[xanderlewis]

I’m not making any comment about Buddhism, but the fact that something is ‘2,500 years old’ doesn’t seem to have much bearing on its validity.

There’s plenty of misguided rubbish that’s been knocking around for millennia — I would imagine Buddhism has other selling points.

[jdietrich]

The selling point for the kind of people who read HN is probably this - the similarities between what Buddhism has been teaching for 2,500 years and the state of the art in evidence-based psychotherapies are uncanny. Long before the likes of Jon Kabat-Zinn were explicitly making the connection, Beck, Adler, Low and Ellis independently rediscovered an awful lot of Buddhist principles, with only a little help from the Stoics. It's one of those weird apparent anachronisms like the Antikythera mechanism.

[t-3]

It's not really anachronistic, is it? Religion and psychotherapy have been basically indistinguishable until the modern era. "Someone 2500 years ago striving to improve human mental health had some success" isn't so surprising.