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Comment by empath-nirvana | Hacker News Reader

The ancient greeks (and romans) often claimed that some piece of writing was sourced from ancient knowledge -- the egyptians and the chaldeans (babylonians) being frequent purported sources -- sometimes they even sourced things to particular people/gods (Hermes, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Zarathustra). Many (probably most) of those attributions were probably false.

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India and Tibet also do this; if you come up with a new work of philosophy, you have to say it's a newly found ancient work from Buddha you found under a rock or was dictated to you in your dreams from your past life. If you wrote it yourself, nobody would respect it.

Reminds me of this story of a guy who was given some gold tablets by an angel, put it in a hat to read it out for writing it down.

> India and Tibet also do this

Do as in, even in present day?

I wouldn't generalize to like, the entire nations of India and Tibet, but it's an _extremely_ common phenomenon even in the US, even today. Just look at how many spurious quotes are ascribed to "great thinkers" (abe lincoln, gandhi, albert einstein). It happens even with relatively contemporary figures when we have voluminous historical evidence available to disprove it -- imagine how often it happened before the internet and printing press. I have this pet theory that the origin of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_source was just someone trying to write down all the stuff that anybody anywhere said that Jesus said in one place, so that people would stop making up shit.

Buddhists still do it (called "terma"), but I don't think it's necessary to call your secular philosophy works Buddhism anymore.

And of course people in the US often make things up and call it ancient Asian wisdom too, but usually aphorisms rather than whole books.

Not in present day. Our values are 180 degrees from this, it is better to claim novelty.

Rather the question today is OMG why do we care about 1000 years ago, we are more advanced!1111, whatever problem ancient people had, we have solved.

Which is equally silly

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