“Understanding that Buddhism took a freaking 1000 years to get to China by circling the Himalayas to the West, going north into Central Asia and into the Tarim Basin, that isn’t your project either.

If you spent half the time you spend in rationalizing your crap into going to Wikipedia and reading some basic history you wouldn’t be so embarrassing.”

Interestingly, spandrell, your beloved Wikipedia seems at odds with itself…

Siddhārtha Gautama was the historical founder of Buddhism. He was born a
Kshatriya warrior prince in Lumbini, Nepal, in 623 BCE.[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Buddhism#Siddhartha_Gautama

563 BCE: Siddhārtha Gautama, Buddha-to-be, is born in Lumbini into a leading royal family in the republic of the Shakyas,
which is now part of Nepal. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Buddhism#BCE

It seems that Buddhism “took a freaking 1000 years” to flourish in China, not merely arrive.

“3rd Buddhist council (c. 250 BCE) [edit]
Main article: Third Buddhist Council
King Aśoka convened the third Buddhist council around 250 BCE at Pataliputra (today’s Patna). It was held by the monk Moggaliputtatissa. The objective of the council was to purify the Saṅgha, particularly from non-Buddhist ascetics who had
been attracted by the royal patronage. Following the council, Buddhist missionaries were dispatched throughout the known world.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Buddhism#3rd_Buddhist_council_.28c._250_BCE.29

“According to traditional accounts, Buddhism was introduced in China during the Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE) after an
emperor dreamed of a flying golden man thought to be the Buddha. Although the archaeological record confirms that Buddhism
was introduced sometime during the Han dynasty, it did not flourish in China until the Six Dynasties period (220-589 CE).”[28
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Buddhism#China

And the circumnavigation you refer to, in no way obviated the Himalayan route.

Daruma Daishi was the great monk who introduced Buddhism to China. Originally from India, he traveled across the Himalayas on foot to share the wisdom and knowledge from his studies. When he reached China, many people felt he was a fake or had mystical powers, and were immediately skeptical of him. “How could he get here from India? You can’t cross the Himalayas on foot!” http://www.kimsookarate.com/contributions/daruma_072603/daruma.htm.

“Over the course of several centuries, not only did many outstanding Indian masters visit Tibet, but also many Tibetans made the difficult journey over the Himalayas to study the Dharma in India. They brought back with them the Buddhist philosophy of India and also the knowledge of Music, Medicine, Logic and Art. Within a relatively short period, Tibetan society had been transformed. What had once been a primitive nation was changed into one noted for its learning and wisdom”
http://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/buddhistworld/to-himalayas.htm

It is generally accepted that the history of the development of modern Karate started in China. In the year 527 A.D. an Indian Buddhist monk named Bodhidharma (Daruma Taishi: jpn) walked across the Himalayan Mountains from India into the Hunan province of China to the Shao Lin (Little/Young Forrest) monastery that was situated there.
http://www.sanchinryukarate.co.uk/history-of-karate/

Bodhidharma like the Buddha renounced his kingdom and left for China. His father and his family opposed this renunciation, but ultimately seeing the resolve of the prince acceded to his request. Bodhidharma now set course. He traveled across North India and negotiated the Himalayan passes and crossed Tibet as enjoined by the Buddha. This travel took him 3 years and after that he entered China. http://mg-singh.hubpages.com/hub/bodhidharmandspreadofbuddhismtochina

“If you spent half the time you spend in rationalizing your crap into going to Wikipedia and reading some basic history you wouldn’t be so embarrassing.”

What’s the point of going to a page, if you don’t read it, except to hunt for straws?

None of this is central to the point: whatever route Buddhism could take, a belligerent army could take, from either side.
If the Himalayan route was not logistical, others could be found.

{Large-scale endeavours of conquest would have to be incentivised, The development of effective capacities of belligerence could be hastened by factors such as domestic need, hardships that regiment a people around the common aim of external acquisition: plunder. There’s the factor of ruling desire, too, what does the sovereign want? Other checks and balances, etc..
But none of this removes the other, very real factor.
That wealth has to be generated by some sort of structure.
If a peoples or sovereign finds it necessary to visit unprovoked hostility on one of those ‘structures’, for wealth, this is a radical move that necessarily implies a deficiency in those people, that sovereign.
They’re engaging in an action, an effort, for the purpose of acquiring something they do not, as yet, have.
The nebulous smog of claims and counter-claims to ownership could apply to all but the first instance of occupation.
So there are disputes.
Nevertheless, there have been many hostile actions which were quite obviously not petty border disputes, or quarrels over land entitlements.
Whatever the reasons, these actions would have no justification, according to basic ethical norms exemplified in most moral codes.
Thus, any socio-ethnic-national structure that has engaged in such hostilities, has necessarily limited the scope of its moral code, as not applying to all persons.
If this limitation is based on empirical boundaries, geographic, genetic, cultural, linguistic, etc., it can be subject to the vacillation of those boundaries, their variance. This would generate the need for logics of ‘purity’ to legitimate where the moral code applies.
These logics of ‘purity’ would necessarily lead to idealisations that have no empirical instantiation.
They would lead to scenarios of contradiction: where idealisations, stemming from the valorisation of empirical instances, themselves ‘impure’ hybrids, finally clash.
All of this results from any morality that founds itself on its own selective transgression. The very selection of its location of inapplicability, becomes the fulcrum around which it unravels, the logic of exclusion and dissolution, essentially being one and the same.}

The point about China and India, is that there was cultural interchange on an amicable basis. That did exist. For those who only see conflict and deprivation, such interchanges are rendered secondary or dismissed as insignificant because war was impracticable in those circumstances. This assumption of ur-conflict is itself an anxiety that is historically conditioned and exploited. People are faced with choices: to cooperate or contest: to understand or ignore. I don’t really believe in ‘democracy’, per se, as it has been practiced, but what other sane alternative is there, as a tentative, global framework? We already have an anarchy of nation-states, layered with predatory structures of kapital. Are these structures sufficient to generate the nuanced responses required, in a time of global vulnerabilities?

