Ancient India and G
HUM 111 World C
May 2, 2014

Comparing Sculptures of Ancient India and Greece were Ancient Greeks had sculptures depicting gods and goddesses, royalty, animals, and sports, like Olympic events. Greek pottery depicted stories, myths, everyday life, and sports as well.
III Classical Notes on India
[10] The name of India, so far as is known, first appears in Greek literature in the 5th century B.C. in the works of Hekataios and Herodotos. The word is derived from the Indus river (Sanskrit sindhumeans "river"), and in the Greek as well as the Persian language 'India" originally meant only the Indus region, which then belonged to the Persian Empire. Herodotos, however, already used the term in a wider sense to denote the whole country; and classical Greek usage followed his example.
Prior to the time of Alexander, Greek knowledge of India was acquired on the whole by wav of Persia. King Cyrus, founder of the Persian empire and of the Achaemenid dynasty (reigned 559-530 B.C.), added to his territories the region called Gandhara, directly south of the Hindu Kush mountains. About 518-515 B.C. Dareios I extended this conquest southward as far as the Indus river. Thereby the Indus became the easternmost boundary of the vast Persian colossus, which sprawled across all of western Asia to include, after 546 B.C., most of the Greek cities on the coast of Asia Minor. Communications between the extremities of this huge polity were now unimpeded by political frontiers. Moreover, Persian policies served inadvertently to promote that mixture of nationalities which so frequently provides intellectual stimulus. Large-scale deportations of peoples occurred on occasion, while slaves captured in war of often came to reside in portions of the empire far removed from their original homes. The skills and labor power of all of Persia's subjects, Greeks included, were employed in imperial building projects. Many Greeks served as officials or mercenaries in the various Achaemenid provinces; on occasion Greek physicians were employed at the Persian royal courts Conversely, Indian troops formed a contingent of !he Persian army which invaded Greece in 480 B.C., and of the army which opposed Alexander at Gaugamela in 331 B.C. Unquestionably the requirements of war, administration and commerce in the far-flung Persian empire produced numerous encounters between Indians and [11] Greeks. Most of these, no doubt, were inconsequential; but even genuine exchanges of ideas will ordinarily have left no trace for posterity.
One Greek in Persian employ who allegedly both travelled to India and wrote a book on the subject is Skylax of Karia, a mercenary soldier and subject of King Dareios I. At the command of this ruler, who wished to know at what point the Indus flows into the ocean, Skylax reputedly took a fleet of ships from the headwaters of the river down to its mouth, thence westward across the ocean and into the Red Sea as far as Suez. As described by Herodotos, this voyage was exploratory in nature, and was later followed by Dareios' conquest of the Indus territory. Unfortunately, there is good reason to question whether Skylax really made this voyage, or published an account of it which was available in the Greek world. In view of the warlike tribes whom Alexander the Great later encountered along this route, it is difficult to imagine a small explorer's party making this journey successfully. At the same time, extant evidence scarcely permits the alternative conclusion that Skylax ‘s expedition formed part of Dareios' conquering army. More importantly, a genuine voyager cannot have believed that the Indus flows eastward, as Herodotos reports, or that the trip required two and a half years. The latter notion is explainable only upon the historian's assumption that the expedition involved the circumnavigation of India.
Herodotos (484-425 B. C.)
