03-05-2008, 06:21 PM
A Comparative History of World Philosophy: From the Upanishads to Kant (Paperback)
by Ben-Ami Scharfstein (Author)
The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies (Hardcover)
by Thomas McEvilley (Author) "Ancient cultures from the eastern Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean were shaped through a continuous interplay with one another, an interplay only dimly seen, which..." (more)
This unparalleled study of early Eastern and Western philosophy challenges every existing belief about the foundations of Western civilization. Spanning thirty years of intensive research, this book proves what many scholars could not explain: that todayâs Western world must be considered the product of both Greek and Indian thoughtâWestern and Eastern philosophies.
Thomas McEvilley explores how trade, imperialism, and migration currents allowed cultural philosophies to intermingle freely throughout India, Egypt, Greece, and the ancient Near East. This groundbreaking reference will stir relentless debate among philosophers, art historians, and students.
From the Publisher
Two Worlds, One Philosophical Cradle:
Scholar Explores Hidden Kinship Between Eastern and Western Culture in Revolutionary Study;
In the Early Days, Ideas Traveled Freely Between India and Greece
A revolutionary study by the classical philologist and art historian Thomas McEvilley is about to challenge much of academia. In THE SHAPE OF ANCIENT THOUGHT, an empirical study of the roots of Western culture, the author argues that Eastern and Western civilizations have not always had separate, autonomous metaphysical schemes, but have mutually influenced each other over a long period of time. Examining ancient trade routes, imperialist movements, and migration currents, he shows how some of todayâs key philosophical ideas circulated and intermingled freely in the triangle between Greece, India, and Persia, leading to an intense metaphysical interchange between Greek and Indian cultures.
As the author explains it, "The records of caravan routes are like the philosophical stemmata of history, the trails of oral discourses moving through communities, of texts copied from texts. . . .What they reveal is not a structure of parallel straight linesâone labeled âGreece,â another âPersia,â another âIndiaââbut a tangled web in which an element in one culture often leads to elements in others."
While scholars have sensed a philosophical kinship between Eastern and Western cultures for many decades, THE SHAPE OF ANCIENT THOUGHT is the first study to provide the empirical evidence. Covering a period ranging from 600 B.C. until the era of Neoplatonism and a geographical expanse reaching across the ancient world, McEvilley explores the key philosophical paradigms of these cultures, such as Monism, the doctrine of reincarnation in India and Egypt, and early Pluralism in Greece and India, to reveal striking similarities between the two metaphysical systems. Based on 30 years of intense intellectual inquiry and research and on hundreds of early historical, philosophical, spiritual, and Buddhist texts, the study offers a scope and an interdisciplinary perspective that has no equal in the scholarly world.
With a study like THE SHAPE OF ANCIENT THOUGHT, students and scholars of history, philosophy, cultural studies, and classics will find that their field has been put on entirely new footing. Yet as editor Bill Beckley points out, the merits of this work reach into a broader social context: "More recently, events have leant an unexpected urgency to the [book] by focusing the worldâs attention on Afghanistan (ancient Bactria), where much of the story unfolds in this volume, and where the difficult karma of cross-cultural contacts is still alive."
For many, certainly for me philosophy started with Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. What a mistake! What we think of as Greek Philosophy is a mix between Indian and Greek philosophy based on extensive exchange of knowledge starting no later than 550 BC at the time of Buddha in India and Pythagoras in Greece. Up to 350 AD you can find the same concepts in India and Greece. Therefore Western thinking being unique, at least up to that point in time, is an illusion. It was joint East West thinking.
So you may ask, so what? The surprising merit of this book is that by comparing the different schools of thought in India with those of Greece I developed for the first time some real understanding of the differences. A second merit is that the book proves that what appear to be important differences between East and Western ways of thinking are due do misinterpretation of texts. There are differences and overlaps between the schools but that does not depend on whether they are Greek or Indian. Finally I feel more comfortable by knowing that our philosophical base is based on the joint efforts from two great philosophical traditions.
There is no book on which I have spent more hours in reading time. But it was worth it. For an easy start begin with the last chapter, number 25. Even reading only that chapter makes the book worthwhile to buy.
News Flash: Plato was a Yogi & Greeks may have made a major contribution to Buddhism.
This is a magnificent and most provocative piece of scholarship. In the course of 732 pages of beautifully written and carefully documented prose, McEvilley establishes the evidence for a number of surprising conclusions of great relevance for Yoga Science.
