A man named Pelagius stands before a council in the early fifth century and is condemned for an idea that sounds, today, almost banal: that individuals are responsible for their own destinies. Dukes lines him up with a row of others — Origen, Basilides, the Docetists, the Patripassians — and makes a quiet, provocative claim about all of them. Each was declared heretical, he says, for teaching something that looks strikingly like a Buddhist doctrine. Self-responsibility. Levels of truth. The holy emptiness of the heart. Emanation bodies. A God who suffers. The pattern Dukes wants you to see is that early Christianity kept generating Buddhist-shaped ideas from the inside, and kept stamping them out — as if the two traditions were drawing on the same well and only one of them was allowed to admit it.1
This page records a footnote-argument Dukes makes in passing: that a cluster of early Christian figures condemned as heretics held doctrines "similar in nature to Buddhist principles."2 His list, with his glosses:
To this Dukes adds two contact-points showing the early Christian world knew of the Buddha: the Gnostic teacher Bardesanes "mentioned the Buddha," and St. Jerome "spoke of the Virgin Birth and the Buddha."8 And he reuses the Roman coinage of "Atheist" — the term Romans invented for Christians and Jews, "ones who lived without the Gods," later reversed and applied by the Church to its own heretics.9
[Partially tendentious — some claims supportable, some not.] This is a footnote doing more rhetorical work than its evidence can bear, and the honest reading separates the legs.
The supportable end. That early Christianity condemned figures whose doctrines resemble Buddhist ones is, taken loosely, fair. Origen's graded truth genuinely parallels the two-truths structure. Basilides' Gnostic emptiness-language does echo apophatic and emptiness motifs. The Docetic "emanation bodies" of Jesus do sit structurally near the Trikaya's multiple-bodies idea. And the contact-points are real and verifiable: Bardesanes and Jerome did mention the Buddha — the Greco-Roman world had heard of him (see the early Greco-Buddhist record). Resemblance and awareness, at this level, are defensible.
The tendentious end. Resemblance is not derivation. Dukes's framing implies — without quite asserting — that these heretics were Buddhist-influenced, or that Christianity suppressed a Buddhist substratum. That is far weaker. Pelagius's self-responsibility arises perfectly well from internal Christian debate over grace and free will; it needs no Buddhist source. The Patripassian argument is a logical consequence of Trinitarian theology, not an import. Independent invention of structurally similar ideas is the null hypothesis, and Dukes's footnote does not clear it. His glosses also editorialize — "foolish enough to suggest" is Dukes's irony, not the historical record's. And his sources are a popular dictionary of the Christian Church, a Penguin dictionary of religions, Robert Graves's King Jesus (a novel), and Pagels — a mix that runs from reference to fiction.10 🚩 SECONDARY WITHOUT PRIMARY applies: the heretics are characterized through dictionaries and a 1910 survey, not their own texts.
The page keeps the whole list because the pattern is genuinely interesting, while refusing the implied causal story. Parallel, yes. Descent, not shown.
Set the derivation question aside and a sharper structure appears in Dukes's list, one that doesn't need Buddhism at all. Every figure on it was condemned for pushing a doctrine toward more individual responsibility, more interior emptiness, more graded subtlety — and away from a single sovereign God of judgment dispensing grace from outside. That is the axis. Pelagius moves agency inward (you author your fate). Origen moves truth inward (meaning has layers you must penetrate). Basilides moves the sacred inward (holy emptiness in the heart). The Docetists dissolve the solid incarnate body into emanations. Each one, in its own way, relocates the center of religious gravity from an external authority to an interior process — which is precisely the move Dukes elsewhere identifies as the Buddhist signature: spiritual autonomy versus "subservience to a primitive God of judgment, partiality, and power."11
So the parallel may be real without being a transmission. The same type of idea — interiorized, self-responsible, graded — recurs because it is a stable attractor that any sufficiently reflective tradition keeps rediscovering, and any sufficiently centralized orthodoxy keeps suppressing for the same reason: it threatens the external authority's monopoly. The heresies aren't Buddhist imports. They're what happens when the interior-autonomy attractor surfaces inside a religion organized around external sovereignty. Buddhism let it stand; orthodox Christianity could not.
Take the one parallel Dukes draws most tightly: Basilides' "holy emptiness" of heart and mind, "reminiscent of the Buddhist Heart Sutra."5 The Heart Sutra's emptiness (sunyata) is a precise technical claim — that all phenomena lack inherent self-existence, that form is emptiness and emptiness is form. Basilides' Gnostic "holy emptiness" is a different animal: an apophatic gesture toward an unknowable, ineffable divine source beyond all attributes. Both use the word "emptiness," both refuse positive content, both point past the graspable. That is the resemblance, and it is real. But the two emptinesses do opposite work. The Buddhist sunyata empties things to dissolve the self and end clinging; the Gnostic emptiness empties the divine to preserve its transcendence above a flawed creation. Same word, near-opposite function — which is exactly the trap of arguing influence from vocabulary. This single case shows the page's whole problem in miniature: the parallel is genuine at the level of language and gesture, and it evaporates the moment you ask what the emptiness is for. Dukes's "reminiscent of" is doing honest work; any stronger verb would be false.
