The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c41.52

v2.c41.52

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.