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The oral tradition you're probably trying to refer to is the Rigveda, which is amazing. It's like a human recorder that kept a series of vocalizations intact for thousands of years through chanting, with error correction mechanisms and all sorts of tricks to reduce drift over time. That's our oldest attested oral tradition, 2000 years or so. Stretching to a maximum of 6000 years if we're generous. Buddhism is like, a thousand years after that. It's all still super young though. Like I said, humanity has 300.000 years. Earliest petroglyphs from 50.000 years ago corroborate my point of view: they depict animals, and migrations and shit. Nothing that can attest some kind of cult towards individuals, no heroes, no holy images. So, yeah, talking about the Buddha "seems like old stuff", but it really isn't in the timescales that matter for estabilishing what "human nature" is, we've been human way before all that jazz appeared. |