The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c41.47

v2.c41.47

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.