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The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c41: Chapter 29. Greece and the Philosophy of India

The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c41

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Chapter 29. Greece and the Philosophy of India

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IT is not to be thought that the early philosophy of Greece exercised any influence on the philosophy of India. Apart from every other consideration, it is clear that the rise of philosophy in Greece was long subsequent to the beginnings of Indian philosophy in the hymns of the Rigveda, and from those hymns the history of that philosophy presents itself in the light of an ordered development. The same reason, which makes it inconceivable that the philosophy of the Upaniṣads should have been the product of external influences, such as the introduction of extraneous ideas from the warrior class, makes it inconceivable that the development of that philosophy should have been affected by influences from Greece.

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The only question, therefore, which can arise is whether the early schools of Greek philosophy were affected by the tenets of the schools of the Brahmans. This question, first handled with naïve enthusiasm by Sir William Jones, has been dealt with at length by Garbe,¹ who is quite prepared to derive early Greek philosophy in large measure from India, and the merit of his work on Indian philosophy renders it necessary to consider carefully the arguments which he has adduced. The possibility of such influence must be admitted, though its probability is a very different question. Still we cannot assert that there was any insuperable barrier between early India and early Greece: the proof of such intercourse is not large in quantity or quality, but the mere fact that the two countries were not separated by uncrossed deserts or seas is so far in favour of there having been exchange of ideas. Positive evidence is sometimes alleged in the shape of the quaint legend of the wooers of Agariste in Herodotos,² which is traced to a Buddhist Jātaka, and even for the famous passage of the *Antigone*,³ in which the heroine weighs the respective claims of brother and husband to consideration as regards the duty of self-sacrifice, an Indian original has been claimed. In neither instance is the case at all made out and the easy credulity with which the claims of the proof of the wandering of fables and folk-tales at an early date have been accepted⁴ is scarcely creditable to the historic acumen of the critics.

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¹ *Philosophy of Ancient India*, pp. 32–56; *Sâṁkhya-Philosophie*², pp. 114 ff. Cf. W. Jones, *Works* (1799), i. 360 f. ; von Eckstein, *Ind. Stud.* ii. 369–88.

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² vi. 130. For an uncritical account of the relationship, see Macan, *Herodotos, III–VI.* ii. 304–11; cf. Winternitz, *Gesch. d. ind. Lit.* ii. 102; Tawney, JP. xii. 131; Güntert, *Buddha*, pp. 50 ff.

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³ 904–20; Herodotos, iii. 119; Pischel, *Hermes*, xxviii. 465 ff. ; Nöldeke, xxix. 155 ff.; Tawney, IA. x. 370; Winternitz, ii. 111.

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⁴ *e. g.* by Macan, *l. c.* Cf. v. Schroeder, *Indiens Literatur und Kultur*, pp. 518 ff. ; Oldenberg, *Die Lit. des alten Indien*, pp. 110 ff.; Forke, *Indische Märchen*, pp. 26 ff. ; Winternitz, iii. 307 ff. ; Garbe, *Indien und das Christentum*, p. 24; Hertel, ZDMS. lxii. 113 ff., corrected by Jacobi, 358 ff.; Cosquin, *Les contes indiens et l'occident*.

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A more serious attempt to prove connexions of a literary and religious nature is made by A. Götze, who compares ¹ the doctrine of correspondence of macrocosm and microcosm as enunciated in the Bundahišn ² with the pseudo-Hippokratean treatise περὶ ἑβδομάδων. The latter work appears to have been known to Plato, and therefore goes back to the fourth century B. C., while W. H. Roscher has endeavoured to assign the short treatise to the seventh century and to regard it as the earliest work extant of Greek science and cosmology. The Bundahišn, of course, is late, and this particular portion cannot even for certain be attributed to the Sassanian recension. On the other hand we have in the Upaniṣads and even in the Brāhmaṇas ³ the idea of the parallelism of macrocosm and microcosm, so that the possibility that oriental influence lies at the basis of the Greek composition cannot be excluded. It may be conjectured also that oriental influence is to be seen in the doctrine of the pseudo-Hippokratean treatise περὶ φυσῶν, where the breath is a ground of illness, and even in the doctrine of the humours, for Pāṇini already knows in the fourth century B. C. of wind, bile, and phlegm as affecting health.⁴ But, even if we grant that there was influence in these matters, the date is late; the doctrines suggested by Persia were, it is believed, introduced into Greece not before 480 B. C. by the Knidian school of medicine. We know in fact of three Greek physicians at the Persian court, Demokedes under Dareios I, Ktesias under Artaxerxes II, and Apollonides, whom Ktesias mentions. It must, however, be borne in mind that we have no evidence that the doctrines alleged to have influenced Greece were actually known in Persia in the fifth century B. C., and that a case can quite fairly be made out for Greek independence in these regards.

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¹ ZII. ii (1923), 60 ff.

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² c. xxviii.

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³ CU. ii. 19; ÇB. x. 1. 3. 34.

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⁴ B. Liebich, *Zur Einführung in die ind. einheimische Sprachwissenschaft*, iv. 22.

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Still less can we deduce Indian influence on Greece from the famous Orphic hymn,⁵ which celebrates the greatness of Zeus, and was in some form or other known to Plato,⁶ Aischylos,⁷ and Xenophanes.⁸ The parallelism which has been seen between the cosmic doctrine of this hymn and that of the Puruṣasūkta ⁹ is interesting, but it is not claimed ¹⁰ that it is due to borrowing from India. Rather it is suggested that the Orphic movement owed much to Iranian religious conceptions of the people, which play little part in the reformed religion of Zoroaster. Nor need we doubt Iranian influence on this comparatively late movement. But, so far as ascertained facts go, the evidence of any intellectual ¹¹ connexion of a serious character between Greece and India in the period before the extension of the empire of Persia to the north-west of India is still to seek.

