Intercourse between India and the Western World from the Earliest Times to the Fall of Rome c12.47

c12.47

Much more accurate is the knowledge possessed by the Christian writer Clement of Alexandria, who died about 220 A.D. Clement derived much of his information from his tutor Pantaenus, one of the earliest Christian missionaries to visit India². Clement starts by telling us that the Brahmin sect take no wine and abstain from flesh. The latter was a doctrine which found much favour with Neo-platonists (as we see from Porphyry’s Περὶ ἀποχῆς τῶν ἐμψύχων). He goes on to add that they worship Pan and Herakles, —probably Brahmā, the “All-God,” and Śiva,— and abstain from women. But the most important of his statements are that the Brahmins despise death and set no value on life, because they believe in transmigration (παλιγγενεσία); and that the Σεμνοί (Śramaṇa or Buddhists) worship a kind of pyramid beneath which they imagine that the bones of a divinity of some kind lie buried³. This remarkable allusion to the Buddhist stūpa is the earliest reference in Western literature to a unique feature of Buddhism, and must have been derived from some informant intimately acquainted with the doctrines of Gautama. Clement distinguishes clearly between Buddhist and Brahmin,—Sarmanae and Brachmanae. Earlier writers like Megasthenes confuse them. Archelaus of Carrha (278 A.D.) and St Jerome (340 A.D.) both mention Buddha (Buddas) by name and narrate the tradition of his virgin birth¹. The Buddha story became gradually known in the West, until, by a coincidence hardly to be paralleled in literature, it was narrated, in the eighth century A.D. by John of Damascus as the life of a Christian saint. Under the guise of Saint Josaphat, Gautama the Bodhisattva found his way into the Christian Church, and was included in the Martyrology of Gregory XIII (1582)².