Fascinating, but I can only read the abstract.
I am not a scholar of comparative religion, but I would be interested in how the author reconciles the vast geographical and historical spread that the thesis implies. For example, the "Energy" techniques mentioned in the abstract are not part of the earliest extant Buddhist texts, both Theravada and Mahayana, to my knowledge, at least (I read the Pali Canon and some early Mahayana texts, the Perfection of Wisdom literature). These ideas and techniques, to my knowledge, only developed later, and then, yes, in conversation with orthodox Hinduism in India and Taoism in China. But there is roughly a millennium between the formulation of the earliest Buddists texts and the Tantric schools which involved energy manipulation.
But this is my own incomplete, amateur knowledge. I'm interested in the new developments mentioned in the abstract.