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⁵ Kern, fragm. 168.

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⁶ *Laws*, iv. 715 E.

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⁷ Frag. 70 (ed. Nauck).

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⁸ Frag. 24 (ed. Diels).

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⁹ RV. x. 90.

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¹⁰ See Götze, *op. cit.*, pp. 167 ff.

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¹¹ To cite the presence of Greek gems of the seventh century B.C. in the Punjab (Furtwängler in *Sâmkhya-Philosophie*², p. 119) as proof of intellectual influence of India on Greece is decidedly odd.

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The actual proof of influence must, therefore, be derived from internal evidence, the comparison of the two systems. Garbe lays stress on the fact that Xenophanes teaches that the universe is one (εἷς θεὸς ἔν τε θεοῖσι καὶ ἀνθρώποισι μέγιστος), eternal and without change, and that Parmenides writes in verse, and holds that reality is due alone to this universal being, neither created nor to be destroyed, and omnipresent, that everything which is subject to change is unreal, and that thinking and being are identical.¹ He admits that the identity of thinking and being, and the insistence on the unreality of the universe, can be proved as a definite doctrine in India only from texts later than Parmenides; but he insists that the doctrines are implicit in the Upaniṣads, and that they, therefore, may justly be deemed to have been the sources of the Eleatic philosophy. It might be added that the two philosophies are alike in the fact that they both realize that the nature of the absolute must be deemed in some way to be intellectual, however little either is able to make the nature of that intellectual character intelligible.

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¹ τωὐτὸν δ' ἐστὶ νοεῖν τε καὶ οὕνεκέν ἐστι νόημα. Cf. also Xenophanes: οὖλος ὁρᾷ, οὖλος δὲ νοεῖ, οὖλος δέ τ' ἀκούει.

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When these resemblances are pointed out, however, all that can be said for the theory is said: there is no ground to assume borrowing: the clearness of the position of Parmenides regarding the nature of the one is much more pronounced than the view of the Upaniṣads, and the identification of thought and the object is carried beyond the views of the Upaniṣads, while by his view of truth and opinion as distinct Parmenides anticipates Indian thought. It is, therefore, far more probable that the Greek and the Indian views were of independent origin: the Greek bears already the mark of definiteness which is only evolved centuries later in the Indian thought, and it is also aided by its freedom from the mythological connexions, which weigh so heavily on the thought of the Upaniṣads. The fact that the Brahman is identified with thought is by no means the same thing as the idea that thought and its object are identical, a doctrine of Parmenides² which duly modified is brought to its most complete form in the theory of Aristotle.³ Nor is it of any value to cite the fact that Thales's view of the origin in water of everything is much later than the Vedic conception of the waters as the primeval form of existence. The idea is not only Babylonian but is a singularly simple one, as found in primitive religion, and must have been natural to primitive man: it is even possible to trace in theory the mode in which he arrived at this result.

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Similarly it is idle to compare the primitive matter (ἄπειρον) of Anaximander, which is indefinite and into which things pass again as they have emerged from it, new worlds arising and passing away, with the matter of the Sāṁkhya school: apart from the fact that the nature of the Sāṁkhya is not shown to be as old a conception as Anaximander, and that it is essentially possessed of three constituents, and even rectifying the theory by placing in the position of Prakṛti the vague conception of the Brāhmaṇas as to the primitive nature of the universe, the parallelism is far too weak to be of any value as proof.

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In the case of Herakleitos the argument is even more unsatisfactory: the doctrine of the constant flux of things (πάντα ῥεῖ) is certainly comparable with the movement of nature in the Sāṅkhya system and to some degree in Buddhism, and his belief in the innumerable annihilations and re-creations of the universe may be compared with the view of the Sāṁkhya of the destruction and re-creation of the world.¹ But, apart from the fact that the comparison of the doctrine of constant movement with the Sāṁkhya system of the development of Prakṛti is far from important, in view of the complete distinction between the two ideas of development, it must be pointed out once more that the Sāṁkhya system is not proved to be, and most probably was not by any means, as early as the system of Herakleitos, and the doctrine of the periodic destruction of the universe, which is probably caused in India by the doctrine of transmigration, is not recorded in one of the older Upaniṣads, and is clearly a late development; Garbe himself rejects the theory that it is known to the Atharvaveda.² It is hardly necessary to add that it is quite out of the question to regard Empedokles as borrowing from India his view that nothing can arise from nothing: the same view is undoubtedly held by the Sāṁkhya, but is as emphatically not normally held by the Upaniṣads.

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Nor is it of any importance that the character of that teacher as a prophet, a magician, a believer in purification, and a mystic is comparable with certain types of Indian sage. The view that the world is incapable of producing similar figures under similar or even different circumstances is one which must be proved first before mere similarities prove anything, and Empedokles’ claim to be a god, degraded to earth, is un-Indian, being derived from the Orphic doctrine of man’s defilement. The fact that a dislike to flesh as food sprung up among the believers in transmigration like Empedokles is perfectly true:³ it is, however, striking that in India itself the belief was of more tardy appearance as at all general than the date of Empedokles,⁴ and was not so far as we can see caused by the doctrine of transmigration. The great sage, Yājñavalkya, with whose name the doctrines of the Upaniṣads are mainly connected, was a beef-eater with decided views as to the condition in which he ate it. It is also argued that the position of the gods in the view of Demokritos, who holds with Empedokles that nothing arises from nothing, is precisely the position of the gods in Indian thought, as seen in the Upaniṣads, where they cease to be anything more considerable than a number of superior beings, not very essentially different from men. But this argument is clearly of no weight.

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² ver. 94; cf. Windelband, *Hist. of Phil.*, pp. 57 ff., where the implications of the doctrine are made clear.

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³ *de An.* i. 3. 13; cf. also Wallace, *Aristotle's Psych.*, pp. c ff.

