16th century European contacts with Hinduism

[nanda chandran]

Steve Farmer writes :

>You have the story right, but it doesn't show up in the Platonic
>corpus (for 'Plato's works,' read 'works of the 4th-century BCE
>Platonic school')

Strange. The first time I heard it somebody said it was from Plato's
Timaeus. Either my source was wrong or I remembered wrong.

>In extant documents, this *particular* story first shows up in the 4th
>century CE -- nearly 800 years after the death of 'Socrates'!

That itself need not invalidate the story. Even the Buddhist canon that we
have now was put down in writing centuries after the historic Buddha. Still
we accept that as his teachings.

We also have the Buddhist text, "Milindapanha", which is basically a
debate between the Greek king Menander (Indianized to Milinda) and the
Buddhist monk NAgAsena. Bertrand Russell, in his, "History of Western
Philosophy", makes a dubious claim that this text has a Greek original! Is
there such a text?

Doesn't seem too likely - given the stress on "anatta" - "no soul" in the
text which is uniquely Buddhist.

Also Parmenides, who is supposed to have been a soldier in the Grecian army
which invaded India, seems to teach something pretty similar to the
MAdhyamaka Buddhist chatushkoti - the four fold negation.

Plus the stories regarding Alexander's encounters with yogis and logicians
in India.

>-- in the Church historian Eusebios (d. 340 CE). See _Evangelicae
>Praeparationis_ 15.11.3; cf. Sedlar (1980: 14 and 306, n. 33).

Fascinating. So was the Church trying to counter philosophical scepticism
with support from India - that religion itself is the end of philosophy?

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