[Buddha-l] Re: Natural lucidity for Socrates

[Dan Lusthaus]

Joy,

  Yes, but what to think of references in Greek litterature to Indian influences. 


This is a complicated and convoluted matter. One of the more interesting attempts to unravel this is Richard Stoneman's "Naked Philosophers: The Brahmans in the Alexander Historians and Alexander Romance", The Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. 115 (1995) 99-114. These are the prototypes embellished and twisted by most later writers, including the Hippolytus passage. Stoneman argues these were not Brahmans but Oxydorchai in Taxila, that the attempts by Greeks such as Aristobulus to communicate with the "naked ascetics" were fraught with language difficulties (four translators were used simultaneously), and they never quite got the template right, which was nevertheless copied and mutated for many centuries. He also reviews a long tradition that holds that much of it was actually camouflaged Cynic doctrine put into the mouths of gymnosophists by Cynic writers such as Onesicritus.
   Were retreat and disengagement from the life of the City typical Greek features? 

For some Greeks, yes. But to be clear, most descriptions of "Brahmans" in Greek literature do not portray them as hermits, but, on the contrary, as fully engaged in political life. The naked ascetics are even supposed to have wives and sex (but only mate to procreate and only during the new moon), and so on. They are not monists, or pantheists, etc. They "investigate" natural phenomena (weather, etc.), which is, again, a Cynic practice (as is eating only uncooked food). On the other hand, some scholars have argued that even the Cynics' ideas are India-inspired. Aristoxenes of Tarentum tells about a meeting in Athens between Socrates and an Indian sophist (which Stoneham thinks might have some historical validity).


  It can also be found in Plato's Theætetus. 
  You wrote elsewhere http://www.hm.tyg.jp/~acmuller/yogacara/thinkers/nagarjuna-bio-asc.htm that it was possible that Sariputta and Moggallana introduced the tetralemmic method to Buddhism. Have you since then reached any other conclusion or idea about that? 

Goodness! Someone actually has read something I wrote. I still think that is plausible, and even likely. They brought it with them from their previous teacher Sa~njaya -- where he got it from, who knows? 

In my previous message I wasn't advocating any of the "influence" theories (Greece to India or vice versa), but merely suggesting that almost anything can be made to sound plausible in the vacuum created by a paucity of evidence. What about all those people who see ufo-s? or ghosts? or believe in virgin births? (the last shows what people can believe even when the evidence is available and unambiguous)

Dan
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