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¹ L. Berndl (*Über das Sâmkhya*, p. 14) argues strongly that this element in the Sāṁkhya is late. In his novel, but untenable, theory of the Sāṁkhya, he sees parallelism with Anaxagoras, but *not* influence on either side.

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² *Sâṁkhya-Philosophie*², p. 286; AV. x. 8. 39 f.

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³ Speyer (*Indische Theosophie*, p. 299) lays stress on this point.

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⁴ For many exceptions in Buddhism, cf. Hopkins, JAOS. xxvii. 455-64; cf. Macdonell and Keith, *Vedic Index*, ii. 145-7.

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Though Garbe is in favour of the view that these comparisons are proofs of borrowing, he confines his assurance of dependence to the case of Pythagoras, which has been accepted by von Schroeder¹ and Hopkins² with others³ as a clear case of the influence of Greek philosophy on Indian speculation. The question cannot be ignored nor easily disposed of. The theory of Pythagoras clearly included the belief in transmigration, the idea that a series of births serves to purify the souls, and the view that the contemplative life is the highest form of existence and that man by living it most effectively strives to rid himself of the fetters of nature. It is, therefore, argued that he must have borrowed his conception from India, as there is no earlier trace of metempsychosis in Greece, and the principle must therefore have come from an external source. Further arguments are based on detailed coincidences, which must at once be admitted to be of great value in such a question, if only they could be established. The prohibition to eat beans, the rule of ceremonial purity regarding the sun (πρὸς ἥλιον τετραμμένον μὴ ὀμιχεῖν), the vow of silence like that taken by an Indian Muni, the Pythagorean theorem, the irrational root 2, the character of the religious philosophical brotherhood treated as similar to the Indian philosophical schools, and the mystic character of the doctrine are all regarded by Hopkins as valid evidence of the connexion. Other arguments have also been adduced by von Schroeder, but have been abandoned by his own supporters: thus the theory that the Pythagorean numbers are borrowed from the Sāṁkhya system is given up even by Garbe, in face of the fact that in that system number plays no part save in so far that three Guṇas and twenty-five principles are enumerated, and the Pythagorean conception of number is something totally different.⁴ The further argument adduced by Garbe that the five elements are borrowed by Pythagoras from India is open to the grave objection that the five elements are not certainly known in India early enough for this, but to the still more grave objection that the system of five elements cannot be traced back to Pythagoras himself, and further that the five by no means precisely correspond with the five of India in the concepts attached to them; the efforts¹ to show that the word ὁλκάς as used by Philolaos of the ether is the imperfect transcript of the Ākāça of the Indian tradition must be deemed to be methodologically completely mistaken.

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¹ *Pythagoras und die Inder* (1884); *Indiens Lit. und Kultur*, pp. 717 ff. Cf. Colebrooke, *Essays*², i. 436 ff.

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² *Rel. of India*, pp. 559, 560.

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³ Macdonell, *Sanskrit Literature*, p. 422; Gomperz, *Greek Thinkers*, i. 127, 146; Speyer, *op. cit.*, pp. 299 ff. C. Rhys Davids (*Buddhist Psychology*, p. 143) actually suggests that the doctrine that like is known by like in Hellenic philosophy (Aristotle, *de An.* i. 2. 5; Plotinus, *Enn.* i. 6. 9) may be due to Eastern sources, although a conscious statement of the doctrine appears first in Buddhaghoṣa in the fifth century A.D., and asserts that Empedokles, Plato, and Plotinus were all influenced by Eastern thought. Classical scholars naturally ignore such bare assertions, or repeat them uncritically.

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⁴ So also Dahlmann, *Die Sāṁkhya-Philosophie*, pp. 256, 257. Berndl (*op. cit.*, p. 4) insists on MBh. xii. 11409 as proving that number was essential for the early Sāṁkhya. One may justly dismiss as ludicrous Garbe’s suggestion that Pythagoras invented his system as a result of misunderstanding information given to him as to the Sāṁkhya.

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¹ Von Schroeder, *op. cit.*, p. 65, n. 2; Garbe, *VOJ.* xiii. 303 ff. Cf. Böhtlingk, *VOJ.* xiv. 85; *BSGW.* 1900, p. 150; Gundermann, *RM.* 1904, pp. 145 ff.; Winternitz, *Gesch. d. ind. Lit.* iii. 478.

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The detailed evidence of the arguments adduced is quite insufficient to prove the propositions contended for.² The origin of transmigration in Greece is probably to be traced to Thrace, and it seems to have been spread by the Orphics, whose views in part at least appear to have been brought forward in a rational form by Pythagoras: it cannot be traced, as so often urged, to the personal activity of Pythagoras: it was known by Empedokles and by Pherekydes, and was recognized by Pindar:³ it is most probable that in Thrace it developed itself in connexion with the belief in the temporary embodiment of the divinity in animal form revealed in the Dionysiac rites: the Mainads, the Bakchai, with their close communion with nature, their adoption of animal garb, their tearing of the animal who represented the god, their efforts to produce states of ecstasy, portrayed for us by the master hand of Euripides, suggest the source from which the belief could grow.⁴ The story of the Thracian Zamolxis is clear proof of the belief as existing in Thrace.⁵ There was also no such spirit in Greek religion, as would prevent the ready acceptance of the view. On the contrary, it may be noted that the idea of the transfer of one soul into another body was familiar from such tales as that of Kirke and the comrades of Odysseus, and the daimons of Hesiod suggest a mode of transition. The fact that transmigration appears also among the Druids, and has independently grown up with other peoples is of importance.⁶ The case of Egypt where Herodotos⁷ held that transmigration prevailed is difficult: the view may have been held by a sect there, though its existence is not yet established, but this possibility does not appear to be of fundamental importance. The doctrine much more probably originated in Thrace than at any other point in the Greek area, and its development beyond crude outlines was the work of the Greek religious and philosophical genius, as will be shown below.

