Download Jesse`s “Lineage Tree” and Its Buddhist “Branch”

Jesse’s “Lineage Tree” and Its Buddhist “Branch”
Michael Lockwood, Advocatus Diaboli
_________
‘Then a shoot shall grow from the stock of Jesse,
and a branch spring from his roots.’
– Isaiah 11:1
When King Aåöka, in the mid-third century BCE, sent out Buddhist monks from India as missionaries
(the world’s first Salvation Army, propagating the Buddha’s Gospel: The Dharma) to the kingdoms beyond
his borders, the king’s 13th Rock Edict inscription specifically names rulers of the Seleucid Empire, Egypt,
Macedonia, and the lands which were approximately today’s Libya, Greece, and Albania:
(XVI) So, what is [peaceful] conquest through Dharma is now considered to be the best conquest by
‘The Beloved of the Gods’ [i.e., by Aåöka].[1]
(XVII) And such a conquest has been achieved by ‘The Beloved of the Gods’ not only here [in his
own dominions] but also in the territories bordering [on his dominions], and as far away as six
hundred Yojanas, [where] the Yavana [Greek] king named Antiyoka[2] [is ruling and], beyond [the
kingdom of] the said Antiyoka, [where] four other kings named Tulamäya,[3] Antikeni,[4] Maka[5] and
Alikasundara[6] [are also ruling]. . . .
And, in another Rock Edict, the 2nd, Aåöka assigned certain medical and botanical duties to be carried out:
(I) Everywhere in the dominions of king ‘Priyadaråin’ [i.e., of Aåöka], ‘Beloved of the Gods’, and
likewise [in] the bordering territories such as [those of] the Ço∂as [and] Pä∫∂iyas [as well as of] the
Satïyä-putras [and in] Tämrapar∫ï [i.e., Årï-La≥kä] and [in the territories of] the Yavana king named
Antiyoka and also [of] the kings who are the neighbours of the said Antiyoka – everywhere King
‘Priyadaråin’, ‘Beloved of the Gods’, has arranged for two kinds of medical treatment, [viz.,] medical
treatment for men and medical treatment for animals.
(II) And, wherever there were no medicinal plants beneficial to men and beneficial to animals,
everywhere they have been caused to be imported and planted.[7]
As Aåöka’s main object was, of course, for the monks to spread the Buddhist Gospel (The Dharma) throughout
these lands, these words about medicinal plants carry an additional, suggestive meaning. Aåöka is known to
have sent to the island of Årï La≥kä a physical ‘shoot’ of the Bödhi tree, under which the Buddha was said to
have gained Enlightenment. One can view this venerated tree in Årï La≥kä, today, some 2250 years after its
shoot was transplanted there. In Indian art during Aåöka’s time, the Bödhi tree was the very symbol of the
Buddha’s Enlightenment (his realization of The Dharma). Therefore, consider the following:
Proposition 1: Besides the physical medical plants which had been imported into these countries, Aåöka’s
inscription can be taken to signify that a metaphorical “medical shoot” (the Buddha’s Gospel: The Dharma)
had also been introduced in these lands.
Proposition 2: However, this “introduction” would not have been a simple case of “transplanting” the
Buddhist Gospel directly into the foreign “soil” of these western countries, but rather, the Buddhist monks
accomplished it by slight of hand, a very clever and discreet (upäya-kauåalya) case of “engraftment”!
Proposition 3: Though it may never be known when exactly this “engraftment” was first initiated, it had
already established, by the second century BCE, both the Essenes of Qumran with their followers throughout
Palestine and the Essenes of Mareotis (Philo’s Therapeutæ) with their followers throughout Egypt.
