00:00:12.149 - 00:00:33.049

The book that we're here together to talk about is a book that I started working toward in 1964. That's 36 years ago, and when I say I started working toward it, I mean that it came to my attention. Uh, when I was in graduate school, that

00:00:33.049 - 00:00:53.369

I felt that there were certain really significant connections between Greek and Indian thought, roughly, let's say the 6th century BC. There are several reasons why ancient Greek and Indian civilizations were closely related. First, both were deeply affected by the Bronze Age civilizations of the ancient Near

00:00:53.369 - 00:01:13.120

East, especially Mesopotamia. Second, both were in the Persian Empire and in close touch there. Finally, there was rich trade between them in the Alexandrian and Roman periods, and by the way, the pictures here will illustrate all this in a kind of loose free associated way. So

00:01:13.120 - 00:01:36.250

there was a commingling of ancient cultures and I felt that these issues had been neglected both by classicists and when I looked into it by endologists. And it took me a while to realize that they had been neglected because there were certain socially uncomfortable obstacles to

00:01:36.250 - 00:01:59.339

such subject matter in the colonial and the immediate post-colonial periods. And that above all there was a need to kind of keep the Greek tradition seeming pure and Western and as if it had not been significantly influenced by non-western forms of civilization and yet it came

00:01:59.339 - 00:02:19.270

increasingly through to me this temptation to look more and more deeply into that. It seemed that there was something repressed there, not something which had just happened to be neglected, but something that had been repressed out of an agenda which had to do with colonialism and

00:02:19.270 - 00:02:42.259

racism. Over the 30 years of working on this material was two great trends. First of all, there seems unquestionably to have been an integrated effort of thought that went on in the 6th century BC between Greeks and Indians who were interacting in the Persian Empire, Eastern

00:02:42.259 - 00:03:05.029

Greece and Northwest India from about 545 to 490 BC. They were in the same political polity that they were both in the Persian Empire. They had constant contact with one another, and those are the years in which pre-Socratic philosophy occurred. The evidence, which is vast. Seems

00:03:05.029 - 00:03:33.070

to suggest that pre-Socratic philosophy was essentially deposited by Indian influence through the Persian Empire and that the great philosophers whom we think of as the origins of our tradition. Pythagoras He amenities Anaximander and so on that they had somehow been contacting Indian ideas through Persian texts

00:03:33.070 - 00:03:51.009

and through Persian contacts and that this is what they brought into Greece. One of the problems that my book can expect to encounter when it enters the world is that I will be perceived properly as having struck at the very roots of the idea of Western

00:03:51.009 - 00:04:13.580

civilization because the pre-Socratics are the very roots of Western civilization. They are the number one top of the hierarchy for the beginning of Western civilization, and what I feel happened was that many, perhaps most. Of the great contributions of the pre-Socratics were simulus diffused from India

00:04:14.229 - 00:04:32.498

during the Persian Empire. The second time when this occurred was in the Alexandrian Empire, and at that time, as far as I can tell, it seems that there was a reversal of the direction of influence that by that time it seems that the Greeks caught the

00:04:32.498 - 00:04:51.670

ball of philosophy from India in the pre-Socratic period, and then a couple 100 years later they had gone so far with it by themselves that they were ahead of the Indians, and then they passed the ball back to India. In the Alexandrian and Hellenistic and then

00:04:51.670 - 00:05:15.209

the Roman period. There's no question about the fact that Greeks broke the code of the logic and the dialectic. They are the ones who figured out how you prove something logically. And this had not yet really been demonstrated in India, although Indian philosophers had produced the

00:05:15.209 - 00:05:41.720

great fundamental ideas of the Upanishadic and related movements in the early period. Still they had not cracked the code of thought, how thought actually proves something, and this was the great gift that the Greeks. In the 3rd and 2nd centuries and 1st centuries BC gave back