Knowledge communicated via Persia was doubtless also the source for those few Indian names which appear in surviving remnants of Hekataios of Miletos' Geography (ca. 500 B.C.). Unfortunately, the small number of the fragments makes it nearly impossible to tell precisely what Hekataios did know about India. By contrast, information is plentiful concerning his successor, Herodotos of Halikarnassos (484-425 B. C.), whose Histories have survived in their entirety. The work of Herodotos provides an enormous variety of data about many countries - some of it in fact derived from Hekataios. Although it is probably safe to assume that Herodotos himself never visited India, he was an indefatigable collector of anecdotes from many sources. He knew, for example, that India embraced diverse peoples of widely varying physical appearance, customs and language. Some Indians were nomadic an ate raw flesh; others refused to kill any living creature. Apparently he also recognized the distinction between the Aryan and Dravidian races; the latter he compares to the Ethiopians in skin color and notes that they "dwell far away From the Persians southwards, and were no subjects of King Dareios." However, Herodotos clearly exaggerates India's population, saying that the Indians are "more in number than any nation known to me.” He emphasizes the country's wealth in gold; according to his information, India supplied a larger tribute than any other province of the Persian empire. Indian birds and beasts he regards as much bigger than those existing elsewhere, except for horses; Indian clothing he describes as [12] made from wool growing on trees (i.e. cotton). Herodotos' notions of geography were understandably inaccurate: for instance his belief that the Indus flows eastward, and that India constitutes the easternmost inhabited region of Asia, with only desert wastes beyond. Interestingly, nothing in his remarks gives the impression that India possessed much in the way of civilization, let alone the philosophic and religious eminence for which it became noted in Hellenistic times.
Herodotos' most famous statement about India-that gold is produced in the Indian desert by fierce ants larger than foxes-appears at first sight utterly fantastic.
Ktesias (405-397 B.C.)
[] Finally, the last of those Greeks before Alexander who are known to have written about India was Ktesias of Knidos, who ought to have known more about the subject than any of his predecessors. A medical doctor by profession, he served for eight years (405-397 B.C.) as personal physician to the Persian king Artaxerxes Mnemon. Living thus at the Achaemenid court, he had unexampled opportunities to communicate with Persians of high rank and acquire an insight into the workings of the Persian empire. Upon his return to Greece Ktesias wrote a book called Persika, covering the entire history of the Near East from its beginnings down to his own time, as well as a much smaller work called Indika. Both of these have disappeared; but a number of fragmentary citations remain extant, together with extensive excerpts made by the Byzantine patriarch Photios in the 9th century.
Ktesias' credibility as a historian was already questioned by Aristotle, [13] and has remained a disputed issue. His books were full of entertaining stories and descriptions, including undoubted exaggerations if not pure fantasy in some cases. Thus he has been described as a founder of the historical novel. He claimed to have used Persian royal archives in gathering his material, though this seems unlikely, given the legendary character of so much that he relates. Unfortunately he had slight critical sense, and superimposed improbable stories upon what may originally have been genuine traditions.27 But he was a popular author, as the survival of his works into the 9th century demonstrates. Until the age of Alexander the Great he was a standard authority on Persia and India. With respect to India the information Ktesias has to offer is occasionally accurate, though more often exaggerated. Even from the vantage-point of the Persian court at Susa, India was still a strange and virtually unknown country; at such a distance, marvels become credible. He did take care, nonetheless, to distinguish between things he had seen himself and information he had only acquired by hearsay. He never claimed to have visited India, though we may suppose that he sometimes had occasion to meet Indians, or Persian officials who had served in the empire's Indian territories. Presumably he had seen articles of tribute or presents offered by Indian princes to the powerful Persian monarch. Thus he knew that India contained elephants, little monkeys with long tails, huge birds and talking parrots, and silver and gold in the mountains. But with equal assurance he describes Indian wonders: a fountain which fills with liquid gold each year; dogs large enough to fight lions; a river consisting of honey: a spring in which the water curdles like cheese, and if drunk becomes a truth serum; people who live as long as 200 years, and others having eight fingers on each hand and ears long enough to cover their shoulders. He does not examine such tales according to any standard of verisimilitude - except to say that he has omitted to relate even more extraordinary matters for fear he will not be believed! If we may judge from the wide dissemination of his books, Greek. readers did not expect a sceptical approach to the marvels of the Orient.
What the Greeks actually knew about India, therefore, was not very much and not very accurate. As the fruit of writings like those of Hekataios, Herodotos and Ktesias, educated Greeks of the period undoubtedly possessed some rudimentary awareness of India's existence. Presumably such information did not remain totally without effect. Knowledge of foreign peoples was a prime stimulus in causing the Greeks to examine their own traditions in a critical spirit; and this in turn had enormous importance in the development of Greek intellectual life. Herodotos himself gives evidence of how foreign contacts might produce a relativistic point of view: he notes that while each nation possesses its own customs, each also considers its own to be superior. As an example [14] he cites certain Indians at the court of Dareios of Persia, who considered it normal to eat their own fathers' dead bodies, but abhorrent to cremate them. The Greeks, of course, held precisely the opposite view.
