Buddhism and Gnosticism
The idea that Gnosticism was derived from Buddhism was first proposed by the Victorian gem collector and numismatist Charles William King (1864). Mansel (1875,) considered the principal sources of Gnosticism to be Platonism, Zoroastrianism, and Buddhism However the influence of Buddhism in any sense on either the gnostikos Valentinus (c.170) or the Nag Hammadi texts (3rd C.) is not supported by modern scholarship, but in the later case considered quite possible by Elaine Pagels (1979), who called for Buddhist scholars to try to find parallels.
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“A religion so cheerless, a philosophy so sorrowful, could never have succeeded with the masses of mankind if presented only as a system of metaphysics. Buddhism owed its success to its catholic spirit and its beautiful morality.”
—W. Winwood Reade (1838–1875)