ESSENES – The name of the sect is variously given as Essaioi (Philo) or Essënoi (Josephus, Dio,
Hippolytus) in Greek, Esseni in Latin (Pliny). Epiphanius mentions . . . Essënoi, which he identifies
as a Samaritan sect. . . .8
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Following Eusebius’s confused claim that Philo’s Therapeutæ were Christians, Epiphanius, who lived
c. 315-403 CE, made the following interesting statement about these Therapeutæ in his Panarion (1.29.5.1-3):
If you are a lover of learning and read the writings of Philo, you would find an account of these
people in the book entitled On the Iessaioi. He describes their way of life and their praiseworthy
customs and recounts their monasteries in the vicinity of the Marean marsh, speaking about none
other than the Christians. For he himself was present in the area (the place is called Mareotis) and
spent some time with them, receiving hospitality in the monasteries in this locality. Since he was
there during the time of Pascha [Passover], he observed their practices, how some of them prolonged
their fast for the entire holy week of the Pascha, others ate every second day, while yet others broke
their fast every evening. All these matters are dealt with by the man in his account of the faith and
practices of the Christians.9
Further, in the prior section (1.29.4.9-10), Epiphanius, significantly, says:
[S]ince I have come to the reason why those who came to faith in Christ were called Jessaeans
[Iessaioi] before they were called Christians, I have said that Jesse was the father of [King] David.
And they had been named Jessaeans [Iessaioi], either because of this Jesse; or from the name of our
Lord Jesus. . . . In any case, they had acquired this additional name [Iessaioi] before they were
called Christians.10
What Epiphanius is either obscuring or failing to understand, himself, is the fact that the Qumranites and
Mareanites were Iessaioi / Jessæans who, long before the beginning of the Common Era, had assumed the
form and some of the practices of Jewish sects, and in this manner had engrafted themselves onto Jesse’s
‘Lineage Tree’ of Judaism. It is in this fundamental sense that they originally came to be called ‘Jessæans’/
Essenes.
Both Eusebius and Epiphanius were mistaken in saying that Philo’s Therapeutæ were Christians.
However, Philo’s Therapeutæ and the Qumranites should, indeed, be counted among the proto-Christians.
Was Epiphanius mistaken in identifying the Therapeutæ with the Essenes (Iessaioi)? David Winston,
in his book Philo of Alexandria (1981), had this to say:
As for the relationship of the Therapeutae to the Essenes, the consensus is that, although originating
from the same root, they nevertheless represent separate developments. Vermes, however believes
that there is a close bond between them, and he interprets the opening sentence of the treatise
[On the Contemplative Life] as implying that the Therapeutae were contemplative Essenes.11
Winston’s translation of this opening sentence of Philo’s work gives support to G. Vermes’ view, when the
word ‘those’ is understood as ‘Essenes’:
After discussing the Essenes who zealously cultivated the active life, and excelled in all or, to put it
more acceptably, in most of its spheres, I [Philo] shall now proceed at once, following the sequence
demanded by the treatment of this subject, to say what is fitting concerning those [Essenes] who
have espoused the life of contemplation.12
The Greek term Iessaioi is interchangeable with Greek Essaioi, Essënoi, and Latin Esseni, and these terms
apply equally to both the Mareotis monastics and the Qumran monastics. Keep in mind that the name of King
David’s father, in Greek, is Iessai, and therefore we can reasonably follow Epiphanius in saying that the
Iessaioi (the Qumranites as well as the Mareanites) were Jessæans – ‘of the lineage of Jesse’. And both
groups can equally be thought of as “Therapeutai” (‘Devotees of God’ [Greek] or ‘Sons of the Elders’ [Päli])
– but the Qumranites had little use for Greek terms!
Isaiah, 11:1:
“There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.”
It was only toward the end of the disastrous Jewish revolts against the Romans between 66 and 135 CE, that
the Alexandrian Essenes (one ‘limb’ of that great western ‘branch’ of Buddhism which had been engrafted
onto Judaism in the third century BCE by King Aåöka’s Buddhist missionary monks) appear to have begun to
interpret their Jessæan ‘Lineage Tree’, onto which they had been metaphorically engrafted, as now having
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become a mere ‘Stump’ – that is, what little was left of the Jewish nation. And, by the end of the first century
of the Common Era, when, in Alexandria, the allegorical gospel accounts of ‘Jesus’ had begun to be written
in Greek, this allegorical ‘Jesus’ – a disguised meta-Buddha – was now put forward by the evangelists as a
historical ‘Shoot’ which had ‘sprouted up’ from the ‘Stump of Jesse’ some one hundred or so years before
their own time.
In the Vulgate Bible, the Isaiah passage would later be translated into Latin by Jerome as:
“et egredietur virga de radice Iesse et flos de radice eius ascendet”
“. . . a rod out of the root of Jesse, and a flower shall rise up . . .”.
