spark of the Single Principle yet remains in all people. True gnosis does not come from books or religious authorities. You can only find it in and through yourself.

Like New Judaism, Gnosticism seems to have shared a suspicion of cen­tralized religion, and its close alliance with the state. If a claim of natural we is coextensive with a state or empire, it can be hard to avoid detecting a sour stench of politics in that we. Gnosis is clearly more compatible with a more localized faith tradition. This is no doubt much of the reason that the Roman state and its new centralized vision of Christianity as a state religion had little patience for the books in the Nag Hammadi jar.

But despite Roman suspicion, Gnosticism—or, rather, the many Gnos- ticisms—represented a tradition that spoke to the issues its adherents expe­rienced in their place and time. Those adherents were not pagan. Like New Judaism and New Testament Christianity, like Buddhism and Jainism, and like Platonism, Gnosticism spoke to bourgeois concerns about issues of desire and its inequalities. Like those traditions, Gnosticism spoke strongly to those who worried about religious centralization and its political implications. And like them again, Gnostic texts did not speak to concerns of ecology and agricultural sustenance. Although Gnosticism’s veneration of Aeons lends it a poly-divine energy, unlike pagan traditions its many divinities are not immanent in the forces of sustenance and what we have come to call nature. There is no Aeon of rain, no Aeon of fertility, no Aeon of hunting. Rather, the Aeons manifest transcendent abstractions. The Aeon Nous represents mind. The Aeon Alethia (the female half of a syzygy with Nous) represents truth. And so it goes with the other syzygies. Sermo and Vita: word and life. Anthropos and Ecclesia: hu­mans and church. Bythios and Mixis: profundity and mixtures. Paracletus and Pistus: comfort and faith.⁶³

Gnosticism, then, is also bourgeois—but a bourgeois polytheism.

Nineteen ninety-nine was a year for great departures of my own. A few months after my visit to China, Lingyin, and West Lake, where I picked up that beau­tiful pearl, I also got to travel to South Korea, where I’d been invited to a con­ference on environment and consumption. The conference was held at Jeju National University, which is in Jeju-shi, the capital city of Jeju Island, which lies off the southern coast of South Korea. It was another wonderful trip that got me thinking. I didn’t bring home another pearl, though. Instead I came back with a plain wooden dipper. It still hangs in our bathroom at home. I use it to rinse after brushing my teeth, or for a little drink of water now and again. The handle has a couple of symbols in Korean script carved into it. I can’t read what they say. At least what they were intended to say: I can read what they say to me.

I remember well the afternoon I got the dipper. I’d just arrived on Jeju Island. The conference was to begin in a couple of days, so I had time to look around. After my host dropped me off at my hotel, I decided to take a bus out to Sanbangsan, a volcano that spurted out a million years ago right on the edge of the southwest coast ofJeju. It turned out to be an excellent choice. San­bangsan is about twelve hundred feet high, and rears straight up out of a flat strip of coastal land. It looks twice as high as it is. Plus it has a lovely Buddhist temple, with a fabulous bell at the top, rung by a massive log like a battering ram that swings into it from chains hung from the roof of the bell tower. I had a great walk along the beach below and met a couple of Jeju’s famous women shell divers, wading out into the rocks and waves. One of the women sold me a huge, fresh oyster, slathered with chili paste. It didn’t have a pearl, but it wasn’t supposed to. And it was delicious. We chatted delightedly for about fifteen minutes, she entirely in Korean and I entirely in English, with lots of laughter and pointing. I didn’t understand a word of it.

But it didn’t matter. I understood the all of it—or so it seemed in that bright moment. For after visiting the temple, and before heading down to the beach, I had taken the stairs up to a cave a good ways up the mountain. A Buddhist monk lived there a thousand years ago, they say. Inside the cave is a statue of the Buddha and a series of pools filled by a constant drip of healing water from the ceiling. “The tears of the Buddha,” people call the drips. On the way up the long course of steps, a Korean craftsman sold me my wooden dipper so I could have a drink of the tears. I entered the cave mouth and waited for my eyes to adjust. Another flight of stairs led up and into the cave, with the statue of the Buddha at the top. I climbed up to the highest pool, just beneath the Buddha. That day the tears were vigorously streaming into the pool from the cave roof, not just drips but a shower of purity. Perhaps it had rained recently.

I dunked in my dipper. I hesitated. Would the water taste foul or strange?— strange to an urban American, and a non-Buddhist? I brought it to my lips and tipped the dipper toward me. The sip was utterly clear. And utterly familiar. Because, I now realize, I had had such water before. Many, many, many times.