What Do Buddha, Socrates, Confucius, and Zoroaster Have in Common? (The Axial Age)
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- Опубликовано: 26 фев 2023
- What do Buddha, Socrates, Confucius, Zoroaster, the Jewish Prophets, Laozi, and Mahavira have in common? They are all figures who emerged during a proposed, common time period which philosopher Karl Jaspers would label as the "Axial Age", which would lay the foundation for all world belief systems that would emerge after it.
Tune in to learn more!
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Timestamps:
Regions of the Axial Age: 1:35
Axial Age Thinkers: 1:52
Pre-Axial Civilizations: 2:38
Axial Age Ideas: 3:47
Post-Axial Empires: 6:40
Causes of the Axial Age: 8:01
- Human Evolution: 8:34
- Invading Nomads: 8:53
- Advances in Written Language: 9:59
Critiques of the Axial Age: 13:00
I feel it makes sense that the advent of a more advanced writing system would in turn advance human thought who can then come up with such grand scale ideas like good and bad, an afterlife, that surpass the subsistent lifestyle
Similiarily to how Gutenberg's invention influenced "the second Axial Age" - Enlightenment. Just in this case instead of the elites (priests and rulers), the lower classes were the bearers of change.
Wow, great video! Thanks for uploading it!!
No problem, glad you enjoyed!
I love this . that period of history is always fascinated me . especially during the 600 s and 500 s BC . I always wondered at the development of Continental trade routes and the building of ancient roads had something to do with the spread of ideas across these different civilizations hey then adapted some of these ideas to the circumstances of their culture .
Love this! thank you! A lot is being over simplified, understandable for the sake of a shorter video. One big one that stood out to me is that Lao Tzu was not just one man.
EXCELLENT VIDEO!!
Thank you very much!!
this is a really good video but there are a few parts you got wrong in it. mentioning that the egyptians or the greek had pantheons based on primitive sacrifice for some form of magickal boon or gain. the book "the secret teachings of all ages - Manly P. Hall" is a book on occultism and esotericism and in it it explains the deeper meaning behind the myths and how that these secrets esoteric meanings to their religions were only shown to the priests for deeper understangs for what the gods were representitive of in forces of nature. the idea of going away from offering to gods to then being "god" on earth through good ethics is also found throughout all of these religions. a further argument for that the actual opposite is true of the two different type of axial age. the path of maat for instance is mentioned in the egyptain book of the dead and describes how the journey through the underworld, it then explains what each part of the myth is representative of and how it relates to the narrative. a further book to study on this would be "meditation: the ancient egyptain path towards enlightenment - muata ashby"
Great catch. STOAA is a real masterpiece, you'd think that so many topics on one book would be treated superficially or poorly, but even after a century of being first published, and in my case sitting in a quite well stocked library, I still use it as reference every time I need a refresh on "X" topic. M.P.Hall was an extraordinarily bright man, all his works are ridiculously professional both technically and topically.
Who is considered as the greatest writer in occultism/esotericism ?
@@Maitatron I think it's quite hard to reply, if possible at all, it's like asking who's the world's best racing driver, where there is so much talent tied to so many different driving styles, so it really depends what topic you're interested in, but being completely honest, I think Manly P. Hall could be the best introduction you can have, as I previously mentioned, his "Secret Teachings of all Ages", still is to this day a great enciclopedia-like work, it has over 40 chapters, about different traditions or philosophies, and even though it's now close to be an 100 years old book, as it was originally published in 1928, it's written so well and clearly, it could have been published last year. It goes from the origins and philosophy of Masonic secret societies, to Atlantis, Egyptian mysticism, Greco-Roman philosophers, natural magick, Quabbalah, Rosicrucianism, Alchemy, esoteric symbolism, esoteric Islam, esoteric Christianity and much more. It obviously can't treat every single mystical subject, it's already 700 pages deep, but I feel like it's a great introduction, from which you can then pick your favorite subject and go deep into that. And no, I'm not sponsored by the way!😅 Just an honest view point.