First -- Pre-literate Sumerians were the first scientists.
Based on observations made over generations, Bronze Age Mesopotamians, in the millennia before writing (probably by 3000BC), had figured out the precession of the equinoxes and how a number system based on 60 - the "sexagesimal system" that we still use today - has great advantages for measuring time.
They had also figured out that this number system works better than the decimal system for the tuning of string and pipe musical instruments -- of which there were many in ancient Mesopotamia.
This work long preceded and set the stage for Pythagoras and the rest of the pre-Socratics to whom we generally attribute the origins of science.
Second -- Plato was a Yogi.
In 559BC Darius I of Persia established the Achaemenid empire that reached from the Aegean, Black, and Eastern Mediterranean Seas (including a slew of Greek cities), across Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Persia, Central Asia, and all the way to the Indus river. Darius collected all manner of precious things from across his empire including medical systems and philosophies. His Royal Road reached from Susa (in present day Iran) across Iraq and Asia Minor all the way to Sardes (near the Aegean end of present day Turkey). He maintained a large retinue of translators in his capitals to facilitate communication. As a result, goods, people, and ideas from India, in its early Upanishadic period at the time, moved readily into the stream of pre-Socratic philosophy.
McEvilley tells this story in such a way that you feel you get to know the pre-Socratics - folks like Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Empedocles - as real people. He does side-by-side comparisons of their writings and those of contemporary Indian philosophers - the documents make the case.
He reviews why no-one had ever done this comparison before.
The tale leaves little doubt that the influence here on Greek thought was deep and lasting. The net result, by the time we get to Plato, some 150 years later, it is clear that forms of life practice that we would now recognize as Yoga, had also become an integral part of the practice of Greek philosophy.
Plato's Academy was a Yoga ashram, in effect.
Third -- Nagarjuna was a Greco-Buddhist.
Greek thought developed rapidly - by the time of Alexander, another century had passed, and Greek philosophy was now considerably more sophisticated than contemporaneous Indian in its manner of argument and had developed mature forms of syllogism and dialectic.
Alexander did not move just to conquer the Persians militarily - he went to remake Persia into a Greek - or "Hellenic" civilization. He equipped himself to establish Greek colonies, with a set pattern for urban infrastructure and the people needed to build and inhabit these centers. He took with his army their families, teachers for their kids, craftsmen of all kinds, physicians, philosophers, and tens of thousands of prospective colonists.
He lefts dozens of "Alexandrias" across Persia, into Central Asia, and North Western India. The legacy of all this in Central Asia and Northwestern India was a dynamic Greco-Indian civilization. Many of Greek descent embraced Buddhism and appear to have played a significant role in the emergence of the Mahayana and its spread into China from Central Asia. King Ashoka was himself most likely half or quarter Greek. Greek logic -- the syllogism and the dialectic - were adopted by the Greco-Buddhists and most eloquently elaborated by Nagarjuna in the 1st or 2nd Century AD.
Bottom line - Science was Yoga Science in these ancient formative times. This is my conclusion from McEvilley's evidence.
What happened next? In the East, development of the Greco-Buddhist civilization was cut off by what appear to have been a number of factors - my impression is that these include climate change with desertification of Central Asia, invasions from various Steppe nomad groups, and Islamization of the region during the centuries of the late first and early second Millennium AD. In the West, Greco-Indian thought was summarized by Plotinus and the Neo-Platonist movements he spawned in the early 1st Millennium. Then, the collapse of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity and Islam led to a complex subsequent history.
What happened to this Greco-Indian synthesis? In the East, elements of it were preserved in the Asian Buddhist traditions, perhaps most completely in Tibet. In the West, Neo-platonism fed into the stream of esotercism that is being documented by scholars such as Antoine Faivre, Wouter Hanegraaff, and their colleagues.
Yoga Science as an effort to re-integrate the seemingly divergent streams of this vastly complex history into a coherent whole as key to our global inheritance - scientifically updated and philosophically streamlined for the future.
Thank you, Dr. McEvilley!
Thomas McEvilley, 'The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies.' New York: Allworth Press, 2002. ISBN 1581152035. Hardback, 731 pp. Illustrated with b/w plates, maps, and with a detailed bibliography and index.
The orthodox position regarding the early Greek philosophers might be thought of as a view which likes to see Ancient Greece as a self-contained clearly demarcated autochthonous entity, and the Greeks as more or less like us in meaning by 'philosophy' what our orthodox professors such as Guthrie, Kirk, Raven, Barnes etc., mean by the term.
