ABSTRACT

The reception of Asian religions in “the West” provides a parade example of the perils of comparison. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries-concurrent with the advent of modern colonialism-a variety of European intellectuals embraced the possibility that linguistic and mythological parallels in the classical corpora of Europe and Asia might reveal the common roots of the “races” and religions of the world. Just as Sir Isaac Newton (1728: 351) linked India to Israel due to the similarity of the names Abraham and Brahmin, so Sir William Jones (1807 [1784]: 391) cited commonalities in the myths and names of Janus and Gaṇeśa, Ceres and Śrī, and Zeus and Śiva, as among the reasons to “believe that Egyptian priests have actually come from the Nile to the Gaṅgā and Yamunā, and that they visited the Śarmans of India, as the sages of Greece visited them, rather to acquire than to impart knowledge” (cf. Lincoln 2002; App 2009; 2010).