Donald S. Lopez Jr.: evaluation

Transcript context

…Now, when I read popular literature today, I see this common trope, some notion of what’s called an axial age. That there was Buddha, there was Socrates, there was Confucius, Zoroaster. You could add in Homer, Jeremiah. The list varies. Supposedly, these people are all about the same time, and there’s something special about that era where all this religious thought blossoms. Is that fabricated, or do you agree? What do you think? I don’t agree. I think the dates are just too vague. We have people who, like Laozi, for example, who is the founder of Taoism, who’s generally put in that period — probably a mythical figure. We don’t know exactly what Confucius taught, and as we’ve been talking about, we don’t know when the Buddha lived, and we don’t know what he taught. Especially on the Asian side, it’s difficult to fit those figures into that particular paradigm. But isn’t it odd that the temporal distribution of religions, especially after Islam — which, of course, is much later — but there aren’t that many new ones, right?…

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