The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c13.37

c13.37

One should also count the belief of Plato in metempsychosis and his theory of the vision among the concordances of his ideas with that of India. This is not the place to examine the former but the latter conforms to the medical concepts of India in so far as Plato admits the existence of a fire inside the eye, the fire which, on meeting the external light, links up, by the union of the similar with the similar, the object with the perceiving soul (45 b-d). Similarly Suśruta describes a fire which is a form of bile called *ālocaka* and which, localised in the eye, is the agent of vision.⁴ The Platonic theory of the visual fire is, moreover, far from being isolated in the Hellenic world¹ and Bühler had, long ago, drawn the attention of Th. Gomperz on the analogy presented by the theory of the vision of Alcmaeon of Croton (VIth century B.C.) and that of the *Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika* philosophy of India.² In Alcmaeon the theory seems to be different from that of Plato but the existence of an intra-ocular fire is put forward in principle.³ On this point the accord is complete between India on the one hand and Alcmaeon and Plato on the other.