Scipio storytelling Book

Given the similarities between Platonic and Indian thought, I reviewed this Radhakrishnan book (second edition, 1940)from that perspective only.

Radhakrishnan describes extensive contact between India and pre-Plato Greece, and suggests that trade between the two regions can be traced to the sixteenth or fifteenth century BCE; he states that the Persian Empire (established in 578 BCE with the fall of Baghdad) under Darius, Cyrus' successor, included the Indus Valley and Greece. "The Iranians, who ruled the empire from the Mediterranean to the Indus, were themselves kinsmen of the Vedic Aryans," Radhakrishnan writes. "The community of interest and ideas between the kindred peoples received emphasis during the centuries preceding the invasion of India by Alexander the Great, when Persia exercised sway over north-western India. While Indians took part in the invasion of Greece in 480 B.C., Greek officials and soldiers served in India also."

It is clear that Radhakrishnan believes that Indian Vedic thought influenced Plato and the Greek thinkers before him, although he allows that "it is quite possible that the Greeks and the Indians reached similar conclusions independently of one another." Radhakrishnan states that some of the Upanishads that "set forth the fundamental concepts of Hindu thought" are "pre-Buddhistic (900-to-600 B.C.)" and these are the beliefs that seem likely to have been incorporated into Greek thought and particularly "to the Orphic and Eleusinian mysteries and the doctrines of Pythagoras and Plato…." Radhakrishnan notes that the beliefs held in common "are those of rebirth, the immortality and godlike character of the soul, the bondage of the soul in the body, and the possibility of release by purification." Drawing in particular from Orpheus and Pythagoras, Radhakrishnan sees the following as the Vedic origins of Plato's thought: "The essential unity of the human and the divine spirit, the immortality of the human soul, the escape from the restless wheel of the troublesome journey, the phenomenality of the world, the contempt for the body, the distinction between knowledge and opinion" and these "contradict every single idea of Greek popular religion."

By implication, Indian thought is for Radhakrishnan the foundation of Western religious philosophy and it may be. "Some of those whose tradition and training are limited to the European are apt to imagine that before the great Greek thinkers, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, there was a crude confusion of thought, a sort of chaos without form and void. Such a view becomes almost a provincialism," Radhakrishnan writes, "when we realize that systems of thought which influenced countless millions of human beings had been elaborated by people who never heard the names of the Greek thinkers."

In Radhakrishnan, the reader gets a sense that he is writing about what it means to be a Platonic man: "To be inspired in our thoughts by divine knowledge, to be moved in our will by the divine purpose, to mould our emotions into harmony with divine bliss, to get at the great self of truth, goodness, and beauty to which we give the name of God as a spiritual presence, to raise our whole being and life to divine status, is the ultimate purpose and meaning of human living." It is frustrating, though, to read Radhakrishnan as he gives us a purified vision of an unreal world that leaves us and our world behind.