Not totally to be discounted is the possibility that Indian religious ideas filtered into Greece through the agency of wandering holy man. The itinerant ascetic has been a familiar figure in India since the beginning of that country's recorded history. Buddhist missionary impulses in particular may have inspired occasional monks to proselytize beyond the Himalayas, though this becomes more likely from the 3rd century B.C. onward, when Buddhism experienced its first great age of expansion. One edict of the Buddhist emperor Ashoka (3rd cen. B.C.) actually records that he sent envoys into various Hellenistic countries to propagate the "Law of Piety. " The fact that no Buddhist writings of this period have ever been discovered on Hellenistic territory is not, in itself, conclusive evidence to the contrary: the Indian guru typically exerts his influence by means of speech and example rather than by written texts. Nonetheless, pre-Hellenistic sources totally fail to mention the presence of Indians of any kind among the Greeks.
Sokrates (469-399 B.C.)
On this theme, however, a curious anecdote is told about the philosopher Sokrates (469-399 B.C.). According to the story, Sokrates in Athens once conversed with an Indian, who inquired what sort of philosopher he was. When Sokrates replied that he "investigated human life," the Indian laughed, saying that "no one was able to observe human affairs if he was ignorant of divine affairs." This incident is reported by the Christian historian Eusebios (260-340 A.D.), who cites it at two removes: from Aristokles, who in turn is quoting the musicologist Aristoxenos (fl. 320-300 B.C.). But even if the citation is accurate, the incident as recorded is highly improbable. Certainly a stray Indian holy man may have wandered somehow as far as Athens in the classical period, and even learned Greek along the way, though the probabilities are against it. But it is virtually unthinkable that such a man, once arrived, would have been regarded as a sage. Not only had the Greeks of Sokrates' time no inkling that the Indians might possess a philosophy; their contempt for “barbarians” (i.e. all non-Greeks) would have profoundly hindered any mutual understanding. Furthermore, it is beyond belief that a Greek of the 4th century B.C. (Aristoxenos) would have permitted an Indian to have the last word - the final laugh - in a discussion with so revered a personage as Sokrates. Conceivably the idea of an Indian's encounter with Sokrates was invented by Aristoxenos, who lived in the period just after Alexander's Indian expedition, and whose imagination may well have been aroused by that extraordinary adventure. But even if the meeting (unlikely as it is) did in fact occur, the contents of the conversation would seem to belong to a much later century. The late-Hellenistic age, unlike its classical predecessor, held a notably high [15] opinion of Indian wisdom. Eusebios himself may well have been glad to cite the alleged remark of an Indian in confirmation of the Christian conviction that divine concerns take precedence over human ones.
Despite the classical Greeks' ignorance of India, some significance presumably attaches to the fact that Greek philosophy originated in the cities of lonia on Asia Minor's western shore - that portion of the Greek world in closest touch with the Orient. Admittedly, this circumstance scarcely permits any inferences regarding Indian influence upon the Greeks. But the inter-cultural communication which the policies of the Persian empire facilitated certainly gave impetus to intellectual creativity - an impetus which cannot have remained without effect upon the life of Greece.
V Soul-Wandering
[20] The notion that spirits or souls of dead persons may inhabit or "possess" animals or plants is widespread among both ancient and modern peoples in many pans of the world. But the belief that the life-force or soul of the individual passes from life to life, inhabiting a different physical body in each existence, is a much rarer doctrine. Known as metempsychosis or transmigration of souls, it is found in developed form in the ancient world only in India and Greece. Metempsychosis appears in rudimentary form in the Upanishads, and subsequently became incorporated into the ethical teaching of all the major Indian thought-systems down to the present day. Though vastly more important in Indian than in Greek religion, it was nonetheless known in Greece as early as the 6th century B.C., and played a significant role in Orphism and Pythagoreanism. Plato in the early 4th century B.C. could already refer to it as "an ancient tradition."