00:05:41.720 - 00:06:03.179

to India through the sea trade and especially in the. First two centuries of the of the Roman Empire. In antiquity, Afghanistan was known as Bactria. That was the great The accomplishment of Alexander the Great's famous expedition into Asia when he wanted to revenge the Greeks upon

00:06:03.179 - 00:06:29.260

the Persian Empire for their two attacks on Greece 150 or so years earlier, and he at great pains and with enormous effort and care, managed to conquer and pacify Bactria and our present day Afghanistan, and it stayed. Pacifized and stabilized with some few exceptions for 2

00:06:29.260 - 00:06:46.540

or 300 years really. And what Alexander did was he created this area there where he left a lot of Greek colonies, you know, those enormous armies that were involved in such expeditions in antiquity. They were made up to a large extent of mercenary soldiers, and the,

00:06:46.809 - 00:07:04.600

the idea was that a mercenary soldier would at the end of his service. Be given an allotment of land in the conquered territory, and then he would marry into the local population and become a part of it. In other words, these were colonies that were meant

00:07:04.600 - 00:07:24.119

to last and become a part of the local culture. The Greeks in Afghanistan and northern India tended to become Buddhists because the Buddhist religion didn't acknowledge the caste system. So you were at no disadvantage to be coming into it as an outsider. Alexander left something like

00:07:24.119 - 00:07:49.440

40 colonies in Afghanistan and northwest India at the end of his six years or so there, and these colonies, some of them survived for, it seems, as much as 3 or 400 years, as Indo-Greek or Greco-Indian communities, where those two Ancient cultures mingled and enriched one

00:07:49.440 - 00:08:09.119

another in what seems not to have been an essentially hostile way. Now, if you focus on that idea for a moment, you see it's rather phenomenal because as the English poet Percy Shelley said, we are all Greeks, meaning everybody in the West, meaning the Western civilization

00:08:09.119 - 00:08:31.190

really developed out of Greek origins. But what is equally interesting to note is that Asian civilization seems to have been almost equally dependent upon Indian origins. I mean, of course, China had an ancient culture which was great and tremendously important in East Asia, but still, Indian

00:08:31.190 - 00:08:56.030

culture was uh back to the Indus Valley was really the earliest civilization in Asia, and, and it's possible to see. Western civilization arising out of Greece. And Asian civilization arising out of India, and this is the great dichotomy between east and west, they never shall meet

00:08:56.030 - 00:09:20.299

and so on. And yet there was that period when they were mutually fertilizing one another and influencing one another and contributing to one another with what seems like a great deal of love and constructive feeling. And the location where this primarily happened for several 100 years

00:09:20.299 - 00:09:45.270

in the early Iron Age was what today we call Afghanistan. That sound like thunder that I heard outside this window 6 weeks ago. Reminded me once I learned what it had been, once I saw those two gigundus absences in the sky, reminded me of those fallen

00:09:45.270 - 00:10:04.830

monumental Buddhas that the Afghan government brought down by bombing in Bamiyan about a year ago, the World Trade Towers and those two rock-cut Buddhas look rather the same if you think about it. And one was an icon of the east and one was an icon of

00:10:04.830 - 00:10:30.190

the west, and that was the place where they had entered into a mutually fruitful Birth of civilization experience which has led to the main outlines of civilization both east and west and which has been repressed in our awareness by primarily what seemed to have been the

00:10:30.190 - 00:10:53.659

agendas of colonialism. I mean that when Western colonizing nations began to move into India, the Portuguese and the Dutch, and then, of course, above all, the English, they had to deal with the moral weight of what they were doing, and basically, a moment of, ah, Lightning

00:10:53.659 - 00:11:18.700

like realization dawned in 1786 when an Englishman named Sir William Jones gave a talk at the Asiatic Society of Bengal, which he had founded, in which he pointed out that Sanskrit was an Indo-European language. Now the Indo-European languages are, of course, primarily characteristic of Europe, and