(‘Flos, pl. floris, is Latin for flower. Virga is a “green twig”, “rod” . . . , as well as a convenient nearpun with Virgo or Virgin, which undoubtedly influenced the development of the image. Thus Jesus is
the Virga Jesse or “shoot of Jesse”.’ – Wikipedia)
Nazareth
The foregoing discussion offers a solution to the long-standing theological puzzle of the evangelist’s
statement in Matthew 2:23:
And being warned by a dream, he [Joseph, with Mary and Jesus] withdrew to the region of Galilee;
there he settled in a town called Nazareth. This was to fulfil the words spoken through the prophets,
‘He [Jesus] shall be called a Nazarene.’
– The New English Bible
The problem with the last sentence, of course, is that nowhere in the Hebrew Bible do the prophets mention
a town called Nazareth. The fact is that the evangelists were rather careful about openly declaring that
‘Jesus’ was the Messiah/Christ (the messianic “Shoot” – N-Z-R, in Hebrew – from Jesse’s “Stump”). They
were under Roman rule, when even such an allegorical claim might appear treasonous. So Matthew’s passage
is camouflage: Jesus is called a Nazarene because of his having lived in Nazareth. Thus, Matthew, by means
of this passage, is obfuscating the fact that the followers of ‘Jesus’, the Nazarenes (including ‘Paul’, of
course), were, indeed, followers of Isaiah’s messianic “Sprout” from the “Stump” of Jesse. But keep in
mind, these Nazarenes were not the ordinary Jewish, militaristic variety of messianists: they were pacifistic
crypto-Buddhist-“Jewish” messianists!
Employing Christian Lindtner’s analytic method and following his use of gematria techniques, one
can throw light on how ‘Nazareth’, the putative residence of ‘Jesus’, is actually derived from Jesus, the
‘Shoot’, which had been grafted onto the ‘Stump’ of Jesse. Take the word netzer in:
Isaiah 14:19
Hebrew (Strong 5342): netzer = NeTZeR = N-T-Z-R
a sprout, shoot, branch, descendants
NeTZeR / N-T-Z-R = N-Z-R-T / NaZaReT (Nazareth, in English transliteration)
It follows that the name of the town of ‘Nazareth’ is but a Greek metaphorical transmogrification of the
Hebrew word for ‘sprout’ or ‘shoot’; so ‘Nazareth’ can be rendered in English as ‘Sprout-town’. In this way
the theological puzzle is solved in one stroke. Arthur Drews, a century ago, presented an extensive scholarly
analysis covering much of this same ground. (See the Appendix.) Only, Drews did not grasp the presence of
Buddhism: the evangelists’ conception and literary ‘engraftment’ of the Buddhist ‘Jesus’ onto the Judaic
‘Stump’ of Jesse’s ‘Lineage Tree’.
In the year 93 or 94 CE, Josephus used the Greek word ‘Naziraios’ twice in his Antiquities: in iv, 4, 4,
and in xix, 6, 1 (see Drews’s remarks on page 204 of his work – in the Appendix – where he gives ‘Nazaraios’
for Josephus’s first entry and ‘Naziraios’, for the second). Note that the context of each appearance of the
term in the Antiquities is crystal clear and unambiguous: it involves the ‘Nazirite’ tradition of the Hebrew
Bible (think of Samson and Samuel). As Josephus was mainly addressing educated Roman Gentiles in his
writings, the term ‘Nazaraios’, meaning ‘Nazarite’, would have thus appeared to them totally innocuous.
Thus, protected by the smokescreens of the “town of Nazareth” and the Hebrew Bible’s “Nazarites”,
Pliny’s first century BCE ‘Nazerini’, the Gospel of John’s 19:19 ‘Nazoraios’, and all the other ‘Nazoræans’,
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The Karma Kägyu “Lineage Tree”, Tibet
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The Drikung Kägyu Mahämudrä “Lineage Tree”, Tibet
Reclining Jesse, a “Lineage Tree” arising from his navel
The Basilica of St. Quentin, France
Courtesy of Wikipedia
Reclining Viß∫u as “Padmanäbha”, a lotus (padma)
arising out of his navel (näbha), Brahmä sitting on it
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‘Nazaræans’, ‘Nasiræans’, and ‘Notzrim’ – all terms derived from N-Z-R or N-S-R – will have to be examined
anew, now, as possibly signifying the presence of crypto-Buddhists-Judaic organizations from as early as
the second century, BCE, and crypto-Buddhist-Judaic Christianity from the end of the first century, CE.