The earliest known mention of metempsychosis in any extant source occurs in a verse of the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad, which probably dates from the 7th or 6th century B.C., though an earlier reference in the Rig Veda may hint at it. The development of this doctrine in India is apparently connected with the growth of monistic tendencies in religion, as the period which produced the ritualistic Brahmana literature passed into that of the more philosophical Upanishads, and then to the devotional Bhagavad Gita and the bhakti (i.e. faith) cults. The numerous gods and goddesses of the older Vedic hymns were gradually brought into a single system, each becoming identified with others, until eventually all were considered to be manifestations of Brahman, the world-essence. Likewise all earthly beings came to be linked through the idea of transmigration of souls. However, in the few instances where transmigration is mentioned in the Upanishads it is not associated with any theory of ethics. These texts are quite clear on the point that the soul of a person is freed from further transmigration only through mystic knowledge, not through "works" or actions of any sort.
[23] But in both India and Greece, metempsychosis in its characteristic and fullest development was a decisively ethical doctrine. The present status of every living being - whether human or animal, man or woman, high- or low-caste, happy or miserable - was believed to be the direct result of the quality of its behavior in previous earthly existences. Certain Greek mystery-cults apparently held that the soul becomes purified only through a series of successive rebirths. In India, metempsychosis was taught as an ethical doctrine by Buddhists and Jains, Vishnuites and Shivaites, adherents of the Sankhya and Vedanta philosophies, and by the practitioners of Yoga. Formulated as the law of karma (i.e. "act" or "deed"), ethical metempsychosis served to sanction traditional mores, inasmuch as proper behavior was defined according to custom. Strange from the Western viewpoint is the fact that karma was believed to operate as a kind of natural law, not requiring the intervention of any personalized form of deity.
The earliest Indian religion in which karma is known to have occupied a central place is Jainism, whose traditional founder, Parshvanatha, probably lived about the 8th century B.C. Jainism, which survives today as the faith of some two million Indians, first came to history's attention in the person of Mahavira (ca. 540-468 B.C.), its greatest exponent. Jain doctrine teaches that each living creature possesses a material soul jiva) which is originally pure and colorless, but through the activities of life becomes contaminated by karmic matter. Every act committed by man or beast is believed to produce karmic coloring on the soul-light colors for virtuous deeds, medium tones for minor offenses, with the darkest shades being reserved for serious transgressions. Since dark-colored stains are supposed to weigh down the soul, while lighter ones allow it to rise, the light-colored souls will be reborn correspondingly as gods or humans, the darker ones as animals or plants, or as inhabitants of Hell.
By the time of Gautama the Buddha, who was a contemporary of Mahavira, metempsychosis and the law of karma seem to have become widely accepted in India as virtually self-evident truths. It would otherwise be difficult to explain their acceptance in the Buddhist metaphysics, which declares all earthly phenomena to be in a state of continuous flux, and denies the existence of any permanent entity whatever. To Buddhists the notion of soul is self-contradictory - an opinion which (at least in the view of some critics) ought to exclude the idea of karma, since there is no soul or subtle material body to provide continuity from one life to the next. But as far as we can judge from the extant scriptures, early Buddhists were not unduly disturbed by this difficulty. Gautama himself discouraged all metaphysical speculation on the ground that it hindered the true goal of the religious life-namely, relief from earthly suffering. Only several centuries after the Master's death did the second great branch of Buddhism, the Mahayana, attempt to reconcile the ideas of [24] karma and universal flux. The Mahayana school explains karma as a kind of psychic energy, not as a material appendage to the soul. Karma is transferred from one person's life to the next through the chain of "dependent origination" which governs the workings of the universe.