Over this orthodox landscape the American scholar Thomas McEvilley has arrived like a thunderbolt of Indra with a burst of brilliant light that enables us to see clearly for the first time things that without him we might never have seen.
As a classicist who is competent, not only in Greek and Latin but also in Sanskrit and several other languages, and who is conversant, not merely with the history and primary texts of an isolated and clearly demarcated 'Greece' (which never existed except in the minds of the orthodox), but with the larger Indian-Mesopotamian-Egyptian-Greek complex, he has devoted thirty years research to bringing before us a massive and comprehensive account of the philosophies that burgeoned and grew within that complex.
It was a complex in which an enormous amount of movement took place with innumerable people of various sorts engaged in travel by both land and sea - statesmen, ambassadors, emissaries, couriers, merchants, bankers, financial agents, healers, soldiers, sailors, scholars, students, priests, missionaries, religious mendicants, holy men, wonder workers, tourists, sightseers, etc.
It was also one in which people still retained their natural curiosity about others, their ways of life and beliefs, and would have been eager to listen to the wise and informed no matter what region of the earth they hailed from. This open-mindedness, naturally enough, led to a great deal of cross-fertilization of ideas which McEvilley, a man who happily is similarly open-minded, sets out before us in detail. What he shows us is that, while it is undoubtedly true that Indian thinkers learned certain things from the Greeks, it is equally true that the Greeks learned some very important things from the Indians.
By all means read Guthrie and Kirk and Raven and Barnes and the rest of the tribe of the Orthodox, but be aware that - imprisoned as they are in the cave of wishful thinking with its ceaseless and seductive whisper - autochthonous ... autochthonous ... autochthonous - they are giving you only an incomplete and distorted picture of what ancient Greek thought was really about. For the bigger and truer picture you will most assuredly need McEvilley's truly magisterial study, a study which throws a dazzling and brilliant light over what has hitherto been the somewhat dim and distorted landscape of the orthodox.
The Upanishads (Classic of Indian Spirituality) (Paperback)
by Eknath Easwaran (Introduction, Translator) "AMPLY THE LONGEST and certainly among the oldest of the Upanishads, the Brihadaranyaka touches on every Upanishadic theme and covers the range of its styles..." (more)
by Ben-Ami Scharfstein (Author)
The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies (Hardcover)
by Thomas McEvilley (Author) "Ancient cultures from the eastern Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean were shaped through a continuous interplay with one another, an interplay only dimly seen, which..." (more)
This unparalleled study of early Eastern and Western philosophy challenges every existing belief about the foundations of Western civilization. Spanning thirty years of intensive research, this book proves what many scholars could not explain: that todayâs Western world must be considered the product of both Greek and Indian thoughtâWestern and Eastern philosophies.
Thomas McEvilley explores how trade, imperialism, and migration currents allowed cultural philosophies to intermingle freely throughout India, Egypt, Greece, and the ancient Near East. This groundbreaking reference will stir relentless debate among philosophers, art historians, and students.
From the Publisher
Two Worlds, One Philosophical Cradle:
Scholar Explores Hidden Kinship Between Eastern and Western Culture in Revolutionary Study;
In the Early Days, Ideas Traveled Freely Between India and Greece
A revolutionary study by the classical philologist and art historian Thomas McEvilley is about to challenge much of academia. In THE SHAPE OF ANCIENT THOUGHT, an empirical study of the roots of Western culture, the author argues that Eastern and Western civilizations have not always had separate, autonomous metaphysical schemes, but have mutually influenced each other over a long period of time. Examining ancient trade routes, imperialist movements, and migration currents, he shows how some of todayâs key philosophical ideas circulated and intermingled freely in the triangle between Greece, India, and Persia, leading to an intense metaphysical interchange between Greek and Indian cultures.
As the author explains it, "The records of caravan routes are like the philosophical stemmata of history, the trails of oral discourses moving through communities, of texts copied from texts. . . .What they reveal is not a structure of parallel straight linesâone labeled âGreece,â another âPersia,â another âIndiaââbut a tangled web in which an element in one culture often leads to elements in others."
