Three Indian religions are considered, in the likely order of their origin. In each case a history and analysis are first offered before a specific issue is addressed in more detail. For Jainism it is the question of reincarnation. Here it is suggested that similar concerns for justice underly both Jainism’s almost physical embedding of karma in the universe and western theism’s postulation of a doctrine of resurrection. If so, it is what is scientifically and metaphysically possible which is in dispute (the status of soul and body) rather than different moral values. With Buddhism its moral approach is considered, partly through using Gavin Flood’s comparative study on asceticism and partly through drawing parallels with the influence of Stoicism on early Christian ethics. Finally, the impersonal character of the divine advocated in Sikhism is given sympathetic treatment through considering some issues raised by Neo-Platonism. Each of these questions will be considered further in subsequent chapters.

Heir to a shared Indo-European eudaimonist thoughtworld, Shakespeare’s Hamlet dramatizes the interplay of Buddhist, Skeptic, and Stoic philosophies at the affective-cognitive interface indispensable for virtue in action. Hamlet’s search for appropriate response — in the role of “scourge and minister” thrust upon him to redress regicide — requires equanimity, and equanimity, as the play suggests, ultimately requires other-focused compassion to counteract affective-cognitive affliction: the emptying of self-engrossed mental proliferation prepares the mind for virtuous action. Our ability in Greco-Buddhist wisdom traditions to stand firm by judgment and detachment from destructive emotions and mental disturbances is encapsulated in Hamlet’s famous line in banter with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: “There’s nothing either good / or bad but thinking makes it so” (2.2.244-45). This key idea from Buddhist, Skeptic, and Stoic philosophies compresses therapy for emotional control through skepticism, or suspension of judgment. This equanimity in Buddhist-Stoic spiritual practices, moreover, interacts closely with two primary virtues: compassion and wisdom. Throughout most of the play, Hamlet’s quandary is exacerbated by his overactive ruminations until finally in Act 5, his feelings of compassion toward another, Laertes, relieves and releases Hamlet from his psychohumoral affliction and lends him the emotional equanimity and mental clarity to take virtuous action.

Theravada Buddhism is the dominant tradition in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. Thai monasteries in the “forest tradition” are the setting for Tim Ward’s What the Buddha Never Taught and Phra Peter Pannapadipo’s Phra Farang: An English Monk in Thailand. These authors describe how the rules and regulations of the monastic code challenged them and prompted insights into the self’s relentless craving. Ward and Pannapadipo (now Peter Robinson) finally affirm an enduring self with abiding values and commitments, even as they appreciate Buddhist ideas about no-self. Rudolph Wurlitzer’s Hard Travel to Sacred Places and Stephen Asma’s The Gods Drink Whiskey recount travels in the dense urban centers of Cambodia and Thailand. Wurlitzer’s weary and disillusioned memoir rejects the possibility of enlightenment and says he was unchanged by travel. Yet, by taking this stance, he renounces the desire to exploit Asia or engineer his spiritual destiny. Stephen Asma’s account of a year teaching in Cambodia explores ideas about no-self, karma, and other ideas that conflict with Western assumptions and elicit a new orientation to life that he calls “transcendental everydayness.”

Borges came to know Buddhism from a European perspective filtered through Schopenhauer and other philosophers, and his interest in it was ultimately concerned with the extent to which it coincided with Western ways of thinking. Together with Alicia Jurado, he co-authored What is Buddhism?, and he wrote with clarity of understanding about karma, nirvana, suffering, and nothingness, concepts that find their way into stories and essays such as ’The Garden of Forking Paths’, ’The Library of Babel’, ’The Cult of the Phoenix’, and ’The Writing of the God’. Borges showed greater enthusiasm for the fables and legends of Buddhism than for the spiritual truths of its doctrine. The chapter proposes a Buddhist-inflected reading of ’Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ and a more fully developed one of ’The Circular Ruins’, which it concludes is Borges’s consummate ’Buddhist fiction’.

Chapter 17 sets out the historical factors behind the differing conceptions in India and Greece of the interrelation of universe with inner self and the absence from Greece of karma.

Chapter 9 describes the earliest extant Indian beliefs about the afterlife, which were superseded by the idea of individually accumulated metaphysical merit accompanied by the danger of repeated death, which develops into the idea of subjection in the hereafter to a repeated cosmic cycle. All this prefigures the combination of individually accumulated karma with the universal cycle of reincarnation (sam?sara), from which escape was sought by various forms of renunciation. An important factor in these developments was the individual accumulation and universal circulation of money.

Chapter 10 begins with a critique of the best existing attempt (by Obeyesekere) to explain the origins of what I call ethicised indiscriminate reincarnation (EIR) in India and in Greece. But in my view any successful explanation cannot exclude monetisation, which also contributes to the importance of cyclicality in reincarnation, and to the advent of the widespread and persistent idea of individually accumulated karma. This requires reflection on the different roles of kinship in Greece and India.