A variation of metempsychosis was taught by the Sankhya philosophy, numerous schools of which are known to have flourished in India in the first half-millennium A.D. Sankhya in some form may actually be older even than Buddhism, though as a dualist and atheist system the earliest known exposition of it - the Sankhya-karika of Ishvarakrishna - dates only from about the 4th century A.D. Like Jainism, Sankhya assumes the existence of a plurality of souls; but it differs by its assertion that the soul (purusha) is a purely spiritual entity, incapable of being affected by material qualities such as color. In spite of this, the Sankhya notion of karma remains materialistic. It assumes that the visible living creature contains a subtler (but still material) inner body composed of the sense faculties, the breaths (which are the source of life), and the mind. This subtle body, rather than the soul, is the bearer of karmic influences and the basis of the reincarnated personality. Though the visible body dies, the subtle body persists and is reborn in human, animal or plant form according to the number and depth of the karmic scars upon it. Liberation from the otherwise endless succession of births and deaths is possible only when the person fully recognizes (through a kind of mystic intuition) that the soul is essentially pure and free, its bondage to matter (prakriti) being merely the produce of ignorance.
Orphics
In Greece metempsychosis is not directly attested by any source before Plato, though its presence at an earlier date can probably be inferred. The doctrine is linked to the Orphics; we hear of "Orphic" holy men who wandered about seeking adherents and conducted religious ceremonies; but it is unclear just what their teachings were. The dramatist Euripides criticized some of these persons as unscrupulous practitioners claiming magical powers. The Orphics lived as vegetarians; they refused to sacrifice animals and used only bloodless offerings at their rites, possibly on the ground that human souls may migrate into animals. Orphic ceremonies were designed to purify the sinner of guilt, to assuage the anger of the gods, to cure disease, or to facilitate the soul's passage into the lower regions after death. Probably they included reading from books; all sources agree on the importance the Orphics attached to the written word. Plato could be referring to Orphics - though he does not say so expressly - when he speaks of the persons who equate the body with a prison or tomb of the soul, which is undergoing punishment for some reason. Likewise he mentions "certain priests and priestesses" - perhaps Orphics - who claim that the soul is immortal and will be reborn, and that therefore human beings on earth should lead a holy life. Surviving sources hardly permit us to judge whether or not a [25] distinct sect of Orphic believers, as distinct from mere practitioners of cult ceremonies, ever existed in Greece. However, the worship of the god Dionysos was sometimes associated with the rites of Orpheos; some texts also connect these rites with the Eleusinian mysteries.
The origins of Orphism too are wholly enshrouded in myth. As seen from the 4th century B.C., Orpheos was a personage both distant in time (allegedly pre-Homeric) and remote in origin: his home was semi-barbarous Thrace. Reputedly he was one of the great classic poets, equal to Homer and Hesiodos. Various poems circulated under his name, though sceptics denied his authorship: e.g. Ion of Chios says that the true source of some "Orphic" poems was Pythagoras. According to legend Orpheos had been a gentle lyre-player who could charm the most fearsome beasts by his music, and had initiated the mystic ceremonies (teletai) conducted in his name. Allegedly he had once visited the underworld seeking the soul of his dead wife, Eurydice, and afterward returned again to earth. Indeed, in many respects Orpheos resembles the typical shaman - a type of magician and miracle-worker known since ancient times in Central Asia and Siberia. The shaman is able to bring about a connection with the souls of the dead, with demons and nature-spirits; he experiences ecstatic trances in which his soul leaves its body and journeys to heaven or to the nether regions. Thus he serves as mediator for the living in their relations with the gods. The Orpheos of legend bears many characteristically shamanistic features: his journey to the underworld; his function as guide for the soul in its descent to Hades; his love of music and animals; his ability to heal disease, and his magical and soothsaying powers. Even the legend of his singing head - allegedly cut off by priestesses of Bakchos and thrown into a river in Thrace, where it floated as far as Lesbos and became an oracle - has analogues in Central Asia: the skulls of Siberian shamans are considered capable of prophecy.