While scholars have sensed a philosophical kinship between Eastern and Western cultures for many decades, THE SHAPE OF ANCIENT THOUGHT is the first study to provide the empirical evidence. Covering a period ranging from 600 B.C. until the era of Neoplatonism and a geographical expanse reaching across the ancient world, McEvilley explores the key philosophical paradigms of these cultures, such as Monism, the doctrine of reincarnation in India and Egypt, and early Pluralism in Greece and India, to reveal striking similarities between the two metaphysical systems. Based on 30 years of intense intellectual inquiry and research and on hundreds of early historical, philosophical, spiritual, and Buddhist texts, the study offers a scope and an interdisciplinary perspective that has no equal in the scholarly world.
With a study like THE SHAPE OF ANCIENT THOUGHT, students and scholars of history, philosophy, cultural studies, and classics will find that their field has been put on entirely new footing. Yet as editor Bill Beckley points out, the merits of this work reach into a broader social context: "More recently, events have leant an unexpected urgency to the [book] by focusing the worldâs attention on Afghanistan (ancient Bactria), where much of the story unfolds in this volume, and where the difficult karma of cross-cultural contacts is still alive."
For many, certainly for me philosophy started with Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. What a mistake! What we think of as Greek Philosophy is a mix between Indian and Greek philosophy based on extensive exchange of knowledge starting no later than 550 BC at the time of Buddha in India and Pythagoras in Greece. Up to 350 AD you can find the same concepts in India and Greece. Therefore Western thinking being unique, at least up to that point in time, is an illusion. It was joint East West thinking.
So you may ask, so what? The surprising merit of this book is that by comparing the different schools of thought in India with those of Greece I developed for the first time some real understanding of the differences. A second merit is that the book proves that what appear to be important differences between East and Western ways of thinking are due do misinterpretation of texts. There are differences and overlaps between the schools but that does not depend on whether they are Greek or Indian. Finally I feel more comfortable by knowing that our philosophical base is based on the joint efforts from two great philosophical traditions.
There is no book on which I have spent more hours in reading time. But it was worth it. For an easy start begin with the last chapter, number 25. Even reading only that chapter makes the book worthwhile to buy.
News Flash: Plato was a Yogi & Greeks may have made a major contribution to Buddhism.
This is a magnificent and most provocative piece of scholarship. In the course of 732 pages of beautifully written and carefully documented prose, McEvilley establishes the evidence for a number of surprising conclusions of great relevance for Yoga Science.
First -- Pre-literate Sumerians were the first scientists.
Based on observations made over generations, Bronze Age Mesopotamians, in the millennia before writing (probably by 3000BC), had figured out the precession of the equinoxes and how a number system based on 60 - the "sexagesimal system" that we still use today - has great advantages for measuring time.
They had also figured out that this number system works better than the decimal system for the tuning of string and pipe musical instruments -- of which there were many in ancient Mesopotamia.
This work long preceded and set the stage for Pythagoras and the rest of the pre-Socratics to whom we generally attribute the origins of science.
Second -- Plato was a Yogi.
In 559BC Darius I of Persia established the Achaemenid empire that reached from the Aegean, Black, and Eastern Mediterranean Seas (including a slew of Greek cities), across Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Persia, Central Asia, and all the way to the Indus river. Darius collected all manner of precious things from across his empire including medical systems and philosophies. His Royal Road reached from Susa (in present day Iran) across Iraq and Asia Minor all the way to Sardes (near the Aegean end of present day Turkey). He maintained a large retinue of translators in his capitals to facilitate communication. As a result, goods, people, and ideas from India, in its early Upanishadic period at the time, moved readily into the stream of pre-Socratic philosophy.
McEvilley tells this story in such a way that you feel you get to know the pre-Socratics - folks like Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Empedocles - as real people. He does side-by-side comparisons of their writings and those of contemporary Indian philosophers - the documents make the case.
He reviews why no-one had ever done this comparison before.
The tale leaves little doubt that the influence here on Greek thought was deep and lasting. The net result, by the time we get to Plato, some 150 years later, it is clear that forms of life practice that we would now recognize as Yoga, had also become an integral part of the practice of Greek philosophy.
Plato's Academy was a Yoga ashram, in effect.
Third -- Nagarjuna was a Greco-Buddhist.
Greek thought developed rapidly - by the time of Alexander, another century had passed, and Greek philosophy was now considerably more sophisticated than contemporaneous Indian in its manner of argument and had developed mature forms of syllogism and dialectic.
Alexander did not move just to conquer the Persians militarily - he went to remake Persia into a Greek - or "Hellenic" civilization. He equipped himself to establish Greek colonies, with a set pattern for urban infrastructure and the people needed to build and inhabit these centers. He took with his army their families, teachers for their kids, craftsmen of all kinds, physicians, philosophers, and tens of thousands of prospective colonists.
He lefts dozens of "Alexandrias" across Persia, into Central Asia, and North Western India. The legacy of all this in Central Asia and Northwestern India was a dynamic Greco-Indian civilization. Many of Greek descent embraced Buddhism and appear to have played a significant role in the emergence of the Mahayana and its spread into China from Central Asia. King Ashoka was himself most likely half or quarter Greek. Greek logic -- the syllogism and the dialectic - were adopted by the Greco-Buddhists and most eloquently elaborated by Nagarjuna in the 1st or 2nd Century AD.
Bottom line - Science was Yoga Science in these ancient formative times. This is my conclusion from McEvilley's evidence.
What happened next? In the East, development of the Greco-Buddhist civilization was cut off by what appear to have been a number of factors - my impression is that these include climate change with desertification of Central Asia, invasions from various Steppe nomad groups, and Islamization of the region during the centuries of the late first and early second Millennium AD. In the West, Greco-Indian thought was summarized by Plotinus and the Neo-Platonist movements he spawned in the early 1st Millennium. Then, the collapse of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity and Islam led to a complex subsequent history.
What happened to this Greco-Indian synthesis? In the East, elements of it were preserved in the Asian Buddhist traditions, perhaps most completely in Tibet. In the West, Neo-platonism fed into the stream of esotercism that is being documented by scholars such as Antoine Faivre, Wouter Hanegraaff, and their colleagues.
Yoga Science as an effort to re-integrate the seemingly divergent streams of this vastly complex history into a coherent whole as key to our global inheritance - scientifically updated and philosophically streamlined for the future.
Thank you, Dr. McEvilley!
Thomas McEvilley, 'The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies.' New York: Allworth Press, 2002. ISBN 1581152035. Hardback, 731 pp. Illustrated with b/w plates, maps, and with a detailed bibliography and index.
The orthodox position regarding the early Greek philosophers might be thought of as a view which likes to see Ancient Greece as a self-contained clearly demarcated autochthonous entity, and the Greeks as more or less like us in meaning by 'philosophy' what our orthodox professors such as Guthrie, Kirk, Raven, Barnes etc., mean by the term.
Over this orthodox landscape the American scholar Thomas McEvilley has arrived like a thunderbolt of Indra with a burst of brilliant light that enables us to see clearly for the first time things that without him we might never have seen.
As a classicist who is competent, not only in Greek and Latin but also in Sanskrit and several other languages, and who is conversant, not merely with the history and primary texts of an isolated and clearly demarcated 'Greece' (which never existed except in the minds of the orthodox), but with the larger Indian-Mesopotamian-Egyptian-Greek complex, he has devoted thirty years research to bringing before us a massive and comprehensive account of the philosophies that burgeoned and grew within that complex.
It was a complex in which an enormous amount of movement took place with innumerable people of various sorts engaged in travel by both land and sea - statesmen, ambassadors, emissaries, couriers, merchants, bankers, financial agents, healers, soldiers, sailors, scholars, students, priests, missionaries, religious mendicants, holy men, wonder workers, tourists, sightseers, etc.
It was also one in which people still retained their natural curiosity about others, their ways of life and beliefs, and would have been eager to listen to the wise and informed no matter what region of the earth they hailed from. This open-mindedness, naturally enough, led to a great deal of cross-fertilization of ideas which McEvilley, a man who happily is similarly open-minded, sets out before us in detail. What he shows us is that, while it is undoubtedly true that Indian thinkers learned certain things from the Greeks, it is equally true that the Greeks learned some very important things from the Indians.
By all means read Guthrie and Kirk and Raven and Barnes and the rest of the tribe of the Orthodox, but be aware that - imprisoned as they are in the cave of wishful thinking with its ceaseless and seductive whisper - autochthonous ... autochthonous ... autochthonous - they are giving you only an incomplete and distorted picture of what ancient Greek thought was really about. For the bigger and truer picture you will most assuredly need McEvilley's truly magisterial study, a study which throws a dazzling and brilliant light over what has hitherto been the somewhat dim and distorted landscape of the orthodox.
The Upanishads (Classic of Indian Spirituality) (Paperback)
by Eknath Easwaran (Introduction, Translator) "AMPLY THE LONGEST and certainly among the oldest of the Upanishads, the Brihadaranyaka touches on every Upanishadic theme and covers the range of its styles..." (more)