If ‘Neoreaction’ is to be any more than a basic sophomoric contrariness, a wider perspective has to be taken. Anything else leads to a resentful balkanisation, at the very time that technology is enabling global monstrosity. If those two trends conflict, it’s not hard to see which will win.

And I think that there’s a common Gestalt for the subcontinent. Even in the absence of central states, most foreigners did understand India as a distinct cultural area. Something strange in the air after crossing Khyber Pass.

If you spent half the time you spend in rationalizing your crap into going to Wikipedia and reading some basic history you wouldn’t be so embarrassing.

“That’s because they never had a common border until Gengis Khan, and even then there’s still this small problem called the Himalayas.”

My initial claim:

“Is it not interesting that on the whole, for millenia, China and India had no serious conflicts or disputes, until modern times, after Islamic and European interventions?”

I said: “no serious conflicts or disputes”: I didn’t mention full scale invasion. In any case, the Himalayas did not prevent considerable cultural interchange (Buddhism, etc.) between the two kingdoms. This implies a degree of cordiality. I realise that Buddhist monks could be formidable practioners of the martial arts, but I’m sure any motivated army with animus and ambition could have followed in their tracks – the Alps didn’t stop Hannibal, did they?.

People have a tendency to conflate geopolitical arrangements of the present with those of the past. Instead of adequate imaginations of the past, they project their own limited, categories of understanding, in the hope that a fuller comprehension might arise. For those who only have axes of ignorance to grind, the past is something to appropriate according to their own dispositions, not an open text to interpret, and be interpreted by.

“You’re just stupid, I guess our host lets your nonsense stand as a zoo-like reminder of HBD.”
[Uncropped for honesty, I leave it to admin, whether to leave this section in or not? I think it is significant that spandrell resorts to this sort of ad hominem invective, locating my productions in the categories of the ‘zoological’, and ‘intellectual incompetence’. It allows the exploration of contradictions: e.g. implicit denigrations of ‘animality’ vs. the valorisation of evolutionary underminings of the exceptionalisms of ‘human spirit’, ‘soul’, etc.. The religious adherence to a particular form, regime, of mechanistic thought? ‘Intellectual competence’ identified with a fixed interpretation: the ability to calculate within a ‘fixed’ vocabulary of ‘fixed’ understandings? If Spandrell’s ‘logic’ is explored, it could be interesting.]

That might be an insult, if you had a sufficiently rich conception of what thinking is about. But you don’t. You seem limited to wargames. I suppose you could quote Heraclitus? That might be in your favour? But, in any case, I’m quite happy to be considered stupid by an ‘intelligence’ that only equates with the dull mechanics of avarice. Such an ‘intelligence’ isn’t my project.

Ranjit Singh’s conquest of the Afghans?
But Afghanistan actually was an ancient Indian province; it was called Gandhara; it was Hindu or Sind or Indus, whatever you want to call it. It was Indian. The invasions began with the Persians, more ‘barbarians from the North”?

“Cyrus the Great (558–530 BC) united the Iranian people into a state that stretched from the Caucasus to the non-Iranian areas around the Indus River. Both Gandhara and Kamboja soon came to be included under this state which was governed by the Achaemenian Dynasty during the reign of Cyrus the Great or in the first year of Darius I. The Gandhara and Kamboja had constituted the seventh satrapies (upper Indus) of the Achaemenid Empire…
The conquered area was the most fertile and populous region of the Achaemenid Empire. Indus Valley was already fabled for its gold; the province was able to supply gold dust equal in value to the very large amount of 4680 silver talents…
When the Achamenids took control of this kingdom, Pushkarasakti, a contemporary of king Bimbisara of Magadha, was the king of Gandhara. He was engaged in a power struggle against the kingdoms of Avanti and Pandavas.”

As ever, the ‘barbarian from the North’ takes advantage of internal dissents to steal gold and land. Once they have what they want, through ‘barbaric’ means, they start playing at being ‘civilised’.

Afghanistan-Ghandara has gone back and forth, between native Indus-Sind-Hindu-Buddhist rule and foreign Persian-Mughal-Muslim invasions. Nadir Shah of Persia (another “barbarian from the North”?), in his 1735 invasion of India, annexed Afghanistan.
Given that the Afghans-Persian-Turkics-Muslims were consistently raiding and invading India for centuries, from their base in Afghanistan-Ghandara, it seems highly exaggerated to imply the Sikh Empire’s occupation was an ‘expansion’, it’s not as if they (Afghans-Persian-Turkics-Muslims, etc.,) stuck to Afghanistan.

“Yet your Moral Outrage is only pointed at one very specific group, which, I assume, just happens to be your own group. I’m just trying to figure out why?”

I’m not morally outraged, Scharlach. I’m just pointing out the hypocrisy of all regimes that wish to call themselves ‘civilised’, but did it through exploitation of other civilisations. Barbaric regimes always use the imagination of ‘perpetual war’ as a justification, to the point of hypothesizing war as an enabling precondition for civilisation. That theory won’t work with the Indus Valley Civilisation: they didn’t have weapons. They practiced meditation and yoga. Their engineering feats weren’t equalled until 19th century Great Britain.

In the end his only argument is that India has always been incapable of building strong states with expeditionary forces. I’ll give him that.

[… cropped for civility …]