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² Keith, *JRAS.* 1909, pp. 569 ff., where full details will be found. Oldenberg (*Die Kultur der Gegenwart*², I. v. 52) does not accept the theory, nor Weber, *Ind. Stud.* xviii. 463 ff.; *SBA.* 1890, pp. 923 ff.

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³ In Greece, it should be noted, transmigration is optimistic, not a source of pessimism; Oltramare, *L'histoire des idées théosophiques*, i. 102 ff. For the early date of the Orphic views, see Diels, *Archiv für Gesch. der Phil.* ii. 91 ff.

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⁴ Burnet, *Early Greek Philosophy*², pp. 86 ff.

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⁵ Herodotos, iv. 94, 95.

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⁶ Among the Druids, Caesar, vi. 14. 5; cf. Dieterich, *Nekyia*, pp. 90 ff.; *Archiv f. Religionswissenschaft*, viii. 29 ff.; MacCulloch, *Rel. of Anc. Celts*, pp. 334 ff., 348 ff. The interpretation of Caesar, which sees in the belief no real transmigration, but the adoption of a new body by the soul in the land of happiness, is less probable. For Germany cf. Appian, *Hist.* i. 4. 3; Helm, *Altgerm. Rel.* i. 254 f.

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⁷ ii. 123; cf. Bertholet, *Seelenwanderung* (Halle a. S., 1904). Rhys Davids (*Hibbert Lectures 1881*⁴, p. 75) traces Pythagoras' views to this source. Cf. J. H. Breasted, *Dev. of Rel. in Egypt*, p. 277, with Hopkins, *Origin of Rel.*, p. 234; Jevons, *Hist. of Rel.*, p. 317.

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The effort to show that the Pythagorean theorem and the problem of the square root of the number two are older in India than in Pythagoras, is based on a mistake: the error was certainly in great measure favoured by Cantor, who declared that the Indian versions of these matters must be based on those of Greece, and it was, therefore, easy for von Schroeder to argue that the relation must be the other way, that the Indian versions occurred in works which were much older than the versions recorded in Greece. The fact is that the Çulba Sūtras which contain the earliest mentions of these matters are of uncertain date: they are nominally parts of the ritual Sūtras, in the sense that they bear the name of the school, and it is urged that further they are so essentially connected with the structure of the sacred altars that they must be held to be early. The arguments for their age cannot be taken as at all conclusive:¹ the Sūtras of the schools were works without internal connexion of such a kind as to render it in the slightest degree difficult to interpolate, and that the Çulba Sūtras may not have been added long after the Çrauta Sūtras were composed it would be absurd to contend. The existing Sūtras have no appearance of great antiquity in any way: they have new technical terms, but little or none of the irregularities of construction and the archaic phraseology which justify us in placing some of the Çrauta Sūtras about the fourth century b. c., and even then of course the date assigned to them would be too late to prove borrowing by Pythagoras. We may legitimately assume that they were composed at the close of the Sūtra period, when interest in their subject-matter had developed. What is more important, and what, it may be added, tells against borrowing by India in this regard from Greece, is that examination of the Sūtras² has shown that complete generality of the theorem of Pythagoras was never attained and was not even striven after. The practical form of the problem was known to the Egyptians and Babylonians, long before it was known to the Sūtras.³ The same remark applies to the alleged knowledge of the theorem of the irrational—the mere approximate calculation of the root of two, which is all the Sūtras attained, is far from being equivalent to the discovery of the solution of an irrational. The real period when these questions came to be discussed in India was doubtless at a date considerably later than Pythagoras—not before the third century B.C. in all likelihood, when the ingenuity of the Brahmans began to deal with the questions of the signification of the exact details of the measurements of the sacrificial ground. The Brāhmaṇas themselves are guiltless of any knowledge of the discussions of numbers, and this is proof positive that the speculations found in the Çulba Sūtras are of later origin.

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¹ See Keith, JRAS. 1910, pp. 518–20, a passage which Garbe has unfortunately forgotten in his polemic (*Sāṃkhya-Philosophie*², p. 126), though informed of it in 1910. His second argument, that Pischel has completely proved the dependence of Buddhism on the Sāṃkhya, is without serious value for any one who prefers argument to assertion; cf. above, Chap. 28, § 7.

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² Kaye, JRAS. 1910, pp. 752 ff. His views confirm those expressed by me in 1909. See also his *Indian Mathematics* (Calcutta, 1915), pp. 3 ff. Cf. also Vogt, *Bibl. Math.* 1906, pp. 6 ff., and the judgement of Oldenberg, GN. 1917, p. 253, n. 1; *Weltanschauung der Brāhmaṇatexte*, p. 233. See also T. Heath, *Hist. of Greek Mathematics* (1921).

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³ Garbe’s assertion that the theorem occurs in the TS. is due to his confusing empirical knowledge with theoretical, an error made by Bürk.

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The other resemblances in detail are negligible: the prohibition of the eating of beans, and the rule regarding the respect due to the sun, are examples of taboos of a common sort which are ethnic, and are not subjects of borrowing: the latter being found in Hesiod,¹ it is hardly intelligible how it should have been considered by Hopkins to be valid as an argument for Indian borrowing.² The vow of silence taken by the Muni is, on the one hand, not a common idea in the Upaniṣads, and it cannot be shown to be as early there as the date of Pythagoras: on the other hand, silence as an observance for all sorts of religious and magic purposes is ethnic.³ The character of the Pythagorean brotherhood bears no real similarity to the Indian, save such as is inherent in every case where any men agree together in any belief. The evidence of early Greece points to the existence of such societies for two centuries before Pythagoras, and his own society seems to have developed a political activity of a truly Greek kind:⁴ in the India of the Upaniṣads we have nothing recorded precisely similar to these societies: we have instead the phenomena of individual teachers with pupils wandering here and there in disputations, of a closed or mystic brotherhood not one trace. Nor is it reasonable to lay any stress on the comparison of the speculations of the Brāhmaṇas as being fantastic with those of Pythagoras on the theory of number; that every fantastic system is derived from another is an absurd proposition, and the kinds of fantasy are quite different.