@@nicksothep8472 Yeah i heard about him, but i have never read him, i know he is an eminent figure but it looks like the 2 behemoths in occultism are Helena Blavatsky and Alice Bailey. So i wonder who else could compare to those 2 central figures with their magnum opus.
@@Maitatron More profound than the identities you mentioned is...Rudolf Steiner...
Paul Foster Case...is also an authentic 20thC Adept
New valuable information
I've been looking for someone to explain the concept of "the golden thread through all religions" and so far your channel has come the closest to doing that.
Thank you very much!
Archaeology shows that any cultures ever found have evidence of religion. God made us with instincts: eat, build shelters, reproduce, pray. Rather we were premade with a way to phone home (pray.)
If you come from a place that speaks different language, your word for home is different than mine. Your cultural practice in building a home probably is different. Why are we offended when your word for God and cultural practice for worshiping him is different?
@@TerribleShmeltingAccident That is because the Jewish Prophets were sharing the Words of the Creator of the entire World.
The others were sharing the faiths from Babylon.
You should learn the difference.
@@canadiankewldude your not understanding what I am saying. I’m arguing that the link to the creator we all feel is instinctual
@@canadiankewldudeallegedly
Addicted to this channel
The support is much appreciated :)
All that you mentioned seemed to arrive at the cycle where faith had a period of purpose, reason, and place to believe.
Im wondering if the Central and South American civilisation that seems to be talking place around the same period as the axial region of the other side of the world has been considered by the same scholars?
The Old Egyptian religion is the oldest with an afterlife and judjement. Egypt also for a short period had monothiesm.😊
It's very clear that Christianty developed at a time of vigorous philosophical thought (Seneca was born the same year as Jesus). It occurs to me that more sophisticated writing developed to sustain more complex socieities, with greater population density/coordination. As this developed, these philisophical questions naturally arose. It wasn't just 'how do I get resources ' but also, 'how do I live with my fellow man in a stable (safe) society '. Taoism arose out of the 'warrimg states' period.. people wanted social harmony. Christianity arose at a time when Jews felt supressed by Roman rule. Mentally humans were looking beyond basic resources, to survival when there were all sorts of social pressures and risks.
A rich channel indeed
I appreciate it :)
Like many theories, there are more than a few wrinkles in it. Socrates was still worshiping the Old Gods despite his philosophy.
But he wanted to change and rationalize the Greek perspective on those gods. Zoroaster did similiar thing.
Age of cause and reaction. Zarathustra might be dated 1700 to 1500 BC and lived in Afghanistan.
I think that the desire to create over-arching narratives often overrides the actual evidence to support such. And lets not forget ego. Whether or not the ideas pan out is pretty hit and miss.
The case of Jesus and Mohammed is that they continued existing thought process and ideas propounded by the Hebrew prophets
They did not originate new thought.
Thus the axial age really did exist because at that time more than ever in history, philosophers arose in almost every civilization in the world, having no contact with each other but asking the same life questions and seeking solutions
The significance of Zarathustra is far far too overlooked. He is the most important of all these thinkers, whose doctrine led to all that came after. He is the first philosopher.
They had contact Much earlier with thoth . Look at Sumerian text. Take that how you may.
I don't know the secret of the world, but I think there were more axis ages than we used to know before the awakening 😉😉😉
I like the spiritually , philosophy and spiritual philosophy idea of the line. From Egypt to China. West to East. Funny how Christian and Muslim are outside the line. But are the two biggest religion in the world . Sikhism is outside the time line . But is popular .. But sinduism is 4th. The 3rd is a mix of atheist, agnostic, etc, so not really a spiritual movements. But we're does the Vedic come into the line. Before the line or after? . Yet ,I have noticed that India still comes out with new ideas. And though the USA is West and classed as money mad. They come out with new spiritual and philosophy ideas . And california seems to be on that line. Interesting subject. ✌👾
The Jews did not encounter the steppe horsemen, but they picked up a lot during their sojourns in Egypt and Babylon.
