Idea-constellations recombine in in-between zones: where two cultures' structured wholes meet in a third place, they form a new constellation that keeps the elements that fit and drops the ones that do not, so the new idea is born in neither home. In Ansary's ch. 8 the Kushan world joined Mithra, a saviour straddling the human and divine, with Buddhism, and produced the bodhisattva who reaches the edge of nirvana and turns back to help others; Greek image-making produced the sculpted Buddha. For the collective, a digest that sets two books' plexes side by side is a deliberately built in-between zone; that reading is Clay's.

Evidence 5 passages

• groundsSource document

  Constellations that originated in different cultures might bump together in an in-between zone and form new constellations of ideas, constellations that include elements from both originals and exclude ones that do not fit.

• backsSource document

  Buddhists started making sculptures of the Buddha to express, through his features and postures, the spiritual equanimity they sought. These Buddhist sculptures looked sort of Hellenic.

• groundsSource document

  Ideas don't drift about as single motes. They link together to form structured wholes, constellations of concepts. When they fit snugly as coherent parts of a larger structure, they resist fragmentation.

• groundsSource document

  a new notion was born into Buddhism of certain exalted spiritual luminaries who made it right to the edge of nirvana, but instead of crossing over into bliss, paused down that line, and reached back to help others.

• backsSource document

  by the 4th century, Mithraism had died out completely, but not before imparting particles of itself to the Christian narrative that came later.

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