living around 550 BCE. Mary Boyce and other leading scholars who once supported much earlier dates for Zarathustra/Zoroaster have recently changed their position on the time when he likely lived, so that there is an emerging consensus regarding him as a contemporary or near-contemporary of Cyrus the Great. Jainism propagated the religion of sramanas (previous Tirthankaras) and influenced Indian philosophy by propounding the principles of ahimsa (non-violence), karma, samsara, and asceticism. Mahavira (24th Tirthankara in the 5th century BCE), known as a fordmaker of Jainism and a contemporary with the Buddha, lived during this age. Buddhism, also of the sramana tradition of India, was another of the world's most influential philosophies, founded by Siddhartha Gautama, or the Buddha, who lived c. 5th century BCE; its spread was aided by Ashoka, who lived late in the period. Jaspers' axial shifts included the rise of Platonism (c. 4th century BCE) and Neoplatonism (3rd century AD), which would later become a major influence on the Western world through both Christianity and secular thought throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. Reception In addition to Jaspers, the philosopher Eric Voegelin referred to this age as The Great Leap of Being, constituting a new spiritual awakening and a shift of perception from societal to individual values. Thinkers and teachers like the Buddha, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Anaxagoras contributed to such awakenings which Plato would later call anamnesis, or a remembering of things forgotten. David Christian notes that the first "universal religions" appeared in the age of the first universal empires and of the first all-encompassing trading networks. This conclusion overlooks the fact that Venus statues, for example, are found across much of Eurasia, and date back many millennia before the first empires. What some regard as the emergence of religion is more likely the emergence of institutionalized and codified religion. Anthropologist David Graeber has pointed out that "the core period of Jasper's Axial age ... corresponds almost exactly to the period in which coinage was invented. What's more, the three parts of the world where coins were first invented were also the very parts of the world where those sages lived; in fact, they became the epicenters of Axial Age religious and philosophical creativity." Drawing on the work of classicist Richard Seaford and literary theorist Marc Shell on the relation between coinage and early Greek thought, Graeber argues that an understanding of the rise