Like the Greeks, their, and our, alphabet was gifted by the Phoenicians, a most interesting seafaring people who seemed to have minimised warfare and relied on trade for their expansion.
The axial period and its usefulness as a lens for historic consideration may be due to the development of writing, and its preservation of non-oral records, thus fixing thought into a permanence previously unlikely.
Thanks for your overview.
My pleasure :)
there is zero evidence that the Jews ever were in Egypt. At least not in the way people think. The part of Canaan they supposedly escaped to from Egypt would have been a vassal of Egypt during the supposed time period. Most historians think the Jews were simply Canaanites that split off and formed their own distinct political group. There is evidence of a group of early Canaanites that eschewed pork and worshipped a pantheon of gods including El, Asherah, Jahweh and Ba'al. The Egypt thing was a fictional device to burnish their reputation by association with the most notable ancient power in their area.
@@NullStaticVoid
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Even if they were never enslaved in Egypt or Babylon, as seminomandic tribal traders with literary inclinations they could not have been uninfluenced by the neighbouring cultures and practices.
Your assumption of the fictionality is a bit of a giveaway as to your respect for the strictly evidential.
'Most historians' implies you have read a prodigious number...but is not evidence of what their perspectives were or what cultures they happen to be embedded in.
This idea that sophisticated writing was the motor behind the axial age greatly overestimates the degree of literacy in the ancient world.
@@scottkunghadrengsen2604 Literacy was not widespread, but would have been cultivated and prized by the Mandarin, Jerusalem temple, Mesopotamian administation class and the Athenians serving the warrior rulers.
Scientific literacy is restricted today to a small, but growing specialised class, largely captured by capital and driven by military budgets.
The motors of progress are often isolated individuals, just as hermits and monastic settlements maintained literacy and learning with feudal bequests from the warrior casts taking advantage of specialised skills.
History repeats patterns, not events. Occasionally a quantum leap occurs, such as the axial age can be imagined to be.
It was Einstein who proclaimed imagination more important than knowledge. The trick is to not get hijacked by it.
how can you build a colony believe in balony
7:10 It's inaccurate to characterize the Mauryan empire as Buddhist. While Ashoka is crucial to the spread of Buddhsim, the rest of the Mauryan dynasty was just as likely to be Jain or Brahmin as Buddhist. If anything Brahmin seems to be the default.
Also the point about writing doesn't apply to Buddhism.
The Buddhist Suttas were famously compiled during a pre-literate period and handed down by rote memorization within the Sangha.
They were written down and organized into the "three baskets" or Tipitaka about 400 years after Goatama's parinibana during the 4th Buddhist council.
I would not include the Hebrew prophets, or say that Jesus and Mohammed invalidate the Axial Age theory. The Levant became part of the Greek sphere in 330 BC and some scholars suggest that the Hebrew Bible was compiled as late as 270 BC. By the time we get to the first century AD, we find the apostle Paul who was Jewish, but a native Greek speaker and well versed in Platonism, Stoicism, and Cynicism as evident in his letters. The gospels themselves do not appear until the early 200's and as Greek literature. Current religious scholarship sugggests Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were all ultimately grounded in the Greek philosophical culture of the Axial Age so should not be counted apart from it.
Judaism is included but Christianity excluded, even though Christianity brought a ground-breaking innovation into Judaism: that Gentiles can join the faith without circumcision and adopting Jewishness as an ethnic identity. Maybe the biggest practical difference between Judaism and Christianity is that Christianity separates ethnicity from faith completely, which ended up separating the religions too. That I would call one of the biggest watershed changes in the history of religion. I think it originated in early Zoroastrianism but came into fruition in Christianity.
It has also changed the social fabric, because religiosity based on personal faith rather than birth emphasises individuality over the collective, which lays a foundation for further development in individual critical thinking in the society.