Images of scenes from the Hebrew Bible are not too common in Christian Churches. However, those
illustrating Jesse’s “Lineage Tree”, because of its connection with Jesus, are the most numerous. It is interesting
to note that these images began to appear in Christian art, especially in Europe, around the 11th century CE,
the same period when the Buddhist “Lineage Tree” images were also coming into prominence.
In the Basilica of St. Quentin, France, the remarkable carving of the Reclining Jesse with his ‘Lineage
Tree’ growing up out of his navel area would immediately make anyone familiar with Indian iconography to
think of the images of the Reclining Viß∫u “Padmanäbha”13 with a lotus flower growing up from his navel,
providing a seat for the smaller, sitting image of the creator god (Demiurge) Brahmä! Christianity has certainly
borrowed from India in the creation of the St. Quentin image! The ‘navel’ theme of Viß∫u Padmanäbha can
be traced back to literary images in the ‰ig-Vëda which, long before the prophet Isaiah and the Hebrew
Bible, praise the all-encompassing creator-God, Viåvakarma (sometimes identified with Brahmä). For
example:
HYMN 82 (Viåvakarma)
(Verse 6) The waters, they received that germ primæval wherein the gods were gathered altogether.
It rested set upon the Unborn’s navel, that One wherein abide all things existing.
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Endnotes (ML’s)
[1]Mid-third century
BCE Rock Edict XIII, at E∞∞agu∂i, Ändhra Pradësh; ed. and trans. by D.C. Sircar, in Aåokan
Studies (Calcutta: India Museum, 1979), p. 35.
[2]Antiyoka = Antiochus-II Theos (regnal years 261-246 BCE), Greek ruler of the Seleucid Empire (stretching from
Syria to Bactria, in the east), and who was therefore a direct neighbor of Aåöka. His capital city was Antioch, future arena
of dramatic incidents in St. Paul’s life. . . .
[3]Tulamäya = Ptolemy-II Philadelphus (r.y. 285-247 BCE), the Greek ruler of Egypt.
[4]Antikeni = Antigonas Gonatas of Macedonia (r.y. 277-239 BCE).
[5]Maka = Magas of Cyrene (r.y. ca. 288-258 BCE) [Cyrene is approximately today’s Libya.]
[6]Alikasundara = Alexander-II of Epirus (r.y. 272-255 BCE) [Epirus, today’s Greece and Albania.]
[7]Aåöka’s Rock Edict II, at E∞∞agu∂i, Ändhra Pradësh (Aåokan Studies, ed. and trans. by D.C. Sircar [Calcutta: India
Museum, 1979], p. 15). The identifications and dates are after W. Norman Brown’s, in his book, The Indian and Christian
Miracles of Walking on the Water (Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Co., 1928), p. 63.
8John J. Collins, “Essenes”, The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 2 (New York: Doubleday, 1992), p. 619. (Bolding
added.)
9David T. Runia, Philo in Early Christian Literature: A Survey (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), p. 228. (Bolding
added.)
10Frank Williams, The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis, vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 1987), p. 115; the bracketed
words have been added by ML.
11David Winston, Philo of Alexandria: The Contemplative Life, The Giants, and Selections (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist
Press, 1981), p. 41; the bracketed words have been added by ML.
12Winston, Philo of Alexandria, pp. 41-42; the bracketed words have been added by ML. The reference for Vermes’
belief, which is not given in Winston’s book, but which was recently communicated personally to ML, is: E. Schurer
and G. Vermes, A History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ: A New English Version by G. Vermes et al.,
vol. II (Edinburgh 1979), p. 596.
13The gold idol of Viß∫u in his Padmanäbha form, pictured above, was discovered along with countless other
invaluable treasures, in 2011, in a hidden vault of the Padmanäbhaswämy Temple, Trivandrum, Kerala, South India.
The Padmanäbha image, solid gold, is said to have weighed in at 30 kilos! – and reported to be valued (only the gold?)
at Indian Rupees Five billion – that is, roughly, US$ 100 million!
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