Jesus in India?

Silk Road Routes during Jesus' Lifetime

Source: History's Histories

With Christian Saints Thomas and Francis showing up in India,

Might Jesus have made a similar journey?

Historic travel between Jerusalem, Israel & Chennai, India was readily facilitated by ancient Silk Road land and sea routes gradually formed from roughly the 3ʳᵈ millennium BC until "formally established during the Han Dynasty of China... around...200 BC" - Ancient History Encyclopedia. The road passed right through Jerusalem, with both overland routes to India as well as further connections with maritime Silk Road sea routes through the Red & Arabian Seas out to & across the Indian Ocean to Chennai (Wiki, Map).

With Christian Saints Thomas and Francis showing up in India, might Jesus have made a similar journey? “After 12-year-old Jesus’s visit to the Temple in Jerusalem in Luke 2, in the following chapter Jesus reappears at ‘about 30 years of age’” - National Geographic. Over the course of an apparent 20 year absence from Jerusalem, during this "coming-of-age" period from early teens to late 20s, of a young man out to change the world, it is common to take a road trip, a walkabout to see that world, reminiscent of the 19th-century young adults European Grand Tour, only instead directed, considering the era and Jesus' intense spirituality, to India, which, according to Historians Michael Woods, Bettany Hughes & Mythologist Joseph Campbell, was at the time the most advanced of all ancient civilizations, particularly spiritually. Such a journey would've afforded Jesus considerable resources and opportunities to strengthen & advance his own spiritual development, particularly from a sojourn at the several-centuries-earlier-precursor to the Library of Alexandria, northern India's "Nalanda University...one of the first great universities in recorded history…reported to have been visited by the Buddha during his lifetime…The library…was said to comprise hundreds of thousands of volumes...[in] three main buildings as high as nine stories tall…Courses were drawn from every field of learning…science, astronomy, medicine…logic…metaphysics, philosophy, Samkhya, Yoga-shastra, the Veda, and the scriptures of Buddhism. They studied foreign philosophy likewise" - Nalanda University . At Nalanda one could encounter & practice the very same ancient Indian techniques of meditation and yoga that resulted in the profound transpersonal psychological experience of Enlightenment Siddhārtha Gautama achieved 500 years earlier, which specific techniques were later initially codified in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (online), afterwards reaching their most succinct expression in the Six Yogas of Naropa (book, retreat (prereq: Gyuto / Kalachakra), the 1st 3 (Tummo, Gyulü, Ösel - aka Inner Heat, Illusory Body, Clear Light) delineating the specific practices for attaining enlightenment, the latter 3 describing the practice of the 1st 3 under different conditions such as during sleep (via lucid dreaming). Once Siddhārtha, after considerable exploration & experimentation, discovered an effective combination of most efficacious techniques, the "assault on the summit" was a fairly straight shot - "Siddhartha…[practiced] a meditation called 'space-like concentration on the Dharmakaya' [involving focusing] single-pointedly on the ultimate nature of all phenomena…training in this meditation for six years [after which realizing] he was very close to attaining full enlightenment…[he] walked to Bodh Gaya…[&] beneath the Bodhi Tree…entered the space-like concentration on the Dharmakaya [continuing] until dawn, when he attained the varja-like concentration…which is the very last mind of a limited being [via which] he removed the final veils of ignorance from his mind and in the next moment became a Buddha, a fully enlightened being” - Nalanda Gautama. Evidently, if one could start with directly implementing the set of hard-won techniques discovered by Siddhartha & achieve the same result in a roughly similar timeframe of about 6 years, then Jesus' absence of 20 years would have more than adequately provided time to cover the work, leave time for additional travel about the region as part of a greater Asian Grand Tour including sojourns at other great centers of learning, as well as include round trip Silk Road travel, at the end of which the cumulative impact may well have contributed to Jesus' decision to spend the rest of his life spreading the "good news", much like the Enlightenment experience inspired Siddhartha to spent the rest of his life teaching.

There is also the possibility that a journey all the way to India was not even necessary, as travel in all directions between Israel & Asia was quite robust, for example "India: Contacts with the West...Numerous sources from the 1st millennium bce mention trade between western Asia and the western coast of India...probably supplying goods to Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean...The emperor Augustus received two embassies—almost certainly trade missions—from India in 25–21 bce...The maritime trade routes from the Indian ports were primarily to the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, from where they went overland to the eastern Mediterranean" - Britannica. In particular there was a great deal of travel from the East by scholars & monks, who variously set up a number of monasteries at particular Silk Road destinations, while others went on to serve as scribes at western destinations, particularly Alexandria Library & Lyceum, some with the intention of bringing back the foreign knowledge to their homeland, among the most famous being the "Marco Polo like" figure of "Chinese monk Xuanzang (Hsuan Tsang) [who] left the Chinese dynasty capital for India to obtain Buddhist texts...He traveled west — on foot, on horseback and by camel and elephant — to Central Asia and then south and east to India and returned in A.D. 645 with 700 Buddhist texts...Xuanzang is remembered as a great scholar for his translations from Sanskrit to Chinese but also for his descriptions of the places he visited — the great Silk Road cities of Kashgar and Samarkand and the great stone Buddhas in Bamiyan, Afghanistan. His trip inspired the Chinese literary classic 'Journey to the West' by Wu Ch'eng-en…Xuanzang was a leading Indophile of ancient China [& authored a] narrative of his pilgrimage to India, The Records of the Western Regions Visited During the Great Tang Dynasty…It is through Xuanzang…that the Faxiang (Fa-hsiang or Yogacara/Consciousness-only) School was initiated in China" - Xuanzang. Thus, a seeker from Jerusalem may well have met spiritually adept travelers from places like Nalanda with whom a sojourn spent at Silk Road monasteries could readily result in a transfer of the knowledge & techniques like, & including, those of Siddhārtha at Nalanda.