Interesting that our thumbs are also known the pre axial digits. Hmmmm
Lore of What Do Buddha, Socrates, Confucius, and Zoroaster Have in Common? (The Axial Age) momentum 100
Wow
The concept is a good shorthand for framing history. Even if it isnt absolutely scientific. From 3000 BC to 500 BC civilizations followed dogmas. Then around 500 BC thinkers around the world began to do free thinking and debate to figure out this thing called "civilization"- how do we manage this thing. These thinkers created new creeds, ideologies, and relgions. Then AFTER that age the civilizations used these creeds to...shut down debate, and return to unquestioning dogma for -the following 2000 years. Christ and Mohammed were just following and developing the creeds of the axial age. What spawned the axial age was probably urbanization combined with (as the video suggested) better writing systems. The rise of an urban merchant class spurred the rise of Buddhism in ancient India, and would later spawn the Protestant Reformation in northern Europe 2000 years later.
The axial age is a theory of history that removes Jesus and Moses from world history (Eric Voegelin). And Mohammed, too.
Jaspers was not the first to create this theory (Ernst von Lasaulx).
Zarathustra didn't live in the 7th century b.c., as Jaspers believed, but in the 12th century b.c. thus creating a broad axis consisting of the third of known history (Jan Assmann).
Zarathustra is far more likely to have lived in the 6th century BCE.
All of these cultures shared this information via trade. Its not hard to understand. I do have a problem with Judaism being a part of this group . They kept to their ways until the came in contact with Persians through conquest. The Greeks got all of their theology from Egypt. They may have built on it. But you give them to much credit.
and they go about building empire
Greeks got alphabet from Phoenician traders.
Dr. Albert Einstein just described what The Buddha already knew 500BC Einstein concluded from his E= mc squared Energy is constant it cannot be created nor destroyed it just takes another form! K
Quran tells us that we had so many messengers of God and with time people changed the message according to people's advantage. Every religion talks about oneness of God.
No they don't
Buddhism doesn't talk about oneness or God
Zoroaster he might have been a prophet among the prophets of Allah. In Islam means submission to Abraham submitted. some of these religions mentioned that being.
All my life I was led to believe first was polytheism then much later monotheism showed up.
But lately, various sources, including this one, point to very ancient belief in the latter.
Note also, Jesus is the divine fulfilment of Judaism -present in the Axial Age.
Oh , and consider the Magi story: Wise ones from the East read the stars that the King of the Jews would be born and traveled to worship the Christ Child.
two battle of religion and war fare
Buddha, Confucius, Zoroaster, Jesus, Mohammed, Krishna, Shiva, Vishnu and Brahman did not literally exist, but Socrates did.
time is up europe
300-500 yrs cycle
It's absurd to me about the false belief in a graven image such as the "cross".... The symbology of all these "Christ" figures is lost to literalism through religion... Shame...
They all went into a bar, and the barman said: "What is this - some kind of a joke?"
I think it's crazy that if you describe a time period, your idea just get's selled. There's no mentioning about how this is his idea, and that it's just his idea as it would happen in other topics. Nope. The time period between 800 BC and 200 BC is the Axial age. Written in the collective consciousness. Not to be deleted.
I need to become a historian then I can become famous too and people don't question me.
I don't believe in history. Why do you think at all that there were no big prophets before? Maybe we just don't know much about them. Maybe it's just the oldest time we can look back to before paper and traditions rotted. Maybe it's just that and there were always world religions springing up everywhere.
History develops, huh? You sure?
There is no Axial Age.
One must approach such topics with clear demonstration and intellectual humility ("we just don't know"). Every subject does this, but history is telling fairy tales.
return the loot then
do it wrong and collapse by an outsider force came out of nowhere like the greek china roman hun mongol
ICXC
Axial Age: Hundredth Monkey Effect?
Your iteration of quotation marks is the OPPOSITE of scholarly & detracts from the content. Pronounce Taoism with an initial D.
They all from the same crew......
They are all extraterrestrials
You're jumping ahead to who they are, first understand what they want
No. The theory is incorrect. To begin with 'Dharma is not Religion.'
