lol, how little you know. lurk moar

The Buddhist doctrine of no permanent self would radically alter Western notions of the individual, responsibility, and freedom. Liberal individualism as we know it might never have emerged.

Ancient Greek philosophy shared fundamental worldviews with what we call Eastern traditions. The Greeks embraced cyclical time and cosmic cycles rather than linear progress, believed in reincarnation (metempsychosis) across Pythagorean, Orphic, and Platonic schools, and saw material reality as illusion or shadows of true reality (Plato's cave as maya). They understood human life as governed by fate (moira) that even gods couldn't escape, emphasized contemplative wisdom over material achievement, and developed non-dualistic metaphysics in Neoplatonism remarkably similar to Advaita Vedanta. The Greeks were culturally hybrid, absorbing influences from Egypt, Persia, and the Near East, making them far more "Eastern" in outlook than the modern Western narrative admits.

The shift from ancient to modern Western thought occurred primarily through Christianity's adoption of Jewish theological frameworks. Jewish concepts—linear time moving from creation to redemption, free will and individual moral responsibility, a real material world imbued with meaning rather than illusion, good versus evil as cosmic struggle, and history as purposeful progression—fundamentally replaced Greek cyclical and fatalistic worldviews. What we call the "Western mind" today—individualistic, progress-oriented, morally dualistic, emphasizing agency and world-transformation over acceptance—derives not from Greek philosophy but from Jewish theology transmitted through Christianity, then secularized through the Enlightenment while retaining these underlying cosmological assumptions.

https://youtube.com/shorts/Vf1DazXAsqU