The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c41.73

v2.c41.73

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.