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¹ *Works and Days*, 727; cf. Pliny, *Nat. Hist.* xxviii. 6; AV. xiii. 1. 56.

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² Hopkins would doubtless reject Brunnhofer's view that Hesiod's is not genuine Greek belief. Von Schroeder (VOJ. xv. 187–212) himself explains the taboo against beans as Aryan and due to their use in offerings to the dead.

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³ Cf. Deussen, *Phil. of Up.*, p. 11. For silence as a sign of the highest wisdom, cf. BAU. iii. 5. 1; CU. viii. 5. 2; Kaṭhaçruti Up. 3.

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⁴ Cf. A. Delatte, *Essai sur la politique pythagoricienne* (1922).

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Moreover it is right to note that the spirit of Pythagoras is different in essentials from the spirit of the Upaniṣads. Plato in the *Phaidon*⁵ gives as older than Philolaos, and perhaps as already held by Pythagoras, the view that the soul of man is a stranger in the world, that the body is the tomb of the soul, and that yet we may not seek to escape from it, for we are the chattels of God, and he is our herdsman, and we may not leave it without his command. This religious attitude is clearly, as will have been seen from the account of the Upaniṣads, wholly at variance with the thought of those texts. In the second place, there is a real point of difference between the form of the belief in transmigration of Pythagoras and that of the Upaniṣads: it is expressly and sarcastically recorded of Pythagoras that he recognized in the howling of a dog the voice of a friend, and that he claimed to remember his former births.¹ These characteristics are not to be found in the doctrine of the older Upaniṣads: the doctrine of the recollection of former births is only recorded later,² and the recognition of the voice of a friend is a peculiarity of the Greek imagination, displaying a humour which in India the doctrine of transmigration does not excite in the times of the Upaniṣads. Further the Indian doctrine of knowledge resulting in emancipation is not to be found in Pythagoras, who was a believer in the essential character of purification, probably in origin a physical purification,³ but soon transformed into one of moral character.

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⁵ 62 B; cf. *Gorg.* 493 A; *Kratyl.* 400 B; Zeller, *Presocratic Phil.*, i. 481 ff.

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¹ Xenophanes *ap.* Diog. Laert. viii. 36.

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² The view that this is meant in BAU. i. 4. 10; AU. ii. 4 (Deussen, *Phil. of Up.*, pp. 317, 318), is clearly speculative; it is not stated in either text and is a bad guess of the commentators who read their own views into the Upaniṣads wholesale, which unfortunately has misled Deussen. According to Deussen in the former passage Vāmadeva is stated to have recognized his identity with the Brahman, ‘and as a proof of his knowledge of Brahman alleged his acquaintance with his former births as Manu and Sūrya’. But the Upaniṣad has nothing whatever as to former births, and the argument is quite different. By knowledge of the Brahman one becomes the Brahman, as it did itself, and as may the gods and seers; in substantiation of this doctrine is cited the fact that Vāmadeva became (not ‘once was’) Manu and Sūrya by recognizing his identity with them (a complete misunderstanding, of course, of the hymn which is not spoken by Vāmadeva: cf., last, Charpentier, *Die Suparṇasage*, pp. 135 ff.). In AU., on the other hand, the citation is merely to establish the fact that Vāmadeva knew the three forms of birth; not a word is said of his having passed through any series of births at all.

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³ Cf. Farnell, *Evolution of Religion*, pp. 88 ff. The eschatology of Pindar, as we gather it from the second Olympian and the Threnoi, is vitally different from that of the Upaniṣads. On death the souls are judged; the good then dwell in bliss with Pluto and Persephone; the evil must undergo anguish to punish and purify them. Then they are sent back again to earth, and on death are judged once more. Those who in three different stages of life live uprightly, and abstain from evil, are permitted eternal life in the Tower of Kronos (cf. Christ, *Pindar*, pp. 21 f.).

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It is in fact hopeless to seek any real derivation of Greek philosophy from India: the alleged travels of Pythagoras and others to India are foolish and late inventions, of no real value whatever. The efforts made, and often most uncritically accepted, to find the influence of Pythagorean views derived from India on Plato is hopeless: the fact that Plato believes in the bondage of the soul in matter and in its immortality and transmigration is made the ground for the belief that he is indebted to the Sāṁkhya philosophy by Barthélemy St. Hilaire,⁴ a view which would be comic if it were not endorsed by the authority of Hopkins. The broad fact which should be recognized is that, the nature of the problem of existence being the same everywhere, and the mind of man not being essentially different in the India of the Upaniṣads and the Greece of the Pythagoreans and Plato, the results of the philosophy tend to resemble each other in diverse points.¹ But in philosophy it is not the results which matter: the solution of the riddle of the universe is, we may feel assured, reserved for no mortal, and the comparative value of two philosophies, even when the results in the mere sphere of theory as opposed to practical philosophy are similar, depends in the main on the methods adopted. In this respect the discrepancy between the Upaniṣads and Plato is sufficient to make us realize from what different foundations the structures of the two edifices of thought were raised.

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⁴ *Premier mémoire sur le Sāṅkhya*, pp. 512, 513, 521, 522. Röer’s comparison of the chariot metaphor in the Kaṭha Upaniṣad and the *Phaidros* (p. 246) is no proof of borrowing.

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¹ Cf. E. Leumann, *Buddha und Mahāvīra*, pp. 55–70.

