Professor Albert S. Geden explains:

“The human craving for an ideal or idealized object of love and homage was too strong. . . . The desire was met, and found its satisfaction, in the deification [after his death] of [Buddha] himself; . . . With him were reintroduced the Hindu deities, or the more important and popular of them. But they were always subordinated in attributes and power to the Buddha. And thus a system in theory deistic became a practical polytheism.”

Toward the beginning of the Common Era images of Buddha made their appearance. The simple places of Buddhist devotion were changed into elaborate temples. Some of these temples also contain images of the Hindu gods Vishnu, Siva and Ganesha.

Buddha’s belief in rebirth and that a person’s deeds in one life affect him in his next life came from Hinduism. So did his ideas about meditation and Nirvana. Where did these Hindu beliefs get their start?

The Encyclopædia Britannica (1952 edition) observes: “The religion [of India] is not based on anything exclusively Indian but on old world-wide beliefs.” How did these “old world-wide beliefs” get to India? William H. McNeill explains in The Rise of the West:

“The existence of trade relations between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley from [the third millennium B.C.E.] . . . suggests that the Sumerians may have played a role in the earliest stages of Indus civilization . . . Seaborne contact with Sumer may have provided ready-made models and ideas which the Indus peoples could adapt to the peculiarities of their local cultural tradition.”