Dharmas (Buddha, Vishnu, Shiva, Jain, Tantra, Sikh, etc.) are about seeking truth ‘Satya’ and disciplines of inner progress ‘Yoga.’ Dharmas overlap, learn from each other, and don’t fight. Hinduism is the collection of all the Dharmas evolved in our region. It is a geographical definition, not doctrinal. The central theme of Dharmas is inner and outer Peace. Dharmas are different spiritual paths \ margas \ ways \ disciplines. It is up to an individual to be interested or practice any, all, or none.
Religions (Christianity, Islam, Communism, Fascism, etc.) are brainwashing systems for social control. Each claims exclusive truth, all others evil, and assumes divine right and duty to attack others, Violence is the central theme. Religions are sets of doctrines to believe and sets of commandments to obey, without any questions. This is militarization of society which is the totalitarian control of individuals leading to 'we vs. they', 'we are superior', ‘misogyny’, and 'violence.’
By the way, Vedas are at least 21,000 years old. Ramayana over 14,000 years ago, Mahabharat over 7,000 years ago.
Time line - Mahabharata & Ramayana: Nilesh Oak; Jaipur Dialogues, 2020
ruclips.net/video/ObdGKFkSJTw/видео.html
perhaps some of these people didn't exist...
CONGRATULATIONS, "BOOK OF KINGS!!! It's impressive how selective and Scholastic ignorance can create a jungle of edited pretention of "Knowledge". It serves the purpose of the dumbing down of the manipulation of "ACADEMIA", but it mostly contribute to the misrepresentation that is the mainstay of "The Church" the "Clergy" and the likes. It's like the shuffling of fabricated doctrines, certified Myths and misplaced Deities. It satisfies the dictates of the impostor ruler of the past 4+ millennium.
Now Buddha is white but the man we all know is black
north indians are fare skinned, not as much as dark to those who live in the south
Buddha was a man born in modern day Nepal, specifically the Lumbini province. Back then it would have been India. There was no way Jesus Christ and Siddhartha Gautama were caucasian.
White" or "Black ia a Neo Western political classification! History doesn't start it that way,rather merit of the conquest and consequences!
@@k28_95z They probably were Caucasian. Jesus certainly wasn’t white but he definitely wasn’t African. Buddha had a red hair like Mohammed Peace be upon them.
@@navaratnewillamune7673 funny becouse is out of blacks oloured people came so what are you talking about?
NOTHING
Let me guess, they are all INDO-Europeans?! LOL
No. Though the first and most influential Axial thinker Zarathustra is (crucially) Indo-European. As were the Greeks and Vedic.
What do they have in common.....they're all dead.
Astagfirullah I can't eat the food of budish🤔,may Allah forgive me,budish and Hindu is similar worshipping stone idles.may Allah 🙏 guide us to beautiful way.
It isn't Religion or man made Reglions that is going to save the world.its Going to be Jesus Christ the original and only 1God he is coming to Earth no one else .The Bible is real and 100 💯 true and bible prophecy is jumping of the pages .💯🌈❤️🦁🙏
Are you mad
No god
No hell
No heven
All are in our mind
All are nonsense
Jesus never existed. He is a composite character.
@@NullStaticVoid nonsense
They are all dead
Are they though?
The body does but the memory of their life and teachings lives on.
No women philosophers? No brown philosophers? Only depictions of Europeans...interesting..
Women philosohers 🤣🤡
Isaiah, Jeremiah as well as Zoroaster were all brown. Confucius and Laozi were Chinese
All from India are brown
@Karin 6255. No technological facilities so men with muscles have to risk by passing into hostile territories after success not being killed or robbed then at the retirement of old age he turn into a philosopher relating his dangerous adventure! Which silly women wants to risk herself travelling alone in ancient times facing wild humans and animals like Hollywood gender balancing fiction movies for "Political correctness ".Brown man,olive man,wheat yellow man or swarthy man formed assorted civilization comes under a dominant assimilated tribe thus called a race,unlike the artificial Western civilization biological terminology pretends to be smart and identification of skin colour is and issue such as White! Black,Coloured! Which contradicts liberalism,the first racist politics is from the Confederate Democrats!
@@BarHawa Jesus too was brown.