Originally Posted by
sean
Leave it to the chink to sound dumb as fuck. The word Buddha itself is Indo-European and means the enlightened or awakened one. Buddha was quite literally what we today call 'woke'. Two cognates are Russian 'budit' (будить) and Sanskrit 'budhyate' (बुध्यते), both meaning 'to wake up'.
Buddha himself was a Shakyan of Scythian descent. Although the mythical genealogy of the Shakyas connects them with the Dravidians and gives a Munda name to one of their ancestors.
It's also tough to separate what is cultural versus what was distinctive to the Buddha, early Buddhist traditions definitely seem to incorporate a lot of Indo-European philosophy and cosmology, and, like all religions, there are a lot of layers of influence from the many different cultures that Buddhism spread through, many of which were (in the early centuries) Indo-European cultures. All Indo-European cultures and mythologies had a non-stop influx of local influences.
Even though the region most commonly connected with the Buddha's biography was definitely on the outer edge of Vedic culture - a 'man from Magadha' is used in the Vedas as an exemplar of an outsider whose presence can disturb or pollute Vedic ritual. The city-states seem to have had a more Vedic culture headed by a king, while the more rural areas like the Buddha's homeland were supposedly governed in the style of an oligarchic republic, with leaders from different families and clans gathering to debate and settle issues.
It could have been an indigenous culture that adopted Indo-European languages, also could have been from an earlier wave of Indo-European migration into Northern India. Buddhist stupas for instance have been modeled on prehistoric cairn burials that already existed in Northern India, and archaeologists have found a number of sites where there is a pre-historic era of megalithic or cairn burials, followed by a Buddhist layer of stupa monuments.
It's intriguing that Buddhists readily adopted these sites as their own and were tolerated to disturb them by local people, but they weren't re-used by other cultural groups in the same way (similar to Celts using pre-PIE megalithic sites as their own religious temples aka Stonehenge or Newgrange).
Shakyamuni means sage of the Shakya clan.
Parthian prophet Mani spent much of his life in Persia and Mesopotamia, and was patronised by Shapur I, the territory of Shapur's empire stretched to the Indus river, and included the territory annexed from the Kushan kingdom. Now, the Kushans seem to have practiced a syncretic form of Buddhism that mixed influences from Hellenic, Iranian, Indian, and even Mesopotamian religion.
Mani is said to have spent time with learned men (I believe the term used is "Brahmins") in the far east of the Empire, and so he certainly had access to Buddhist thought one way or another. But when it comes to what Manichaeism seems to have borrowed from it, what is usually pointed to are confluences with Gnostic Christianity: the flesh is corrupt, worldly pleasure is to be eschewed in favour of asceticism, and from this there is a general misogynistic streak portraying women as wicked temptresses.
Gnostic Christianity, which was also dualistic, would have been easily paired with Zoroastrian philosophy, but Buddhism is a rather different tradition entirely, and one which, while present in the Sassanid Empire, would likely have been far more distant and alien to Mani than Christianity or Zoroastrianism.
Nonetheless, Mani seems to have considered Buddha, along with Zoroaster and Jesus, part of a succession of prophets that each revealed part of the truth.
More chink talking points. It's almost like you are too stupid to be aware of what you are saying. Language families are not theorised on the basis of race.
A very relevant example of that are the North Dravidian languages, which are spoken over a wide area in Pakistan that is very far from the rest of Dravidian languages in South India. You usually only see "Aryan" in reference to the Indo-Aryan languages, spoken by peoples in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Northern India.
Ancient Persians used 'ariya' derived from Sanskrit 'arya' (compatriot) to refer to themselves. Sanskrit speakers in India also used 'aryan' or cognates of it to refer to themselves. Note at this point it doesn't refer to a specific ethnicity or race - it's just present in Sanskrit and languages with Sanskrit influence meaning things such as 'people of this land' or 'noble person of this land.'
A Persian using it would be referring to his fellow Persians, or an subject of an Indian kingdom would use it to refer to other people living in the kingdom. The same way we would say 'my fellow countrymen' or in the past might have said 'the people of my tribe.' The meaning is dependent on the individual context of the speaker.
The neutrality of the term was lost in popular usage in Germany through the late 19th and early 20th centuries when 'Aryan' came to mean not just 'Indo-European speaker', the Nazis used terms such as 'ideal Aryan' to refer to Germanic Europeans in popular culture the word took on that meaning and lost its historical contexts.
To avoid confusion in modern usage academics will avoid using 'Aryan'. They'll use 'Indo-European' to refer to the language grouping which Schlegel and Müller used 'Aryan' for. Occasionally 'Aryan' is used in modern contexts to distinguish Indo-European Indian languages from non-Indo-European ones, not the people.
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