Orphism remained a nebulous kind of religious underground in Greece, difficult to link with particular individuals or dates. But its most famous doctrine - namely, metempsychosis - was certainly taught by several identifiable persons of the 6th and 5th centuries B.C. One of these was Pherekydes of Syros, who composed a mythological account of the workings of the universe, the functions of the gods, and the fate of souls after death. All this he is supposed to have learned through revelation or secret books. probably Semitic in origin; his own forebears seem to have come from Asia Minor. Pherekydes asserted that the human soul passes from one body to another; apparently he also taught that the souls of the righteous and of the wicked will undergo divergent fates after death. Pherekydes was reputed to have been Pythagoras' teacher. Though there is no good evidence for this, the Pythagoreans of later times studied his book; and the teachings of the two men are similar in certain [26] respects.
Pythagoras (6th cent. B.C.)
Pythagoras too taught soul-wandering; this is attested by the oldest traditions about him. Founder of a religious brotherhood in Kroton in south Italy (6th cent. B.C.), he reputedly could remember four of his own previous existences: namely as Aithalides son of Hermes, as the Euphorbos who was killed in the Trojan war, as a certain Hermotimos, and as a Delian fisherman. He believed in a psychic connection among all forms of life, claiming that his own soul was constantly passing into animals and plants; he claimed also to have visited Hades. Pythagoras' name is linked to that of Orpheos: a number of classical sources agree in placing the two side by side. His followers shared many features of the Orphics' way of life, especially the prohibition of meat eating and the employment of mystic rites to purify the soul. Music constituted a further bond between them: Orpheos' music supposedly could soothe even the guardians of Hades, while Pythagoras allegedly had discovered the mathematical relations of the notes on the musical scale. The differences between Orphics and Pythagoreans apparently lay in the realm of cult and social status, rather than doctrine: Pythagoreans were aristocratic, Orphics usually not; Pythagoreans honored Apollo, the Orphics Dionysos. Finally, the Orphic doctrine remained on a mythological plane, interpreting the universe in terms of personalized deities and procreation; while the Pythagoreans developed in the direction of rationalism. They became philosophers and mathematicians; their number-philosophy is an important source for Plato's theory of Ideas.
It is not always easy to separate the later Pythagorean philosophy from its more primitive antecedents. The historical Pythagoras, like Orpheos, was a shaman-like figure. His connection with gods and spirits, his rule over animals, his ecstasy, his presence in more than one place at a time, are all shamanistic traits, as is his periodic residence underground (in the underworld?), from which he periodically emerged looking like a skeleton – i.e. after fasting. Even his golden thigh, considered a sign of divinity, may derive from a practice typical of shamanistic initiations, in which the holy man's body is allegedly chopped into pieces and reassembled. Various other Greek religious figures shared these shaman-like characteristics. For instance there was Aristeas of Prokonnesos, who appeared in various places at once and accompanied Apollo in the form of a crow (a bird symbolizes the shaman's heavenward journey). Hermotimos of Klazomenai allegedly abandoned his body for years at a time; during this long ecstatic journey he traveled about prophesying. Epimenides of Crete reportedly slept for a long time in Zeus' cave on Mount Ida (retreat into a cave being a classic form of shamanistic initiation), where he fasted and fell into ecstatic trances. Thereafter he performed miraculous cures, announced the future, interpreted the past, [29] and exorcised demons. Plato recounts the legend of Er the Pamphylian, who fell in battle; his soul passed into the underworld. After twelve days it returned to earth to report what it had seen; Er's body still lay on the funeral pyre. Other similar tales are recorded in Greek classic literature. While untypical of Greek religion as a whole, they are not entirely uncommon.
Such stories of soul-wandering lead by a rather small conceptual step to a full-fledged doctrine of ethical metempsychosis. A soul which can leave its body and travel about at will - as the souls of shamans supposedly do - can reasonably be expected to choose its own situation. Thus in Plato's myth, Er observes how Fate directs the souls in the mysterious Beyond to select their own future lives. Various patterns of lives are laid out on the ground: human as well as animal ones. The soul makes its choice; henceforth it must cleave by necessity to the life it has selected. Though legendary in form, this is clearly a doctrine of ethical metempsychosis. Nor did the tale originate with Plato, who begins it with "once upon a time.” Presumably it represents an older mythological and philosophical tradition.