A Constructive Survey of Upanishadic Philosophy c5.s4.2.2

c5.s4.2.2

Diogenes, the biographer of Greek philosophers, and Jamblichus, the Neo-platonist, narrate to us stories of the visit to Brahmins of early Greek philosophers, among them philosophers like Thales and Pythagoras. But this fact has yet to be historically proved. The absence of a single reference in Plato to Indian philosophy forbids the truth of such a statement. (2) Thus, in order to explain the many analogies of Comparative Mythology and Comparative Philology, we have to take recourse to a second theory, namely the Theory of Common Origin. The story for example, of the Universal Being as an egg-like sphere, and Phanes, the shining god, coming out of its two lids, namely, the earth and the sky; the bi-partition of the primeval Ātman into two portions, the man and the wo-man, with its analogy in Hebrew literature; and the similar descriptions of the Aśvattha in the Kaṭhopanishad and the Igdrasil in Scandinavian mythology, may all be traced to a time when the European and the Indian Aryans lived together. Similarly, about Comparative Philology.