A History of Sanskrit Literature c19.35

c19.35

The influence of Indian philosophy on Christian Gnosticism in the second and third centuries seems at any rate undoubted. The Gnostic doctrine of the opposition between soul and matter, of the personal existence of intellect, will, and so forth, the identification of soul and light, are derived from the Sānkhya system. The division, peculiar to several Gnostics, of men into the three classes of *pneumatikoi*, *psychikoi*, and *hylikoi*, is also based on the Sānkhya doctrine of the three *guṇas*. Again, Bardesanes, a Gnostic of the Syrian school, who obtained information about India from Indian philosophers, assumed the existence of a subtle ethereal body which is identical with the *linga-çarīra* of the Sāṅkhya system. Finally, the many heavens of the Gnostics are evidently derived from the fantastic cosmogony of later Buddhism.