How are early Greek and early Indian thought similar? And how do we explain the similarities? These questions can contribute to the current debate about the so-called Axial Age, in which – it is claimed – various civilisations were in the first millenium bce transformed, intellectually and ethically, in ways by which we are still defined.

There is general agreement neither on the dating of the Axial Age nor on which civilisations count as manifestations of it. The focus of this volume is mainly (but not exclusively) on the period from about 800 bce to Alexander’s crossing of the Indus...

Can a comparison between Indian and Greek philosophies abstract from history? Most scholars would agree that to isolate philosophical positions from the socio-cultural history in which they were formulated is artificial and problematic, but the question then becomes what sort of history is needed. Of course the Vedas were preceded by the Indus Valley civilisation and Homer by the Mycenaeans, but such precursors cast little light on philosophy and can be left to other specialists. So histories of Sanskrit thinking usually start with the Ṛgveda, much as their Greek equivalents start with Homer. No doubt many scholars take for granted...

In this chapter I will discuss the problem of the beginning of abstract thinking as it is attested in the Ṛgveda. It is an ancient Indian text from the fifteenth to the thirteenth centuries bce, composed in Sanskrit. Its final redaction was done probably in the seventh century bce. The Ṛgveda (similarly to other early Indian texts) was composed and transmitted orally for centuries. Its earliest known manuscript is dated to the eleventh century ce.

In his paper ‘The Linguistic Task of the Presocratics’ Havelock (1983) reconstructs the beginnings of abstract concepts in Pre-Socratic philosophy. He shows how the concepts...

As has been noted by Émile Benveniste (1969: 99–101), ‘order’ is an extremely important concept for Indo-Europeans and is represented by, inter alia, Greek ‘harmonia’, Sanskrit ṛtá, Avestan aša, and Old Persian arta, all of which descend from the same PIE root – *H2er- (to become adjusted, to fit).¹ However, as Franklin has pointed out, the importance of order to Indo-Europeans is often discussed in light of the connection between arta and ṛtá.² It is surprising that there have been scarcely any accounts of the striking similarities between harmonia and ṛtá, and my aim in this paper is to...

What can we say about a concept like the ātman when its principal feature is its apparent indefinability and impersonal nature? Initially we could do worse than utilise Jurewicz’s definition of the term, based mainly on Ṛgvedic sources: ‘This word is used to denote the essence of an entity, the whole body (which ensures personal identity and existence), its most important parts, which are the head (which ensures personal identity and existence – here and in the afterworlds) and the breath (which ensures the existence of a living being)’.¹ But moving on to the Upaniṣads, the final texts in the...

Anticipating ‘a complete and splendid banquet of discourse’, Socrates prompts Timaeus to begin his narration about ‘the knowledge of the nature of the universe’ after calling upon the gods, ‘as custom requires’ (27b).¹ To launch the ‘discourse about the universe’ with the epic convention of the invocation of the gods places Timaeus’ description of the origin and the nature of the cosmos in the realm of poetic invention – the realm of muthos.²

Timaeus explains that we cannot know the cause of the creation of the cosmos with certainty and that his transmission is only a probable story (eikōs muthos,...

Plato and South Asian yogic traditions espouse various soteriological goals – divinisation, nirvāṇa, the identity of ātman and brahman, and yogic aloneness (kaivalya) – but their prescribed methods for attaining them present striking similarities. In addition to right living and right beliefs, meditation and contemplation are valorised as essential means for the deconstruction of the empirical person. While the importance ascribed to such practices is widely recognised in South Asia, the prominent intellectualism of the Platonic dialogues and of Plato scholars has obscured the existential centrality of the practice of inwardness and tranquillity for philosophers who aspire to ‘become as...

Nowadays, the mention of ‘technologies’ and ‘immortality’ in the same breath brings to mind futuristic biochemical methods to stop bodily decay, restore youth, and transfer a mind’s contents and processes to an artificial, unalterable substratum. And yet of course a wide variety of past cultures have also been concerned with attaining some sort of immortality. This essay explores the idea, present in both ancient Greece and early India, that immortality can be achieved through some structured methods, what I call ‘technologies of self-immortalisation’. At the outset, three key terms require qualification: ‘immortality’, ‘self’ and ‘technologies’.

What, then, is immortality? Despite...

In ‘Philosophy and the Crisis of the European Man’,¹ while aiming at characterising the intellectual attitude of the primeval European thinkers in contradistinction with other wise men of the same time in India and China, Edmund Husserl attributes the concept of ‘philosophy’, understood as the quest for the firm basement of any future science, only to the Greek Pre-Socratics. Of course both Indian and Greek thinkers consider the universe as a whole and they try to explain it from a single principle inasmuch as it constitutes a whole. They both care about what is universal, and might have expressed true...