00:11:18.700 - 00:11:42.770

Greek and Latin are Indo-European, and all of the major European languages are Indo-European. And the idea that some ancient culture was an Indo-European culture or an Indo-European language speaking culture seemed to associate it. With the civilization of the West and of the colonizing nations, the fact

00:11:42.770 - 00:12:02.520

that Sanskrit was an Indo-European language was something that actually had been realized and had been remarked upon by a handful of writers for several centuries before then, but was when Sir William Jones made his great presentation. In 1786 that it struck like a lightning bolt into

00:12:02.520 - 00:12:25.210

the heart of the colonial project. In Europe, because the colonial project was based upon the idea that non-Western peoples are essentially non-civilized, that they are kind of childlike in a way. And that they have to be led forward into civilization. And into the Hegelian view of

00:12:25.210 - 00:12:49.869

historical progress by Western cultures. But if suddenly this great Asian culture, which was being colonized from the west, turned out not only to be based on an Indo-European language itself, but also to have been arguably the oldest of the Indo-European languages which was literarily developed. Then

00:12:49.869 - 00:13:09.200

this seemed to reverse the values somewhat. British colonizers had to ask themselves, do we have the right? Because when people set out to do great wrongs to their fellow humans, they generally have to convince themselves that it's a great right that they're doing. And the cover

00:13:09.200 - 00:13:32.510

story was always very essential to the whole colonial project, and the discovery that classical Indian civilization had been an Indo-European civilization as much as that of Greece or Rome, or France or Germany or England, and that it was even older, but arguably older than them. Seemed

00:13:32.510 - 00:13:54.169

to suddenly reverse the direction. In which the value judgments were going and suddenly there was a certain internal shakenness to the will that the British had developed for their colonizing mission in India. So that the way that this problem was solved for their purposes by British

00:13:54.169 - 00:14:19.830

and other colonialists was to say that the Indo-European input into Indian culture. Had been very early and very small. And that it had been what you you might say browned out or let's say assimilated to this non-white culture and kind of sunken and lost in it

00:14:20.280 - 00:14:38.460

so that Western cultures later could say we should go in and re imprint that imprint of Indo-European civilization on India which they've got a good early imprint. But then they kind of lived beyond it and lived their way out of it and now we've got to

00:14:38.460 - 00:14:59.840

go in and re-imprint it and this was kind of the feeling. That I think that the British had about their project in India that they were taking up a project which had first been broached by the so-called Indo-Aryans with their migration into or invasion into or

00:14:59.840 - 00:15:22.375

whatever it was into India in say roughly around 2000 BC and then again had been re-imprinted by the Greek input into India. Under Alexander the Great and then the Ehoeid monarchs who succeeded him, which happened primarily in Afghanistan but also greatly in Northwest India, and then

00:15:22.375 - 00:15:41.280

the British felt that they were coming in and giving a third version of this imprint, so that that was kind of the way they justified it to themselves that these dark skinned peoples needed another shot, another infusion of white Western culture. In order to bring them

00:15:41.280 - 00:16:08.150

back to the mark. Even though there had been this ancient contact between Greek and Indian civilizations, still there were supposedly incompatible tendencies in these two forms of civilization. India was seen as irrational and mystical, and Greece was seen as rational and positivistic and what began to

00:16:08.150 - 00:16:29.969

come through to me with more and more clarity as I. Started studying these matters in the late 60s and early 70s. Was that in fact there's nothing irrational and mystical. In Indian culture, which is not also present in Greek culture. And there's nothing really rational and

00:16:29.969 - 00:16:53.039

positivistic in Greek culture, which is not also. Clearly articulated in Indian culture, so it seemed that this distinction had possibly been based on a kind of a wishful thinking based on a racist colonial agenda, for example, the fact that first attracted my attention that. The night

00:16:53.039 - 00:17:15.319

in 1964 was that in the 6th century BC Greek philosophers along with Indian philosophers began teaching the theory of or doctrine of reincarnation and that they had all of the same elements in place that both of these cultures felt that it was desirable to stop reincarnating

00:17:15.689 - 00:17:37.318

and that one could reach a higher state of. Uh spiritual reality by escaping from the body and that the way to do this was through a series of lifetimes in which one would practice austerities. In other words, one had to counteract one's own desires and impulses.

