Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies Book

The book is a detailed (656 pages) comparative study of Greek and Indian religious and philosophical thought. McEvilley argues that there was extensive contact between India and Greece in the pre-Socratic period* and that ancient Indian religious thought was the origin of the other-worldly philosophical themes (e.g., reincarnation and monism; separation of the soul from the body) seen, for example in Parmenides, Pythagoras, and Plato.**

This account may explain Plato's belief in an unchanging reality (an eternal, perfect oneness) as compared to the natural world of illusion (maya), cyclic time as opposed to the Judeo-Christian beginning (creation) and end (judgment day); rejection of the body that is "so saturated with matter" (Phaedo); the flux and unreality of sensory experience as opposed to unchanging other-worldliness; and philosophical knowledge and wisdom as "a freeing power" to release the soul to realize one's essential cosmic nature. This Indian influence might also explain why Socrates seems like a wandering Indian pundit and why Plato's Republic could be seen as a laboratory to, in McEvilley's terms, "perfect one's soul."

McEvilley writes that India and Greece are typically walled off from each other by Western scholarship, with India being seen as religious, mystical and otherworldly whereas Greece was free of these elements. McEvilley argues that a division such as this is not accurate.*** Regarding why Western scholars have insisted on building this wall between Indian religious and Greek philosophical thought, McEvilley believes that this is tied up to the need of the West to justify its colonial policy of domination and the need to dismiss Indian thought as primitive and otherworldly.

McEvilley also argues that Epicureanism, though focused on the natural as opposed to the supernatural world, contains the Platonic and Buddhist elements of "imperturbability," i.e., a "god's kind of pleasure," an absence of pain, "a Buddha-like" tranquility, a mental "ataraxia," which is superior to "the vicissitudes of the body." McEvilley states that "the fact that both the Buddha and Epicurus espoused the doctrine of personal happiness caused them to be represented by their antagonists as simple-minded hedonists. It seems that the word hedone in Epicurus should not be translated 'pleasure' but something like 'joy' or 'serenity.' What Epicurus means is not simply positive sense-pleasure, Buddhist sukkha, though it may include this. It is more a quietist concept, which holds ataraxia, imperturbability, as the highest delight….Thus Epicurus's brand of "hedonism" should hardly be so called at all."

*More specifically, McEvilley writes that "Instead of Greeks living in India or Indians living in Greece, the evidence indicates contacts taking place between them in the intermediary culture of Persia." Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan makes a similar argument in his "Eastern Religions and Western Thought."

**McEvilley writes that "There is a relationship between early Greek philosophy and early Indian philosophy as clear as that between, say, early Greek sculpture and Egyptian sculpture." The book is filled with textual comparisons that, in the author's view, establishes this connection between Greek and Indian thought.

*** McEvilley also argues that Greece later had an extensive influence in the development of Buddhist thought. This is his twin theme in this book.