When variations could be so extravagantly successful, displacement of one humanoid population by another even more effective group of hunters must ha… - William Hardy McNeill

Religious history also offers another striking parallel between Rome and China. The Buddhist faith began to penetrate the Han empire in the first century A.D., and soon won converts in high places. Its period of official dominance in court circles extended from the third to the ninth centuries A.D. This obviously parallels the successes that came to Christianity in the Roman empire during the same period.

There was a Christian redaction of the historical vision of reality, associated especially with the thought of St. Augustine of Hippo.

The decline of Indian Buddhism was centrally due to the fact that it never offered the Indian laity a complete religion. Early Buddhism knew no ceremonies for birth and death, marriage, illness, and other critical turns of private life... Only for the community of monks did Buddhism provide a complete and well-defined way of life. ...But Brahmins were needed for all the ordinary crises in life, ready with their rites and sacred formulas to ward off danger or minimize the damage. This elemental fact assured the survival of Brahminism in India.