The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c13.34

c13.34

In *Timaeus* is to be found yet another concordance with the doctrines of Tantric mysticism. Plato, while establishing a relationship between the elements of nature and geometrical forms (55e-56b), gives the figure of the cube to earth, that of the triangular pyramid to fire, that of the octahedral to air and that of the icosahedral to water. Now the *tantras* also represent the elements symbolically in various diagrams (*maṇḍalas*) by means of analogous geometrical figures, although plane ones; earth by the square, fire by the triangle, air by a figure of six points (two equilateral triangles superposed one on the other), water by a figure resembling the crescent Moon and ether by the circle.² This is a case of the encounters of symbolism whose history is quite complex; because in Egypt on the Zodiac of Denderah, a monument later than Plato (of the epoch of Ptolemy) is found a representation of the solar light by several chains of triangles.³ The Tantric texts containing these several points of agreement with the ideas of *Timaeus* are also much later than this last work.