In 1957 the Romanian scholar A.M. Frenkian published his doctorate (German summary in Bibliotheca Classica Orientalis 1958) arguing that Greek Sceptical philosophy was influenced by Pyrrho's encounter with Buddhism, and especially with the form of argument known as the tetralemma (‘it either is or it is not, or it both is and is not, or it neither is nor is not’). His argument was reprised with approval by J.M. Sedlar in her 1980 book, India and the Greek World. In the same year E. Flintoff argued in the pages of Phronesis for a connection between Pyrrho and Buddhism. None of these discussions is referred to by B. in his new address to the question, though he does refer to the most recent book on the subject, by A. Kuzminski (2008). He has presumably come to this revelation independently; and, on the principle that ‘what I tell you three times is true’, there should perhaps be no further argument about the matter. But B. is right to draw attention to considerable resistance to the thesis among historians of philosophy, most recently R. Bett in 2000, who dismisses any connection of Pyrrho with Indian thought as ‘too fantastic to entertain’ (cited by B., p. 219). Bett's linguistic argument, that no Greek could understand any Indian language, is well refuted by B. The specific argument about the tetralemma is called into doubt by its cursory appearance in Plato's Republic, well before any Greek penetrated India with Alexander; but his introduction of the Criterion (beloved also by the Pyrrhonist Hume) and the rapprochement of τὸ ἀδιάϕορον with anātman seem to be on more solid foundation. B. collects, almost in passing, the information that Pyrrho used to ‘babble’ to himself (reciting mantras?), to practise motionlessness (yoga) and resistance to pain (the struggle against pragmata), and was celibate and ascetic – a lifestyle that many from then until now have fallen under the spell of in India.

But this demonstration occupies less than half of B.'s book. He is concerned in much of the rest of it to argue that Buddhism existed in the time of Megasthenes, who referred to Buddhists as śramanas, and that it was not yet called ‘Buddhism’, which was the contribution of the later Normative Buddhism, the world of the sa ṃgha (the community). This early ‘Buddhism’ resembles what is known as ‘Pure Land Buddhism’. Much of the discussion of Megasthenes and the other Greek writers, whose writings precede any Indian texts on the history of Buddhism by centuries, is convincing. I think he gets Calanus wrong by making him a Pure Land Buddhist, as I have come to feel sure that Calanus was an ajivika, which explains the hostility shown to him by the Naked Philosophers, who are sometimes thought to be Jains. (This would not do for B., who regards Jainism as emerging centuries later than Buddhism.) B. does not make the connection with ajivikas, though he mentions them elsewhere as one group of ‘other philosophers'. Remarkably, B. does not mention the extended treatment of the Naked Philosophers in the Alexander Romance and related texts, or any of the scholarship on it, which might have helped his argument.

B. has a few bees in his bonnet. His argument is determined by a desire to show that what we know as Buddhism is late in emergence. This entails that any reference to the sa ṃgha in the inscriptions of Aśoka has to be explained away. This he does by arguing that most of these inscriptions are late and spurious, and furthermore that the genuine inscriptions were not put up by Aśoka but by another king calling himself Devānāṃpriya Priyadarśi, who for some reason he thinks is our Aśoka's father, Bindusara/Amitrochates. The actual Aśoka, if he existed, was a Saka-Kushan king of the early centuries a.d. (p. 240). Few will feel able to follow B. on this strange sea of thought, based as it is in part on the belief that because Megasthenes says there was no writing in India (in late fourth century Magadha), therefore there can have been none in the later third century Indus region (even though Nearchus, whom he does not mention, says in the fourth century that there was) when the first inscriptions were erected. The influence of Achaemenid inscriptions (the region was under Achaemenid rule in the fifth century) should be enough to show the advantages of writing to an emperor. Anyway, the ascription of some inscriptions to Bindusara (p. 231) radically contradicts this argument. However, B.'s analysis of variations between the different inscriptions is illuminating.

B. is well aware of the Achaemenid connection. In fact, he comes close to seeing it as central. Buddha's thinking, for him, is a reaction not so much to Brahmanism as to Zoroastrianism (as he calls the religion of the Achaemenids). Another exciting voyage on the sea of thought leads him to argue that the central Chinese philosophical principle, the Tao, is a translation of the dharma, and furthermore that the name of Lao Tzu is the same as Gautama, the Buddha's given name. Intricate philological arguments involving Chinese (/g/ exchanged with /l/) must be left to the experts. The end result is a re-statement of the Axial Age, not as a set of emergences of forms of thought independently at a certain stage of humanity's social and political development, but as ‘the result of concrete contacts, on the ground, by known peoples' (p. 124). The centuries become somewhat elastic in the course of this argument, though he seems prepared to believe that the Buddha could have died as late as the middle of the fourth century b.c. (p. 13), which would give little time for even elementary Buddhism to get established before Megasthenes' stay in Pataliputra around 310–300 b.c.

This is a challenging and serious book, rich in detail and argument. The pugnacity of B.'s preface and some of his footnotes hints that he does not really expect anybody to believe everything in it. I do not see Aśoka being dislodged from his pillars as a result of it. One would have liked, too, to see more engagement with the existing scholarship on some of the material. Looking at M. Dillon in Philosophy East and West (2000), D. Sick in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (2007), or me in Journal of Hellenic Studies (1995) or my book of 2008, might have suggested that not everyone has got the relation of Greece and India wrong and that his Pyrrhonian furrow is less hard to plough than he thinks. His insistence in his preface that he has not set out to cite everything is something of a self-denying ordinance. But his disentangling of the Greek sources on śramanas/brahmanas, and his presentation of the character of Pyrrho as deeply indebted to Buddhist modes of thought and practice, must stand.