Intercourse between India and the Western World from the Earliest Times to the Fall of Rome c13.3

Language: English

c13.3.1

It has already been shewn that the intercourse between India and Greece, before the days of Alexander, was of an indirect nature. Indian goods reached the Mediterranean from Persian or Phoenician caravans; the Indian traders themselves never went further than Babylon or the mouth of the Red Sea. Greece had no direct communication with India. What she knew of India, she had learnt from Greeks in Persian employ, like Ktesias or Skylax. Of the great civilization of ancient India, its philosophy and religion, Greece knew—and cared—nothing. The Greeks were singularly indifferent to the literature or civilization of their contemporaries. They looked on them all as “barbarians,” and treated them with equal contempt. It is extraordinary how little they found out about even their near neighbours, the Persians. Hence we may dismiss at once the theory that the Pythagorean philosophy, for instance, owes anything to India. It is curious, however, to notice how many points of resemblance there are between the mystical philosophy of the Orphic and Pythagorean schools, and Indian beliefs¹. First and foremost, there is the doctrine of Metempsychosis (παλιγγενεσία). But this was a tenet neither of the earliest Greeks nor of the original Aryans of the Panjāb. Practically no traces of it are found in the Vedas, or in the poems of Homer. The Vedic hero, like the Homeric hero, goes to dwell in the Elysium of Yama, the proto-man, and returns no more to earth².

c13.3.2

The belief in re-incarnation appears first in India in its most primitive form in the Chāndogya Upanishad. In Greece, it is first traced to the Orphic schools, who acquired it, we may suppose, in Thrace. It seems probable, in a word, that both Greeks and Indians acquired the doctrine from the primitive peoples with whom they came in contact,—the Greeks from the Thracians, the Aryans from the prae-Aryan tribes of the Ganges valley. Once acquired, the doctrine naturally assumed the form it did, for it provides the most natural of solutions to the eternal questions of the destiny of the soul and the existence of evil. Thus we find in Plato (in the closing episode of the *Republic*, for instance), something which resembles very closely the doctrine of karma, or retribution, commonly held by all Hindu sects. Again, the Pythagorean "tabus" on wine, animal food, etc., remind the reader of Buddhism. But Pythagoras lived before Gautama, and the *ahiṃsā* doctrine of Buddhism, shared also by the Brahmins and Jains, was a later development. Gautama himself died of eating some tainted flesh, offered to him by a humble follower. Finally, we may ask why, if Pythagoras, Plato, or any other Greek philosopher before the days of Alexander, borrowed anything from India, we find no mention of the fact in contemporary Greek literature. There are stories about visits paid to Egypt by both Pythagoras and Plato, and there is nothing intrinsically improbable in this.

c13.3.3

But a journey to India, except under very unusual circumstances, was at that time almost a physical impossibility¹. And Plato never mentions Indian philosophy, or India at all, in all his writings. Herodotus says nothing of the Indian doctrine of transmigration, and in a single sentence, he casually remarks that "some Indians kill nothing that has life, but live on herbs¹." Egypt, not India, was the source, if any, from which Greece borrowed her early philosophy. Herodotus tells us distinctly that the Egyptians were the first to propound the theory of the transmigration of the soul, after death, through a cycle of other lives²; and in a well-known passage of the *Laws* Plato talks of the Greeks as children compared to the Egyptians in knowledge. In a word, there is not a single reference in Greek literature before 328 B.C. which gives us the slightest reason for supposing that the Greeks knew of the existence of Indian philosophy at all. The Indians, on the other hand, were equally ignorant of the literature and civilization of Greece, and equally indifferent to any system of thought outside India. If they ever heard of the *Yavanas* (Pāṇini mentions them once), it was in a doubtful and vague way, probably because an occasional Greek, like Skylax of Karyanda, in the service of the Persians, visited the Panjāb.

c13.3.4

It is therefore with surprise that we find no less an authority than Burnet³ writing that “ everything points to the conclusion that Indian philosophy came from Greece.” The resemblances, superficially very striking, are often, on thorough investigation, found to be far less complete than they appear to be at first sight. As for the theory of Metempsychosis, it has been found to exist among many early races. The Celts, for instance, believed in it, as Julius Caesar discovered¹. The legend said to be inscribed upon king Arthur’s tomb