You are weighing a striking footnote: five Christian heretics, all condemned for Buddhist-like ideas. The claim is seductive and you want it to be true, which is the first warning. So you sort it the slow way. You take each figure and ask two separate questions, never one: Does the doctrine resemble a Buddhist one? and Is there evidence it derived from one? Pelagius: resembles karma-as-self-effort, yes; derived, no — grace-versus-works was a live internal fight. Origen: resembles two-truths, yes; derived, no — allegorical exegesis was homegrown. Basilides: resembles Heart-Sutra emptiness in language, but the two emptinesses do opposite jobs, so even the resemblance is partial. You keep the resemblances in one column and leave the derivation column almost empty. Then you check the contact-points — Bardesanes, Jerome on the Buddha — and those are solid, so the early Christian world's awareness of Buddhism goes in a third column, the firmest one. What survives the sort is precise: real parallels, real awareness, no shown descent — and a separate, sturdier insight about why centralized orthodoxies keep condemning the same interiorizing move.
Evidence base: a single footnote (Note 8) plus a related passage on the Roman "Atheist" coinage. Dukes's cited sources are The Concise Dictionary of the Christian Church, The Penguin Dictionary of Religions, Robert Graves's King Jesus (explicitly "an alternative and magical view"), Pagels's The Gnostic Gospels, and G. Rawlinson's 1910 Intercourse between India and the Western World for the Bardesanes and Jerome mentions.10 The contact-points (Bardesanes, Jerome) are [VERIFIED] against the external record. The doctrinal parallels are [PLAUSIBLE — needs corroboration] as resemblances and [CONTESTED] as derivations. The implied suppression-of-Buddhism narrative is [DO NOT FILE as fact — document-don't-endorse].
Tension, preserved: Dukes uses the list to support his larger thesis that interior, autonomous spirituality is the suppressed road not taken in the West — a thesis the list illustrates but cannot prove, since resemblance under-determines descent. He does not resolve this; the footnote asserts the parallel and moves on. The page keeps the parallel and withholds the inference.
Open seam: the Roman "Atheist" coinage is reused across two contexts (here, and the early Greco-Buddhist record). Tracking its double use is itself a small study in how one factoid serves two arguments.
Dukes here is a practitioner-scholar arguing, gently and by accumulation, that the West suppressed exactly the interior, self-responsible spirituality Buddhism preserved — and this footnote is the move at its most exposed, because it leans on popular references and a Robert Graves novel to characterize figures it never quotes directly. The convergence with his book's spine is total: the heretics are condemned for "spiritual autonomy" against "a primitive God of judgment," which is Dukes's central contrast verbatim. The tension is that the evidence is a dictionary-and-novel composite asserting parallels it cannot trace to sources. Set against the vault's Samuel/White critical-historical method, the divergence is clean: Samuel would accept the contact-points (Jerome did mention the Buddha) and reject the influence-implication on the standard ground that structural resemblance between religions is the expected baseline, not evidence of transmission — independent invention has to be excluded before borrowing can be claimed, and Dukes never excludes it. Where Dukes is strongest is the part he states most weakly: the observation that centralized orthodoxy keeps condemning the same interiorizing doctrine. That insight survives even if every Buddhist parallel is coincidence, and it is the part of the footnote a critical historian could actually use.
Greco-Buddhist Contacts: The Early Record — These two pages share the Roman "Atheist" coinage and, more deeply, the same evidentiary problem of distinguishing contact from influence. The Greco-Buddhist page shows hard contact — a Greek monk in the sangha, a Buddha on Menander's coins, Jerome and Bardesanes naming the Buddha. This page shows soft parallel — doctrines that resemble each other without a traced line between them. Reading them together produces the calibration neither gives alone: the early Christian world demonstrably knew of the Buddha (the Greco-Buddhist contact-points prove it), which makes the heretical parallels more tantalizing — awareness was available, so borrowing was possible — and yet awareness-of-existence is a vast distance from doctrinal-transmission, and the gap between "Jerome mentioned the Buddha" and "Pelagius derived self-responsibility from Buddhism" is the entire difference between a name heard and a doctrine learned. The handshake sharpens the standard: contact establishes possibility, never actuality, and a tradition can know of another while inventing its parallels independently. The "Atheist" word, shared across both pages, also reveals the constant: a culture's boundary-policing machinery — naming the outsider — runs whether the outsider is a monotheist refusing the civic gods or a heretic refusing the orthodox ones.
Sunyavada: Emptiness Teaching and Liberation Through the Void — Basilides' "holy emptiness" is offered by Dukes as a Christian echo of Buddhist emptiness, and laying the two side by side does precise diagnostic work the Sunyavada page can use. Sunyavada's emptiness is a tool against the self: phenomena lack inherent existence, so clinging has nothing to cling to, and the practitioner is liberated. The Gnostic "holy emptiness" empties the divine upward into unknowability, preserving a transcendent source above a fallen world — it protects God's otherness rather than dissolving the self. Same word, opposite vector: one empties to release the subject, the other empties to exalt the object. The insight neither page generates alone: "emptiness" is a structural slot that different traditions fill in opposite directions, which means a doctrine of emptiness tells you almost nothing until you ask what it is emptying and to what end. For the vault's emptiness materials this is a load-bearing warning — apophatic language is the easiest place to false-cognate two traditions, because the refusal of content looks identical even when the purposes are reversed. Dukes's footnote, read against the actual Sunyavada doctrine, becomes an unintended demonstration of why emptiness-parallels are the least trustworthy parallels of all.
Sharpest implication: the early Christian world demonstrably knew of the Buddha and demonstrably condemned interiorizing, self-responsible doctrines — and those two facts together still do not get you to suppression-of-Buddhism, because the strongest reading is that orthodoxy keeps killing the same idea no matter where it comes from.
Generative questions: