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Buddhist philosophy is practical and seems some what out of sync with the Hindu thought at that time. Buddha lived around the same time as Socrates. I can't hel

Buddhist philosophy is practical and seems some what out of sync with the Hindu thought at that time. Buddha lived around the same time as Socrates. I can't help but wonder if some of the ideas were not cross-pollinated. Don't get me wrong. There are many similarities between the cultures, even 1000 years ago. Al-Biruni, an arabic scholar, well versed in Greek thought, said as much. He thought Indians were on par with Greeks in Math and Science, but didn't advance as much because the language(Sanskrit) depends on analogies and metaphors a tad too much ie, not being quantitive and exact. I feel even today, Indian culture relies heavily on analogy.

blackoil 4y ago
Greek and Buddhism had lot of interaction and exchange. Though, independently also Buddhism was a disruptive religion in India. It gained lot of prominence because of these differences and Hinduism required a major refactoring to gain back its position.
Abishek_Muthian 4y ago
Note that Sanskrit wasn't the only ancient language of the Indian subcontinent; There were various languages & civilizations then as it is now. The article itself mentions about the debate on whether the monk was sent from Tamil kingdom or Punjabi kingdom.
jojojaf 4y ago
Phyrro supposedly travelled to India, but he was later than Socrates I think
gumby 4y ago
I think the people who settled both regions, bringing the wheel, a language family, and other cultural structures probably left a common foundation that perhaps lead to further parallel development and/or facilitated cross fertilization. India had wide trade and cultural interchange between Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and even the eastern Mediterranean at least as far back back as Harrapan times.
anukin 4y ago
The facts are spot on. The conclusions are a bit off though. Ancient Indian civilization was pretty advanced in theoretical mathematics and was able to calculate the expansion of sines and cosines before Taylor’s theorems. It also had an understanding of sines cosines etc. The main area where it fell behind was the engineering aspect of theorems. Other than few civil engineering marvels, Indians never discovered things like antikythera mechanism or aqueducts like ancient romans. This could partially be blamed on education being limited to few people as a direct side effect of caste system. The few who worked as smiths were not versed in theorems. Those who worked on theorems were never versed in engineering. They also did not cross pollinate that well. All owing to failure of education system of country. A curse it still suffers from tbh. As for Sanskrit it was never the language of masses. Pali or Prakrit would have been the language of masses during time of Al biruni. Sanskrit is an elegant language but was again limited in access to few by the caste system.
- cscurmudgeon 4y ago
  Both your comment and the parent comment seems biased and in a way parallels jingoistic comments overhyping Indian achievements (but in the opposite direction). Was there any objective metric by which ancient Indian engineering was behind others? There are other Indian achievements that have no parallels elsewhere in a similar time. But you can't overgeneralize from them in the other direction either: https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20170110-indias-ancient-engineering-marvel https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20170110-indias-ancient-e... https://mymodernmet.com/kailasa-temple-ellora-caves/ https://mymodernmet.com/kailasa-temple-ellora-caves/
  - DiscourseFan 4y ago
    These far post-date the engineering constructions in Rome and Greece--not to mention Egypt and other bronze age civilization, including the Indus River Valley civilization itself. Its clear from ancient texts and stories like the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, and the Bhagavata Purana that the Aryans were a nomadic, tribal cow-herding people who didn't tend to live in fixed structures. At some point people starting creating permanent structures, and they are architectural marvels of course, but those achievements do not seem to co-ordinate with the vedic mathematics in the same way that Greek, Egyptian, and Roman mathematics co-ordinate with Greek, Egyptian, and Roman engineering marvels.
fooker 4y ago
> language(Sanskrit) depends on analogies and metaphors a tad too much ie, not being quantitive and exact This is absolutely true. You will find a bunch of modern keyboard warriors who have not studied Sanskrit literature vehemently disagreeing with this based on some misplaced sense of pride. Sanskrit is --syntactically-- a very exact language with no room for debate. The flip side of this is that every dialect got labelled as an aberration (literally!) with no hope of mainstream adoption. Now moving on from syntax, Sanskrit semantics is intentionally loosely defined. So much that you are discouraged from interpreting it yourself. The usual argument for that is that you would have a teacher who will teach you the correct interpretation. Obviously this did not scale, and caused knowledge to get lost wholesale over time. A concrete example is the grammar rules of the language itself, which is supposed to be exact and well defined. Well, it turns out that these rules were only written down in terms of mnemonics (similar to remembering the first letter of trigonometric identities to recall it), and people have interpreted these mnemonics in different ways.
- akprasad 4y ago
  > Sanskrit semantics is intentionally loosely defined I have studied Sanskrit literature extensively and do not know what this means. > people have interpreted these mnemonics in different ways Your implication is that people interpreted these mnemonics differently due to misunderstanding these rules. The mainstream scholarly response is rather some version of प्रयोगशरणा वैयाकरणाः ("grammarians take refuge in usage"), i.e. that different grammarians working in different eras and time periods were forced to reconcile the Ashtadhyayi as a fixed document with the slight divergence in contemporary usage -- that is, that they followed usage and intentionally reinterpreted rules to fit usage. For an example of how this accounts for Patanjali's readings in particular, see [1]. [1]: https://web.stanford.edu/~kiparsky/Papers/markers.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/~kiparsky/Papers/markers.pdf
  - fooker 4y ago
    >I have studied Sanskrit literature extensively and do not know what this means. This means a sentence can often have many different meaning, not just the literal one suggested by the words. The idea is you either accept multiple meanings or settle it through debate. I am not criticizing this, this is fundamentally what makes literature and poetry interesting. But this makes it really difficult to draw a line between philosophy and science.
n1b0m 4y ago
From my understanding, before being influenced by Hellenistic culture the Buddha was never represented in human form.
- wahern 4y ago
  Greek statuary apparently had tremendous influence in Eurasia generally, including as far as Japan. The Greek wind god, Boreas, seems to have become (or at least been the source for depictions of) the Japanese wind god, Fūjin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C5%ABjin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C5%ABjin Regarding your point specifically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhist_art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhist_art
  - progmetaldev 4y ago
    Thank you for posting these Wikipedia articles. I honestly had no idea that there was this combination of ideas between Greek and Buddhist thought and art, but looking at some of the art, it's much easier to see the influences while having this in mind.
selimthegrim 4y ago
Al-Biruni was Central Asian/Khwarizmian (related to Persian), not Arab.
shas3 4y ago
This is an ignorant generalization. Not sure if it is worth writing a rebuttal to a generalization that relies on one guy from 1000+ years ago.
th2o3i4uo3i4443 4y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
th2o3i4uo3i4443 4y ago
There is a huge, unquestioned strain in the West that started with German Indology, that it has been as the original 'Aryans', that it was the inventor of all civilizations. This has been going on for 200 years, and formed the basis for the ruthless and savage colonization and India, but was quietly pushed out of view after the horrors of Nazism. You are merely replaying this template. The West has destroyed all its own traditions, and continues to want to not only appropriate and reform it in the mold of 'western rationality', but also to destroy the original tradition. We see this with Buddhism, Yoga, Ayurveda, Indology and what not, where the authority has been usurped by the West, not out of merit, but by politicking and economic cunning. The sad part is that nothing changes in the occident either. Greco-Egyptian philosophy was appropriated by Europeans for the simple reason that it was bat to beat the papacy with, but then when it posed a real threat, it was again derailed by the continental philosophers and excreted out. The role of continental philosophy on the study of India is an amazing one that is yet to be told. Here's a great presentation from a recent conference, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiD7uOz7eTY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiD7uOz7eTY
- biorach 4y ago
  > There is a huge, unquestioned strain in the West that started with German Indology, that it has been as the original 'Aryans', that it was the inventor of all civilizations This was very much questioned even when it was somewhat mainstream, which was many many decades ago. Since the second world war it is unquestionably considered racist garbage by all reputable mainstream historians, archeologists and linguists.
  - paganel 4y ago
    The historians, archeologists and linguists might well question it, but the feeling is still there, see the recent comments made by an European Union high official comparing the "garden" of Europe to the "jungle" of what's just outside of it.
    - biorach 4y ago
      You said "There is... a strain in the West... that it was the inventor of all civilizations" Academics do more than just "question" this, they consider it racist junk, unworthy of any consideration whatsoever. An EU official talking about a "jungle", while reprehensible, is not representative of the thinking of most people, and, to keep you from wandering off-topic, is not claiming the West invented civilization.
psuresh 4y ago
Indian philosophy discarded physical well-being and the so called 'living standard' thing. Instead efforts were to optimize inner well-being. They realized pointless material pleasure will lead you nowhere and the craving for better environment only grow exponentially ad infinitum.
- slibhb 4y ago
  Nowhere except modern medicine, technology, etc.
- unmole 4y ago
  The longest stage of a typical man's life is spent as a Grihastha in persuit of worldly and material success. Two of the four aspects of Purusartha are about physiological well being. I have no idea what you're talking about.
slibhb 4y ago
My impression is that Buddhism could hardly be more different than Ancient Greek philosophy. If there's a parallel between Buddhism and some Western tradition, it's to Gnosticism. Or perhaps various Judeo-Christian traditions that encouraged ascetism.
- lukeplato 4y ago
  Plato's allegories are very similar to Buddhist metaphysics. I recommend Vervaeke's meaning crisis series which draws connections between Buddhism, ancient Greek philosophy, Gnosticism, neoplatonism, etc. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLND1JCRq8Vuh3f0P5qjrSdb5eC1ZfZwWJ https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLND1JCRq8Vuh3f0P5qjrS...
coldtea 4y ago
>Buddha lived around the same time as Socrates. I can't help but wonder if some of the ideas were not cross-pollinated. Well, at the (later, circa 330 B.C) time of Alexander the Great, some areas of India and modern-day Pakistan had established Greek cities, living behind them some considerable influence. That's a well known historical meeting between the two: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhism
npinterview 4y ago
Colonial eurocentric thought inform history studies. Greeks were at the fringes of the ancient civilization. The Romans and the Germans were considered barbarians in contrast. India on the other hand was the center of the ancient world, both by sea trade as well as its huge population. The Chinese as well as the SE Asians sent their best scholars as well as royalty to study in India. It is very much more likely that the Greeks themselves benefited from their contact with India, as did many other ancient civilizations of that time.