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One further point of suggested contact between Indian and Greek thought should be noted, as it has the support of the authority of Garbe.² Weber³ suggested that there might possibly be some degree of dependence on India through Alexandria of the philosophy of Neo-Platonism in its doctrine of the Logos, as compared with the position of Vāc, speech, in the Brāhmaṇas. In that literature, as we have seen, Vāc now and then appears as the instrument by which the creator god carries out the process of the creation of the universe. Moreover, in a few passages there is a suggestion that Vāc is even higher than her normal lord, Prajāpati: thus at the Vājapeya offering we learn that some offered to her the last of the seventeen oblations in the hope to win her,⁴ and she is credited with the creation of the whole universe and identified with Viçvakarman.⁵ The conception of speech as the final power in the universe, which thus grows up naturally in the Brāhmaṇas, is contrasted by Weber with the sudden and unexpected appearance of the Logos in Greek philosophy. Garbe, accepting this view, presses it further: the Logos in Greek philosophy came to Neo-Platonism through Philo, and he borrowed it from the Stoics,⁶ who in their turn inherited it from Herakleitos whose dependence on India for his philosophy is thus triumphantly proved.⁷ The whole theory is clearly without any solid foundation of truth: the essence of the view that the sporadic doctrine of the importance of Vāc should have given rise to the very definite and clear conception of the Logos⁸ is in itself wholly incredible, seeing that at the most it is reasonable to assume that a view which was widely spread and normal in the philosophy of India might be conveyed by chance to Greece: to assume this of an idea which plays comparatively speaking no part in the Brāhmaṇas and which in the Upaniṣads, i. e. in the early philosophy of India, has no part at all, is contrary to all plausibility.¹

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² *Philosophy of Ancient India*, pp. 55 ff.

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³ *Ind. Stud.* ix. 473–80.

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⁴ ÇB. v. 1. 3. 11, which disapproves.

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⁵ ÇB. viii. 1. 2. 9; cf. xi. 1. 6. 8.

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⁶ Dahlmann (*Die Sāṁkhya-Philosophie*, pp. 255–81) suggests that the Stoic doctrine of logic, physics, and ethics owes much to India, but his parallelisms—often just and forcible—prove nothing save the similarity of the mind of man.

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⁷ If Hertel’s doctrine of Brahman as fire were accepted (see above, Chap. 27, § 2) the case for borrowing would be far stronger. But, as we have seen, this is most implausible.

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⁸ Burnet, *Greek Philosophy*, Part I, pp. 57–63; cf. Mills, *JRAS.* 1902, pp. 897 ff.; Aall, *Die Lehre vom Logos*. S. Langdon (*JRAS.* 1918, pp. 443 ff.) argues for a Babylonian origin of the Logos as cosmic, connected with the primeval waters, suggesting that Thales derived his doctrine of water as the origin of things from Babylonian thought.

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¹ Cf. Oldenberg, *Weltanschauung der Brāhmaṇatexte*, p. 81; Hopkins, *Rel. of India*, p. 558. For the doctrine in the Hermetic writings in Egypt see Flinders Petrie, *Trans. Third Internat. Congress of Rel.* i. 196 ff.

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The true relation between Greek and Indian philosophy can be seen clearly from the parallel which, quite legitimately, has been drawn² between the view of Empedokles and of Pakudha Kaccāyana, whose opinions are recorded for us by Buddhist texts. The date of the views of the latter teacher is such that it is absurd to assume that his opinions, which were obviously never widely held, could have reached Greece and influenced Empedokles. Kaccāyana asserted the existence of seven distinct elements whose interaction gave rise to the world of experience, namely earth, air, fire, water, pleasure and pain as sources of attraction and repulsion, and the soul, Jīva. The first six of these factors clearly correspond closely with the four elements of Empedokles, to which he added love and strife as sources of motion. Both agree in regarding their elements as unchanging, both recognize pores in organized bodies,³ both deny the existence of a void. Yet the fact that Pakudha Kaccāyana accepted the existence of soul reminds us that he derives from a philosophic tradition to which the conception of souls was familiar, while Empedokles' opinions are based on a naturalistic philosophy, although, like Kaccāyana, he believes in the doctrine of transmigration.

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² Barua, *Prebuddh. Ind. Phil.*, pp. 281 ff.; DN. i. 48; MN. i. 198, 250; ii. 2, &c.

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³ Aristotle, *de Gen. et Corr.* i. 8.

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When in Anaxagoras we find Nous introduced as an element, comparison with the Sāṁkhya is far from convincing, for nor merely is Nous one, not many, but it clearly bore no resemblance in nature or function to the Puruṣa of the Sāṁkhya.

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Parallelism again is the cause of most of the similarities which have often been traced between Indian thought and post-Aristotelian philosophy. Garbe has, very wisely, discounted much of the borrowing assumed by the pioneer researches of Lassen,⁴ but his own efforts to trace borrowings from the Sāṁkhya in the case of Plotinus are far from happy. The doctrine that the soul is in reality free from sorrow, which, on the contrary is essentially involved in the world of matter, is the development of a Platonic conception, and farther back is Orphic in origin. The conception of the soul as light is Aristotelian, and, as it is an essential doctrine of the Upaniṣads, derivation from the Sāṁkhya in any event would be wholly unnecessary. The metaphor of the mirror applied to the explanation of consciousness of knowledge is traced by Garbe to the Sāṁkhya, though we have not a scrap of proof that the school knew the doctrine for centuries after his date, since the Kārikā is absolutely silent regarding it. The fact that the system of Plotinus is directed to freeing man from misery follows from his own doctrine, nor in any case could it be made specially Sāṁkhyan in derivation, and the same observation applies to the view of Plotinus that even in sleep happiness is possible since the soul does not sleep. His reduction¹ of all souls to one (εἰ πᾶσαι αἱ ψυχαὶ μία) is, of course, opposed to the Sāṁkhya, and can be explained perfectly well without the introduction of derivation from the Vedānta. His belief in the turning away of the mind from things of the sense and the achievement of a condition of union with the divine in ecstasy is parallel with the Pratibhā, intuitive knowledge,² of the Yoga doctrine, but it also follows inevitably from the foundations of his philosophy.

