The final paragraph is merely an exercise in slamming open doors. Or so it seems, for several in-your-face assertions are built into this innocuous p… - Koenraad Elst

Until Mr. Van Lysebeth shows an authentic Hindu source explaining these destructive historical references as the real meaning of the elements of the Vedic sacrifice, 1 would describe his suspicion that “Indians are careful not to tell us”, as a good example of interpretative delusion, a common symptom in paranoia patients. ‘When someone is obsessed with a belief which is not well supported by reality, he starts giving distorted interpretations to ordinary events, e.g. seeing a genocide commemoration in an ordinary sacrifice ritual. The most lucid students of Vedic and other rituals have lately been emphasizing that rituals are not meant to “symbolize” anything in the first place. And if throwing grains into the fire symbolizes the destruction of someone else’s harvest, are we going to accept that all sacrifices of animals, flowers etc. in all the religions of the world prove that all the communities concerned have a history of genocide and that their commemorative rituals seem harmless only to the naive observer? Clearly, one of Mr. Van Lysebeth’s sources has been projecting his own ethno-paranoid notions onto normal religious practices which are merely the Vedic representatives of a world-wide tradition of ritual and sacrifice.

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.

On the other hand, an irrational anti-Hinduism is a reality. It is precisely through comparison with Islam that this becomes glaring. Whenever a group of people gets killed in the name of Islam, immediately the politicians concerned and the media assure us that this terror “has nothing to do with Islam”. In the case of Hinduism, it is just the reverse. Of any merit of Hinduism, it is immediately assumed that “it has nothing to do with Hinduism”, whereas every problem in India is automatically blamed on Hinduism, from poverty (“the Hindu rate of growth”) to rape.