blackoil 4y ago

Greek and Buddhism had lot of interaction and exchange. Though, independently also Buddhism was a disruptive religion in India. It gained lot of prominence because of these differences and Hinduism required a major refactoring to gain back its position.

Abishek_Muthian 4y ago

Note that Sanskrit wasn't the only ancient language of the Indian subcontinent; There were various languages & civilizations then as it is now. The article itself mentions about the debate on whether the monk was sent from Tamil kingdom or Punjabi kingdom.

jojojaf 4y ago

Phyrro supposedly travelled to India, but he was later than Socrates I think

gumby 4y ago

I think the people who settled both regions, bringing the wheel, a language family, and other cultural structures probably left a common foundation that perhaps lead to further parallel development and/or facilitated cross fertilization. India had wide trade and cultural interchange between Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and even the eastern Mediterranean at least as far back back as Harrapan times.

anukin 4y ago

The facts are spot on. The conclusions are a bit off though. Ancient Indian civilization was pretty advanced in theoretical mathematics and was able to calculate the expansion of sines and cosines before Taylor’s theorems. It also had an understanding of sines cosines etc. The main area where it fell behind was the engineering aspect of theorems. Other than few civil engineering marvels, Indians never discovered things like antikythera mechanism or aqueducts like ancient romans. This could partially be blamed on education being limited to few people as a direct side effect of caste system. The few who worked as smiths were not versed in theorems. Those who worked on theorems were never versed in engineering. They also did not cross pollinate that well. All owing to failure of education system of country. A curse it still suffers from tbh. As for Sanskrit it was never the language of masses. Pali or Prakrit would have been the language of masses during time of Al biruni. Sanskrit is an elegant language but was again limited in access to few by the caste system.