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⁴ *Ind. Alt.* iii. 379 ff., 384 ff. (Gnostics), 417 ff. (Plotinus), 430 ff. (Porphyry), 438 (Abammon).

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¹ *Enn.* iv. 9; Deussen, *Allgem. Gesch. der Phil.* II. i. 497; Inge, i. 205 ff.; ii. 82 ff.

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² *Yoga Sūtra*, iii. 33.

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It is remarkable also that, though in the case of Porphyry (\textsc{a. d.} 232–304) we know that he used Bardesanes and actually reproduces remarks of his regarding the Brahmans, we find nothing conclusive of borrowing from the Sāṁkhya. The distinction which he makes between spirit and matter is merely in keeping with the views of Plotinus; equally so are the doctrines of the superiority of spirit to matter, of the omnipresence of the soul when freed from matter, and of the fact that the world has no beginning. His objection to sacrifice and the slaying of animals might be traced with Lassen to Buddhism with far greater likelihood than to the Sāṁkhya, but it has historical antecedents in Greece. Abammon's doctrine of the remarkable magic powers possessed by persons in ecstasy agrees perfectly with Buddhist views as well as those of the Brahmans, but we cannot forget the delusions attributed by Euripides to the Bakchai and in special to Pentheus. We may see an echo of the Sāṁkhya Guṇas in the Gnostic divisions of men as πνευματικοί, ψυχικοί, and ὑλικοί, and in the according of personal existence to such mental states as the intellect, will, &c., in the manner in which existence is assigned to Buddhi, Ahaṁkāra, Manas, &c. But the case for real borrowing is far from certain; in the later case Iranian influence is probably at work; in other instances, as in the system of Basilides, Buddhist influence is clear.³

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³ Kennedy, JRAS. 1902, pp. 376 ff. See also T. Whittaker, *The Neo-Platonists* (1918); Reitzenstein, *Die hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen* (1910); *Das iranische Erlösungsmysterium* (1921); Keith, JHS. xli. 280 f.

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On the other hand the efforts which have been made by Satis Chandra Vidyabhusana⁴ to establish the gradual reception in India of Greek logic, while ingenious and interesting, are equally without assured ground. It is, indeed, far more probable, if borrowing really took place, that India obtained the impulse to logical investigation from Greece in a general way and proceeded *more suo* to develop her doctrines without detailed intervention of Greek ideas. At least this would suit the history of Indian logic far more satisfactorily than the suggestions of Vidyabhusana, whose readiness to recognize Greek influence is, however, admirable testimony to the scientific spirit in which his valuable researches were conducted. Nor in any case is there any doubt that he is perfectly in the right in distinguishing, as against the contentions of Barua and others, the use of syllogism from the theoretical exposition. A similar error, as has been seen, has led Bürk and Garbe to hold that at the time of the Taittirīya Saṁhitā the Pythagorean problem was known, when in truth all that is recorded is the correct measurement of the sides of a right-angled triangle.

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⁴ *History of Indian Logic*, pp. 497 ff.

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We have in fact to admit that the human spirit, in virtue of its character, is able to produce in different parts of the world systems which agree in large measure, without borrowing by one side from the other. The stress laid in the cave metaphor in the *Republic* by Plato, as by Parmenides, on the relative unreality of the world of sense and experience bears a certain similarity to the conception of the Brahman as alone real, but Plato was the inheritor of the Sophists and Sokrates, and as a result his philosophy is something vitally distinct from any known to India. The metaphor of the chariot and its steeds in the *Phaidros* has, as we have seen, an interesting parallel in the Kaṭha, but the details of the two are perfectly distinct, for Plato uses the conception to illustrate the struggle between the rational and the irrational elements in the soul, and his distinction of θυμός and ἐπιθυμία has no real parallel in the Upaniṣads. In the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad¹ we hear of procreation as the result of the desire for reunion of the two halves of the primitive being, divided by Prajāpati into man and woman. The brilliant myth in the *Symposion* of Plato has been compared by Deussen,² who argues that the view departs from truth merely in that it places in the past what lies in the future, for the being that brings together man and woman is the child that is to be born. The two passages must certainly be independent, and afford an excellent instance of what parallelisms can be adduced.

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¹ i. 4.

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² *Phil. of Up.*, p. 293. His comparison of Maitr. vi. 15 as to the beginning of time with *Tim.* 37 D seems decidedly far-fetched (*op. cit.*, p. 153).

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Yet another instance is that of the five elements. As Deussen³ points out there are characteristic differences between the two lists which show a divergence of origin; the Greeks place fire between ether and air, the Indians air—which is really for them wind, Vāyu—between ether and fire. Moreover there is a perfectly simple natural fact to which the series corresponds, the division of states of matter into the solid, the fluid, the fiery or gaseous, the elastic, and the imponderable, which could not fail to win early attention. In point of fact we can trace in Greek philosophy the gradual emergence of the doctrine of the five elements in a perfectly characteristic manner. Thales claimed water as the primary source of reality, Anaximenes air, Herakleitos fire, Parmenides, in the part of his work dealing with opinion as opposed to true knowledge, admitted the hot and the cold, fire and earth, and Empedokles, accepting four, set fire off against the other three, and, in a wholly un-Indian manner, experimentally proved air to be different from space. The fifth element was added, whether under the title ‘ether’ or not, by the school of Pythagoras, not himself, and is derived from a conception of a πνεῦμα surrounding the world, which is also regarded as space.⁴

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³ *Op. cit.*, p. 189.

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⁴ See Keith, JRAS. 1909, pp. 595 f. with references: Appendix H.

