[Buddha-l] Re: Natural lucidity for Socrates

[Dan Lusthaus]

Joy,

This is an example of the typical confused description found in Hellenistic sources. Even putting the minor factual inaccuracies aside, what Hippolytus is describing is Jains, not "Hindus" (Hindus or the equivalence of "Brahmin" with Hindu took a long time to develop, starting with the Muslim invention of the term Hindu, and much later -- 19th-20th c -- the British institutions of the category of "Hindu" as a religio-ethnic term, to which they offered the Indian locals substantial incentives in order to overcome that label). Brahman, in the ancient world, meant anyone from the Indian cultural orbit (the Indian states, Gandhara, the Hindu Kush, Sind, etc.).

The ideas described here were being adopted by a variety of Christian sects at the time, especially in the Middle East, and the diet issues, the "light" vs. matter conflict, etc., became core issues in the life of Mani (who was a Baptist in roughly the area of Syria in his youth, but traveled eastward eventually, clearly coming into contact with Buddhists and others during his lifetime), and became ascetic foundations of Manichaeaism, so it is unclear to what degree Hippolytus is actually describing Indian (i.e., Jain) ideas, and to which extent he is indirectly refuting his Manichaean-like contemporaries.

Nor, for that matter, were "hindus" of this or earlier periods pantheists or neoplatonic monists, as McEvilley presumes -- that came much later with certain vedantic revisionistic interpretations of the earlier traditions. So McEvilley's entire thesis appears misguided from the outset. Indians couldn't export what they never had. Indians would call this sort of thesis ati-prasanga -- the fallacy of exceeding what is reasonable.

Dan Lusthaus

----- Original Message ----- 
  Refutation of All Heresies (Book I), Hippolytus, Saint (3rd c.)
  CHAP. XXI.--THE BRACHMANS; THEIR MODE OF LIFE; IDEAS OF DEITY; DIFFERENT SORTS OF; THEIR ETHICAL NOTIONS. 

   

  But there is also with the Indians a sect composed of those philosophizing among the Brachmans. They spend a contented existence, abstain both from living creatures and all cooked food, being satisfied with fruits; and not gathering these from the trees, but carrying off those that have fallen to the earth. They subsist upon them, drinking the water of the river Tazabena. But they pass their life naked, affirming that the body has been constituted a covering to the soul by the Deity. These affirm that God is light, not such as one sees, nor such as the sun and fire; but to them the Deity is discourse, not that which finds expression in articulate sounds, but that of the knowledge through which the secret mysteries of nature are perceived by the wise. And this light which they say is discourse, their god, they assert that the Brachmans only know on account of their alone rejecting all vanity of opinion which is the sours ultimate covering. These despise death, and always in their own peculiar language call God by the name which we have mentioned previously, and they send up hymns (to him). But neither are there women among them, nor do they beget children. But they who aim at a life similar to these, after they have crossed over to the country on the opposite side of the river, continue to reside there, returning no more; and these also are called Brachmans. But they do not pass their life similarly, for there are also in the place women, of whom those that dwell there are born, and in turn beget children. And this discourse which they name God they assert to be corporeal, and enveloped in a body outside himself, just as if one were wearing a sheep's skin, but that on divesting himself of body that he would appear clear to the eye. But the Brachmans say that there is a conflict in the body that surrounds them, (and they consider that the body is for them full of conflicts); in opposition to which, as if marshalled for battle against enemies, they contend, as we have already explained. And they say that all men are captive to their own congenital struggles, viz., sensuality and inchastity, gluttony, anger, joy, sorrow, concupiscence, and such like. And he who has reared a trophy over these, alone goes to God; wherefore the Brachmans deify Dandamis, to whom Alexander the Macedonian paid a visit, as one who had proved victorious in the bodily conflict. But they bear down on Calanus as having profanely withdrawn from their philosophy. But the Brachmans, putting off the body, like fishes jumping out of water into the pure air, behold the sun.

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