There are more points in Ms. Nanda's paper which are worthy of further discussion, but for now I will conclude with an observation on what seems to b… - Koenraad Elst

Even the Buddha found a place on the saints' calendar under the name Saint Josaphat. ... The Gospels contain a number of almost literal repetitions of phrases, parables and scenes from the Buddhist canon, particularly from the Mahaparinirvana-Sutra: the master walking on water (and saying to the baffled disciples: "It's me"), the simile of the blind leading the blind, the multiplication of the loaves of bread, the master asking and accepting water from a woman belonging to a despised community, the call not to pass judgment on others, the call to respond to hostility with love, and other overly well-known motifs. Both doctrinal elements and biographical anecdotes have been borrowed. The Buddha's mother saw in a dream how a white elephant placed the promising boy in her womb while a heavenly being revealed the great news to the father, roughly like the annunciation to Mary and Joseph. The loose but devout woman Mary Magdalene is a neat copy of the Buddha-revering courtesan Amrapali. The iconography of Jesus resembles that of the expected future Buddha Maitreya, a name derived from maitri, "fellow-feeling, friendship", close enough to the Christian notion of agape/charity. The Maitreya is depicted with lotus flowers in the places where Jesus has stigmata of the crucifixion. This is becoming too much for coincidence, and the similarity is moreover strengthened by very specific details. Thus, Jesus relates how a widow offers two pennies from her humble possessions and thereby earns more merit than a wealthy man who gives a larger gift from his abundant riches. In Buddhist texts we find the same message in several variants, among them that of a widow offering two pennies; a holy monk disregards the larger gift of a wealthy man and praises the widow's piety. ... These similarities are certainly the fruit of historical contacts, though apart from the presence of a Buddhist community outside Alexandria (the Therapeutai), the details of the whereabouts of Buddhists in West Asia are as yet eluding us.

Still, sum total, linguistics has so far only provided a malleable type of evidence, a probability but not the final word. At any rate, the findings of Historical and Comparative Linguistics turn out to be perfectly compatible with a scenario of Indo-European emigration from an Indian Homeland, and marginally even indicate it. ... Archaeology is a harder science, though less informative about the language of the society studied. It failed to find any traces of the momentous event that an Aryan invasion must have been... Today the nonagenarian dean of Indian archaeology (B.B. Lal) concurs with most of his younger colleagues that there is no archaeological trace of an Aryan invasion.... The invading Aryans are taken to be fundamentally different in culture from the Harappans, and since the Harappan cities declined only after -1900, the invasion must be more recent than that, and the Vedic corpus (clearly set in India though tortured in vain to yield mentions of a westerly homeland or an invasion) even more recent.

We will not change the subject and discuss the large though unknown number of Hindus killed by Christian separatists in Mizoram and Nagaland over the decades, nor the terror of Christian natives in Fiji against Hindus, the latter phenomenon... is not the target of any protest in the world media, and the first is never even mentioned, so I suppose we need not attach any undue importance to the death of Hindus at the hands of Christians.