Buddha and Jesus: Could Solomon Be the Missing Link? (7 page)

Proverbs 25:1 states that chapters 25 through 29 of Solomon’s Book of Proverbs were
copied
by the men of Hezekiah, who reigned
as king from 715 to 686
B.C.
In other words, there were written copies of parts of Solomon’s proverbs in existence long before Buddha’s day. Hezekiah “witnessed the forced resettlement of the northern kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians in 720 BC and was king of Judah during the invasion and siege of Jerusalem by Sennacherib in 701 BC.”
³⁵
So it is quite likely that the Jews expelled during the first and second diasporas took sacred scrolls to Jewish colonies scattered around the world. Their sacred writings—in the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) and the rest of the Old Testament, including Solomon’s writings—enabled the Jews to retain their identity.

How would Jews have fared in northeastern India near where Buddha lived? As we saw from the first quotation by Will Durant in
Chapter One
, given an environment of free speech and widespread interest in disputation of spiritual matters, the likelihood that people in northern India were aware of the teachings of Judaism and the writings of Solomon would have been quite high. The existence of this society of tolerance and debate made northeastern India a favorable place for a colony of Jews to settle. They may have participated in such public debates, being welcomed as a people offering a viable alternative to Hinduism.

Buddha’s Counterculture Contemporaries

There were two prominent religious groups in India at the time of Buddha. Theologian Ernest Valea wrote:

A number of Shramana movements date to the pre-sixth-century
B.C.
Indus Valley civilization.
³⁷
That civilization was very ancient: One of its major cities, Harappa, flourished from 2600 to 1700
B.C.
³⁸
Buddha himself was part of this long-established resistance movement against the ruling priests of India.
³⁹
He was immediately preceded by Mahavira
⁴⁰
(599–527
B.C.
), whose teachings are very similar to Buddha’s. And yet, it is known that “Jainism existed before Mahavira, and his teachings were based on those of his predecessors. Thus Mahavira was a reformer and propagator of an existing religion, rather than the founder of a new faith. He followed the well established creed of his predecessor Tirthankar Parshvanath (877–777 BC).”
⁴¹

The precepts of Jainism,
⁴²
which can be traced to Parshvanath
⁴³
(877–777
B.C.
) or earlier, parallel those of Buddha in most respects. For the same reasons noted earlier in this chapter, it is quite possible that the Jains were influenced in their tenets by the wisdom of Solomon, who died in 938
B.C.
, sixty-one years before Parshvanath was born.

Counterculture movements are naturally attracted to foreign cultures that espouse beliefs and practices that clash with the establishment. We know this from the events of our own day. The Beatles, for example, in general,
⁴⁴
and George Harrison,
⁴⁵
in particular, embraced Hinduism as a way of protesting Western culture in the 1970s. The leading foreign cultures Buddha may have been aware of were those of the Middle East and of China. The writings of Solomon could have been prominent among documents from the Middle East accessible to Buddha and his contemporaries and his Shramana and Jain predecessors.

Sudden Synthesis

The fundamentals of Buddha’s philosophy were clearly evident at the start of his forty-five years of teaching and changed little during his lifetime. “Unlike Hinduism,” wrote Huston Smith, “which emerged by slow, largely imperceptible spiritual accretion out of an
invisible past, the religion of the Buddha appeared overnight, full formed.”
⁴⁶

Buddha came up with the whole framework of his new religion quite suddenly—according to legend, as a result of becoming enlightened beneath a bodhi tree.
⁴⁷
To skeptical westerners, this legend suggests that many of his early tenets may have come from other sources, and that his genius lay more in synthesizing the practices and ideas of others into a compelling whole than in developing new practices and ideas. Part of his genius also lay in living a pure life by sheer act of will and mental discipline and in expounding these tenets effectively to a group of highly dedicated followers over a period of more than four decades.

Very early on, Buddha offered the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path as a Middle Way, “a path of moderation between the extremes of sensual indulgence and self-mortification,” as the route to wisdom.
⁴⁸
Given the suddenness of Buddha’s formulation of a new religion, his radical departure from Hinduism could well have been inspired, at least in part, by one of the other great religions of his day. He may have found in Solomon’s writings the essence of what he believed was so lacking in Hinduism: a solid foundation of clear-cut ethics. That Buddha’s earliest work was a collection of 423 proverbs, the Dhammapada, suggests that he was using a familiar literary form—one that other religious thinkers had used. And the most famous collection of such proverbs, written by Solomon, had quite likely been brought to India via trade-route exchanges and by Jews in the diaspora.

Summary Timeline

Since this chapter mentions some two dozen events of historical significance, discussed topically, there is value in rearranging these in chronological order. They are divided into three different eras. The reader is encouraged to work through this chronology to gain more historical perspective.