00:17:37.699 - 00:17:57.500

And to accept and even feature in one's life types of activity that one would think of as actually negative. In other words, through renouncing the pleasure of the body, you can escape from reincarnation and ascend to some higher realm. This is like a uh. An idea

00:17:57.500 - 00:18:18.755

which is absolutely at the foundation of not only of Indian philosophy but of Greek philosophy also. Pythagoras believed it. Plato believed it. The Stoics believed it. The Neoplatonists believed it. Almost all of the. Pre-Socratic philosophers whose ideas can be reconstructed with any kind of clarity at

00:18:18.755 - 00:18:41.920

all believe this this was the fundamental belief about the meaning of human life for Greek philosophy in general and yet in our way of divvying up the proceeds of history. Where we shuffle out the irrational parts to India and Asia and shuffle out the logical and

00:18:41.920 - 00:19:02.060

positivistic parts to Greece and Europe, we have falsified that and the reason that this has been falsified, I'm sure is because of the colonial agenda. You have to convince yourself that you are right to go in and do this to those people, otherwise you won't be

00:19:02.060 - 00:19:17.650

able to do it with sufficient enthusiasm. You'll lose your confidence. The distinction in Greece and India was the heart of it all, was the heart of the distinction between the East and the West. Now, what came through increasingly to me as I went through these early

00:19:17.650 - 00:19:36.339

years in the late 60s and early 70s of learning Sanskrit and going through the Sanskrit philosophical corpus as I had already been through the Greek. Was that this was just simply a misrepresentation. Another thing that has to be considered in all of this is the Judeo-Christian

00:19:36.339 - 00:19:56.979

factor, and the Judeo-Christian factor really came in later, and it wasn't really involved with the period of the great interaction between Greece and India. Which took place between about the 6th century BC and let's say the 2nd century AD, which is a long period of time,

00:19:57.180 - 00:20:17.130

it's like 800 years when those two cultures were fruitfully interacting constantly, you see, the records of caravan and maritime routes are like the philosophical skeleton of history. The trails of oral discourses moving through communities of texts copied from texts and what they reveal is not a

00:20:17.130 - 00:20:36.060

structure of parallel straight lines one labeled Greece, another Persia, another India, but a tangled web in which an element in one culture often leads to elements in others. For example, the ancient geographer Strabo tells us that there were literally hundreds of ships setting sail from ports

00:20:36.060 - 00:20:57.589

in the Red Sea carrying Greco-Roman goods to India every year. I mean, in other words, there were tens of thousands of these voyages in which not only goods but culture was carried back and forth. And yet in order to cement the colonial agenda in place. This

00:20:57.589 - 00:21:18.199

very artificial distinction grew up. It was based on, I, I think on Judeo-Christian prejudices that. British and German and other Western scholars had imbibed where they were able because the Judeo-Christian tradition is really based on a process of repression that they were able to go into

00:21:18.199 - 00:21:41.369

denial and simply to repress would have seemed obvious from the text. So you see, as I continued to work on this as the 70s passed. It came increasingly to seem to me that I somehow had stumbled upon an enormous cover up. In the history of civilization

00:21:41.369 - 00:22:04.449

as it has come down to us and I worked as it were secretly and in private for about 35 years and now the results of my researches are at last about to come out in this book which will be called The Shape of Ancient Thought. With

00:22:04.449 - 00:22:15.760

the secondary title. Comparative studies in Greek and Indian philosophies. And it will be out by Allworth Press in New York in 2002.