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These concepts seem very similar to me: loosely speaking, it's all about how limiting our desires is good. Knowing that there was contact between ancient Greece and ancient India, could it be that one of these got the idea from the other? Did the ancients notice the similarity, and what did they think about it?

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  • Read Plotinus' 'Six Enneads'.
    – Swami Vishwananda
    Commented Jan 14, 2020 at 6:49
  • I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because belongs on history stackexchange
    – Swami Vishwananda
    Commented Jan 14, 2020 at 6:50
  • The same idea emerges everywhere with no need for any cultural exchange. It is ubiquitous for the same reason that mysticism is ubiquitous, that we all in the same boat.
    – user20253
    Commented Jan 14, 2020 at 12:14
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    Commented Jan 16, 2020 at 0:37

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A book from 2008 that treats the question : Adrian Kuzminski, Pyrrhonism: How the Ancient Greeks Reinvented Buddhism (Lexington Books, 170 p.), and more recently 2015 Christopher Beckwith, Greek Buddha: Pyrrho’s Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia (Princeton UP; commented here). People who insist that history should be seen as a positive science readily object that actually there is only second and third hand testimonies and no real evidence whatsoever. For the ancient Greeks rationality was a defining trait of humans and they would not have been puzzled to meet foreign philosophers; as for the Indians I just have no idea.

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