The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c41.60

v2.c41.60

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