cscurmudgeon 4y ago
Both your comment and the parent comment seems biased and in a way parallels jingoistic comments overhyping Indian achievements (but in the opposite direction). Was there any objective metric by which ancient Indian engineering was behind others? There are other Indian achievements that have no parallels elsewhere in a similar time. But you can't overgeneralize from them in the other direction either: https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20170110-indias-ancient-engineering-marvel https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20170110-indias-ancient-e... https://mymodernmet.com/kailasa-temple-ellora-caves/ https://mymodernmet.com/kailasa-temple-ellora-caves/
- DiscourseFan 4y ago
  These far post-date the engineering constructions in Rome and Greece--not to mention Egypt and other bronze age civilization, including the Indus River Valley civilization itself. Its clear from ancient texts and stories like the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, and the Bhagavata Purana that the Aryans were a nomadic, tribal cow-herding people who didn't tend to live in fixed structures. At some point people starting creating permanent structures, and they are architectural marvels of course, but those achievements do not seem to co-ordinate with the vedic mathematics in the same way that Greek, Egyptian, and Roman mathematics co-ordinate with Greek, Egyptian, and Roman engineering marvels.

fooker 4y ago

> language(Sanskrit) depends on analogies and metaphors a tad too much ie, not being quantitive and exact This is absolutely true. You will find a bunch of modern keyboard warriors who have not studied Sanskrit literature vehemently disagreeing with this based on some misplaced sense of pride. Sanskrit is --syntactically-- a very exact language with no room for debate. The flip side of this is that every dialect got labelled as an aberration (literally!) with no hope of mainstream adoption. Now moving on from syntax, Sanskrit semantics is intentionally loosely defined. So much that you are discouraged from interpreting it yourself. The usual argument for that is that you would have a teacher who will teach you the correct interpretation. Obviously this did not scale, and caused knowledge to get lost wholesale over time. A concrete example is the grammar rules of the language itself, which is supposed to be exact and well defined. Well, it turns out that these rules were only written down in terms of mnemonics (similar to remembering the first letter of trigonometric identities to recall it), and people have interpreted these mnemonics in different ways.

akprasad 4y ago
> Sanskrit semantics is intentionally loosely defined I have studied Sanskrit literature extensively and do not know what this means. > people have interpreted these mnemonics in different ways Your implication is that people interpreted these mnemonics differently due to misunderstanding these rules. The mainstream scholarly response is rather some version of प्रयोगशरणा वैयाकरणाः ("grammarians take refuge in usage"), i.e. that different grammarians working in different eras and time periods were forced to reconcile the Ashtadhyayi as a fixed document with the slight divergence in contemporary usage -- that is, that they followed usage and intentionally reinterpreted rules to fit usage. For an example of how this accounts for Patanjali's readings in particular, see [1]. [1]: https://web.stanford.edu/~kiparsky/Papers/markers.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/~kiparsky/Papers/markers.pdf
- fooker 4y ago
  >I have studied Sanskrit literature extensively and do not know what this means. This means a sentence can often have many different meaning, not just the literal one suggested by the words. The idea is you either accept multiple meanings or settle it through debate. I am not criticizing this, this is fundamentally what makes literature and poetry interesting. But this makes it really difficult to draw a line between philosophy and science.

n1b0m 4y ago

From my understanding, before being influenced by Hellenistic culture the Buddha was never represented in human form.

wahern 4y ago
Greek statuary apparently had tremendous influence in Eurasia generally, including as far as Japan. The Greek wind god, Boreas, seems to have become (or at least been the source for depictions of) the Japanese wind god, Fūjin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C5%ABjin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C5%ABjin Regarding your point specifically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhist_art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhist_art
- progmetaldev 4y ago
  Thank you for posting these Wikipedia articles. I honestly had no idea that there was this combination of ideas between Greek and Buddhist thought and art, but looking at some of the art, it's much easier to see the influences while having this in mind.

selimthegrim 4y ago

Al-Biruni was Central Asian/Khwarizmian (related to Persian), not Arab.