This chapter focuses on a similar argument made by Parmenides² and Śaṅkara³ involving the claim that boundaries between everyday entities are superimposed and not real. I hereby continue my exploration of the similarity of the arguments of the two philosophers, who, so far, have been compared only either as adherents of monism, or in order to show historical dependence, mostly of Greek thought on the Veda.⁴ I will show how Parmenides and Śaṅkara argue that any boundary that we believe to be real and capable of separating the many individuals and things can be proven to be superimposed by humans...

Not only the classicist, but even the layman with a casual interest in Greek philosophy is familiar with the allegory which Plato employs in the Phaedrus to describe the nature of the soul in terms, as he says, that are ‘within human power’:

Let [the soul] be likened to the composite inborn power of a pair of winged horses and of a charioteer … (246a)

Both classical scholars and cultivated laymen alike, on the other hand, have seldom been aware of a strikingly similar allegory occurring in one of the most celebrated works of the final period of Vedic literature,...

In ancient Greece and India, the real use of chariots encompassed sports, cults, journeys and combat. These uses of the supposedly most complex mobile technology of early Greek and Indian culture suggest a potentially similar complex metaphorical or ‘symbolic’ use of the chariot. It can be assumed that steering fast chariots was a demanding and fascinating task: an intensive experience of speed and mid-distance travel, but also a dangerous device, as numerous reported instances of chariot accidents in ancient sources show. Thus, it should not astonish that chariots (and chariot rides) were taken as a source domain, forming a dynamic...

Scholars have claimed that similarities between the Greek poem of Parmenides and the Indic Upaniṣads demand an explanation from either historical contact between Greece and other cultures, or a commonly inherited Indo-European philosophy.¹ Several striking similarities between Parmenides and the Upaniṣads supposedly reveal borrowing or a genetic relationship: first, monism, the idea of metaphysical unity;² second, the rejection of empirical knowledge;³ third, the potential for allegory;⁴ and fourth, the chariot imagery. This last similarity will be the focus of this chapter, which will argue that Parmenides’ poem engages with the chariot race during Patroclus’ funeral games in book 23 of...

To the intriguing similarities that have been observed between Greek and Indian thought around the middle of the first millennium I will here add another: the interiorisation of ritual (specifically, the cosmic rite of passage), a process connected to the advent both of monism and of the all-importance of the inner self. The interiorisation of ritual is an idea that has been used by Indologists but not, so far as I know, by Hellenists. This is not to deny that there are differences between the two cultures in the way that the ritual is interiorised, and in the nature of...

Underlying many speculations about the origins of beliefs in rebirth or reincarnation is an assumption about the relation between metaphysics and ethics. Roughly speaking, the assumption is that ethical outlooks are grounded in metaphysical beliefs or theories, and hence that, in any given case, a metaphysical conception of the world is prior, logically and chronologically, to the ethical outlook. I call this the assumption of metaphysical priority. Among the theories in which we see this assumption at work is that developed by the anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere in several publications since the late 1960s, which concerns how conceptions of rebirth evolved...

Since its coinage by Jaspers, scholars have been looking for an explanation for the changes that Indian and Greek cultures (and many others) seem to have gone through in the so-called Axial Age.¹ This is the time in which the so-called Greek Enlightenment and the Upaniṣadic turn in Indian philosophy took place (roughly a period of several centuries from the eighth to the second century bce). I will apply to this development a typology coined by Roy Wallis, a sociologist working on new religious movements in the 1980s. Wallis analyses par excellence new religious movements from a static perspective. However,...

These three passages are almost the only references to the customs of any Indian peoples in what survives of Ctesias’ account of India.¹ Ctesias of Cnidus was a physician who held a post at the court of the Persian King Artaxerxes I, probably from 415 to 398/7 bce. He wrote an extensive account of Persian history in twenty-three books and a much shorter description of India in one book. His history of Persia is regarded as extremely unreliable, not least where it contradicts his predecessor Herodotus, but it probably contains much that was in oral circulation in Persian court circles....

This chapter aims to use Nietzsche as a prism for examining the parallels between ancient India and ancient Greece. As Mervyn Sprung maintains, ideas of Greece and India are viewed by Nietzsche very much through a ‘powerful Nietzschean lens’¹ in that he mines these cultures for concepts, attitudes and Weltanschauungen which will provide him with alternatives to the life-denying Christian morality he so deplored. I would like to suggest, however, that the interpretations Nietzsche offers are by no means redundant. The parallels between ancient Indian and ancient Greek philosophy have frequently been noted by commentators, and various theories have been...