A. The Age of the Avesta and the Rigveda

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An effort definitely to establish the date of the reform of Iranian religion by Zoroaster has been made by J. Hertel,¹ who seeks to trace the activity of the prophet from 559–522 B.C., a result of much importance in view of the probability that no very great interval of time can intervene between the Rigveda and the Gāthās of the Avesta.

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¹ *Die Zeit Zoroasters* (1924).

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Stress is naturally laid by Hertel on the fact that the religion of the Persians as described by Herodotos contains nothing specifically Zoroastrian, while it accepts much that Zoroaster rejected, especially the direct veneration of nature gods, and the animal sacrifice; moreover Herodotos records the drunkenness of the Persians, which may be connected with the Haoma offering, the fear of defiling fire or water, and the practice of the Magoi of permitting the bodies of the dead to be torn by birds or beasts, matters which are not recognized in the Gāthās. Hence it may be concluded that Zoroaster's activity fell at no great date before the reign of Xerxes I. Nor can we form any reasoned judgement to the contrary on the strength of the view of Xanthos of Lydia, a contemporary of Artaxerxes I (465–424 B.C.), who places Zoroaster 6,000 years² before the expedition of Xerxes, or the slightly variant account of Aristotle which makes him 6,000 years before the death of Plato.³

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² There is a variant 600; Moulton, *Early Zoroastrianism*, p. 412 (a work unknown to Hertel). It is preferred by Rapp, *ZDMG.* xix. 25; Maspero, *Passing of the Empires*, p. 572, n. 8.

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³ Pliny, *N.H.* xxx. 2. 1; see Jackson, *Zoroaster*, pp. 152 ff.

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The Persian inscriptions show Dareios I as a believer in Auramazdā, who is clearly the god of Zoroaster, not the sky god of the nature worship of the Persians, whose name Herodotos heard under a form akin to the Indian Dyaus. The devotion of Dareios to this god can be accounted for only by the view that he was the deity of his branch of the family of the Achaimenidai. Dareios had to struggle against the hostility of the Magoi, representing the traditional faith, and it was his earnestness under the influence of the prophet's teaching, which secured the sudden predominance of the Zoroastrian view, despite its abstract character and lack of popular elements. But this means that Zoroaster had lived just before Dareios or was still alive, for if he had lived some centuries before, and his religion had still at the time of Dareios been of so small account, it could never have suddenly expanded to important dimensions. This view, in Hertel's opinion, is strengthened by the terms used by Dareios himself, when he asserts that the earlier kings had failed to accomplish what in one year he had wrought by the aid of Auramazdā, and when he advises his successors to punish the adherents of the lie. His successors omit this warning, which was only in place when a new god was being first proclaimed. Under Artaxerxes II (404–359 B.C.) we find Auramazdā worshipped along with Mithra and Anāhita, showing the contamination of Zoroastrianism with the older nature worship under the influence of the Magoi, who had accepted the duty of preaching the new faith, but naturally permeated it with ideas of the older belief.

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Ingenious as are the arguments of Hertel, it is clearly impossible to accept them as adequate to prove his thesis that Zoroaster was an earlier contemporary of Dareios I. The attitude of the king is certainly that of the adherent of a faith who believes strongly in his god; it does not prove that the faith was a new one; it might well have existed for some centuries in comparative obscurity, to be brought into prominence by the moral earnestness of a king who shared the spirit of the founder of the reformed faith and of his successors. The evidence *a priori* is simply negative in direction, and the conclusion drawn by Hertel is wholly uncertain, unless it can be supported by other evidence.

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Such evidence Hertel finds in the Parsi tradition which gives something like 595–594 B. C. as the opening of Zoroaster’s ministry and makes him live about 660–583 B. C. The date is earlier than his own, but in view of the deplorable nature of the Parsi tradition generally, he deems this of no importance, and refers to the fact that Anquetil du Perron ¹ arrives at the date 559 B. C. for the beginning of Zoroaster’s work, on the strength of the fact that a religious sect, which immigrated into China about A. D. 600 and which is evidently of Zoroastrian origin, had an era dating approximately from that time, which Anquetil interpreted as fixed by the prophet’s leaving his home and entering on his mission. For the accuracy of the tradition the best argument to be adduced is that, if Zoroaster had not lived at a comparatively later epoch, the Parsis would not have brought his date down, since no sect willingly depreciates the age of its founder. Here, however, we are left to mere guess-work, and we have a very formidable argument to confront in the fact that tradition does not make the patron of Zoroaster, Vištāspa, identical with the father of Dareios until as late as Ammianus Marcellinus (5th cent. A. D.), whose evidence in this regard, Hertel very frankly admits, is worthless.

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¹ Jackson, *op. cit.*, p. 165.

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The later Avesta in fact and the Parsi tradition ascribe the patron of Zoroaster to a Kavi dynasty, founded by a certain Kavāta; moreover it is silent regarding the great Persian kings who favoured the faith. It also, like the Greek tradition, gives Zoroaster the position of one of the Magoi. In Hertel’s view the dynasty of Kavi is a pure invention, Kavi Vištāspa in the Avesta really denoting merely the king ² Vištāspa; the omission to mention the Achaimenidai is due to the opposition of Dareios to the Magoi, and the connexion of Zoroaster with that body is mythical.³ On the contrary, in vv. 8 and 9 of the Gāthā (Yasna, liii.) Hertel finds a direct excitement to Vištāspa to overthrow the usurper Gaumāta and the Magoi, the passage dating shortly before Dareios acted on the hint in lieu of his father, and brought about by treachery the destruction of the Magoi. This suggestion, however, seems wholly implausible. The verses form part of the utterance of the prophet at the marriage of his daughter Pourucistā; what he says naturally applies generally to evil-doers and to their punishment by the Lord, and it is illegitimate to read into them an admonition, carefully disguised from motives of prudence under a double entendre in the later Indian style.

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² But Vištāspa does not appear as a king in the inscriptions; Herodotos (iii. 70) makes him only ὕπαρχος in Persia.

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