It would hard­ly be notable to make the acquain­tance of a Greek Bud­dhist today. Despite hav­ing orig­i­nat­ed in Asia, that reli­gion — or phi­los­o­phy, or way of life, or what­ev­er you pre­fer to call it — now has adher­ents all over the world. Mod­ern-day Bud­dhists need not make an ardu­ous jour­ney in order to under­take an even more ardu­ous course of study under a rec­og­nized mas­ter; nor are the forms of Bud­dhism they prac­tice always rec­og­niz­able to the lay­man. What’s more sur­pris­ing is that the trans­plan­ta­tion into and hybridiza­tion with oth­er cul­tures that has brought about so many nov­el strains of Bud­dhism was going on even in the ancient world.

Take, for exam­ple, the “Gre­co-Bud­dhism” described in the Reli­gion for Break­fast video above, the sto­ry of which involves a vari­ety of fas­ci­nat­ing fig­ures both uni­ver­sal­ly known and rel­a­tive­ly obscure. The most famous of all of them would be Alexan­der the Great, who, as host Andrew Hen­ry puts it, “con­quered a mas­sive empire stretch­ing from Greece across cen­tral Asia all the way to the Indus Riv­er, Hel­l­eniz­ing the pop­u­la­tions along the way.”

But “the cul­tur­al exchange did­n’t just go one way,” as evi­denced by the still-new Bud­dhist reli­gion also spread­ing in the oth­er direc­tion, illus­trat­ed by pieces of text and works of art clear­ly shaped by both civ­i­liza­tion­al cur­rents.

Oth­er major play­ers in Gre­co-Bud­dhism include the philoso­pher Pyrrho of Elis, who trav­eled with Alexan­der and took ideas of the sus­pen­sion of judg­ment from Indi­a’s “gym­nosophists”; Ashoka, emper­or of the Indi­an sub­con­ti­nent in the third cen­tu­ry BC, an avowed Bud­dhist who renounced vio­lence for com­pas­sion (and pros­e­ly­ti­za­tion); and King Menan­der, “the most famous Greek who con­vert­ed to Bud­dhism,” who appears as a char­ac­ter in an ear­ly Bud­dhist text. It can still be dif­fi­cult to say for sure exact­ly who believed what in that peri­od, but it’s not hard to iden­ti­fy res­o­nances between Bud­dhist prin­ci­ples, broad­ly speak­ing, and those of such wide­ly known ancient Greek schools of thought as Sto­icism. Both of those belief sys­tems now hap­pen to have a good deal of cur­ren­cy in Sil­i­con Val­ley, though what lega­cy they’ll leave to be dis­cov­ered in its ruins a cou­ple mil­len­nia from now remains to be seen.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Take Harvard’s Intro­duc­to­ry Course on Bud­dhism, One of Five World Reli­gions Class­es Offered Free Online

Learn the His­to­ry of Indi­an Phi­los­o­phy in a 62 Episode Series from The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps: The Bud­dha, Bha­gavad-Gita, Non Vio­lence & More

One of the Old­est Bud­dhist Man­u­scripts Has Been Dig­i­tized & Put Online: Explore the Gand­hara Scroll

Breath­tak­ing­ly Detailed Tibetan Book Print­ed 40 Years Before the Guten­berg Bible

Dis­cov­er the World’s Old­est Uni­ver­si­ty, Which Opened in 427 CE, Housed 9 Mil­lion Man­u­scripts, and Then Edu­cat­ed Stu­dents for 800 Years

Con­cepts of the Hero in Greek Civ­i­liza­tion (A Free Har­vard Course)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

If ZZ Top have a favorite ancient Egypt­ian deity, that deity is sure­ly Bes, whom the New York Times’ Alexan­der Nazaryan quotes cura­tor and schol­ar Branko van Oppen de Ruiter as call­ing “a beer drinker and a hell-rais­er.” In a paper pub­lished last month in Sci­en­tif­ic Reports, Van Oppen and fif­teen col­lab­o­ra­tors call the row­dy but appar­ent­ly benev­o­lent Bes “one of the most fas­ci­nat­ing and wild­ly pop­u­lar fig­ures of ancient Egypt­ian reli­gion,” and he’s come to mod­ern pub­lic atten­tion thanks to the sub­ject of that paper: a 2,000-year-old cup mold­ed in the shape of his head that has test­ed pos­i­tive for traces of psy­che­del­ic sub­stances — as well as alco­hol and bod­i­ly flu­ids.

Their analy­sis of the mug, a 3D mod­el of which you can exam­ine above, “yield­ed evi­dence of two plants known to have hal­lu­cino­genic prop­er­ties: Syr­i­an rue and the blue water lily,” writes Nazaryan, and it also bore traces of “a fer­ment­ed alco­holic liq­uid derived from fruit,” then sweet­ened with pine nuts, hon­ey, and licorice.

Those were the sorts of ingre­di­ents ancient Egyp­tians had at hand to make the med­i­cine go down — if med­i­cine it was. Nazaryan quotes dig­i­tal archae­ol­o­gist Davide Tanasi, whose lab per­formed the research, cit­ing the traces of sub­stances like blood and breast milk as under­scor­ing that “this is a mag­i­cal potion,” rather than one intend­ed as pure­ly cura­tive.

Bes, as Van Oppen and his col­lab­o­ra­tors write, “emerged from the mag­i­cal realm of the world of demons as a guardian fig­ure,” and by the Roman Impe­r­i­al age “spo­rad­i­cal­ly acquired divine wor­ship.” He “pro­vid­ed pro­tec­tion from dan­ger, while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly avert­ing harm” — and also “had a cer­tain regen­er­a­tive impor­tance con­tribut­ing to the ful­fill­ment and hap­pi­ness of fam­i­ly life in all facets of repro­duc­tion, from viril­i­ty and sex­u­al­i­ty, via fer­til­i­ty and fecun­di­ty, to child­birth and growth.” Hence the spec­u­la­tion that women hop­ing to become preg­nant would drink the potion from his head in order to take a psy­che­del­ic jour­ney that would set them on the path to moth­er­hood. That’s hard­ly the most effi­cient means to the end, as we’d see it today, but giv­en the birthrates of increas­ing­ly many soci­eties across the world, we mod­erns may find our­selves in need of Bes’ assis­tance yet.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Gold­en Guide to Hal­lu­cino­genic Plants: Explore the 1977 Illus­trat­ed Guide Cre­at­ed by Harvard’s Ground­break­ing Eth­nob­otanist Richard Evan Schultes

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.