shas3 4y ago

This is an ignorant generalization. Not sure if it is worth writing a rebuttal to a generalization that relies on one guy from 1000+ years ago.

th2o3i4uo3i4443 4y ago

[flagged]

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

th2o3i4uo3i4443 4y ago

There is a huge, unquestioned strain in the West that started with German Indology, that it has been as the original 'Aryans', that it was the inventor of all civilizations. This has been going on for 200 years, and formed the basis for the ruthless and savage colonization and India, but was quietly pushed out of view after the horrors of Nazism. You are merely replaying this template. The West has destroyed all its own traditions, and continues to want to not only appropriate and reform it in the mold of 'western rationality', but also to destroy the original tradition. We see this with Buddhism, Yoga, Ayurveda, Indology and what not, where the authority has been usurped by the West, not out of merit, but by politicking and economic cunning. The sad part is that nothing changes in the occident either. Greco-Egyptian philosophy was appropriated by Europeans for the simple reason that it was bat to beat the papacy with, but then when it posed a real threat, it was again derailed by the continental philosophers and excreted out. The role of continental philosophy on the study of India is an amazing one that is yet to be told. Here's a great presentation from a recent conference, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiD7uOz7eTY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiD7uOz7eTY

biorach 4y ago
> There is a huge, unquestioned strain in the West that started with German Indology, that it has been as the original 'Aryans', that it was the inventor of all civilizations This was very much questioned even when it was somewhat mainstream, which was many many decades ago. Since the second world war it is unquestionably considered racist garbage by all reputable mainstream historians, archeologists and linguists.
- paganel 4y ago
  The historians, archeologists and linguists might well question it, but the feeling is still there, see the recent comments made by an European Union high official comparing the "garden" of Europe to the "jungle" of what's just outside of it.
  - biorach 4y ago
    You said "There is... a strain in the West... that it was the inventor of all civilizations" Academics do more than just "question" this, they consider it racist junk, unworthy of any consideration whatsoever. An EU official talking about a "jungle", while reprehensible, is not representative of the thinking of most people, and, to keep you from wandering off-topic, is not claiming the West invented civilization.

psuresh 4y ago

Indian philosophy discarded physical well-being and the so called 'living standard' thing. Instead efforts were to optimize inner well-being. They realized pointless material pleasure will lead you nowhere and the craving for better environment only grow exponentially ad infinitum.

slibhb 4y ago
Nowhere except modern medicine, technology, etc.
unmole 4y ago
The longest stage of a typical man's life is spent as a Grihastha in persuit of worldly and material success. Two of the four aspects of Purusartha are about physiological well being. I have no idea what you're talking about.

slibhb 4y ago

My impression is that Buddhism could hardly be more different than Ancient Greek philosophy. If there's a parallel between Buddhism and some Western tradition, it's to Gnosticism. Or perhaps various Judeo-Christian traditions that encouraged ascetism.

lukeplato 4y ago
Plato's allegories are very similar to Buddhist metaphysics. I recommend Vervaeke's meaning crisis series which draws connections between Buddhism, ancient Greek philosophy, Gnosticism, neoplatonism, etc. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLND1JCRq8Vuh3f0P5qjrSdb5eC1ZfZwWJ https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLND1JCRq8Vuh3f0P5qjrS...

coldtea 4y ago

>Buddha lived around the same time as Socrates. I can't help but wonder if some of the ideas were not cross-pollinated. Well, at the (later, circa 330 B.C) time of Alexander the Great, some areas of India and modern-day Pakistan had established Greek cities, living behind them some considerable influence. That's a well known historical meeting between the two: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhism

npinterview 4y ago

Colonial eurocentric thought inform history studies. Greeks were at the fringes of the ancient civilization. The Romans and the Germans were considered barbarians in contrast. India on the other hand was the center of the ancient world, both by sea trade as well as its huge population. The Chinese as well as the SE Asians sent their best scholars as well as royalty to study in India. It is very much more likely that the Greeks themselves benefited from their contact with India, as did many other ancient civilizations of that time.