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Universe and Inner Self in Early Indian UNIVERSE AND INNER SELF IN EARLY INDIAN INDIAN AND INNER SELF IN EARLY UNIVERSE ‘The philosophical traditions of Greece and India are divergent but also GREEK THOUGHT AND EARLY show striking convergences. This book is an important and valuable contribution to the comparative study of the two ancient cultures. The various chapters are learned and sophisticated and considerably enrich our understanding of Greek and Indian philosophy.’ Phiroze Vasunia, University College London How can we explain the remarkable similarities between early Indian and early Greek philosophy? UNIVERSE AND Around the middle of the first millennium BCE there occurred a revolution in thought, with novel ideas such as that understanding the inner self is both vital for human well-being and central to understanding INNER SELF the universe. This intellectual transformation is sometimes called the beginning of philosophy. The revolution occurred in both India and Greece, but not in the vast Persian Empire that divided them. How was IN EARLY INDIAN this possible? This is a puzzle that has never been solved. This volume brings together Hellenists and Indologists representing AND EARLY GREEK a variety of perspectives on the similarities and differences between the two cultures, and on how to explain them. It offers a collaborative Richard Seaford Richard THOUGHT contribution to the burgeoning interest in the Axial Age, and is of interest to those intrigued by the big questions inspired by the ancient world. by Edited Richard Seaford is Emeritus Professor of Ancient Greek at the University of Exeter. Cover images: Detail from The School of Athens, 1511, Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, Wikimedia Commons. Bodhisattva Padmapani, Ajanta, cave 1, India, Abdulsayed/ Wikimedia Commons. Cover design: Barrie Tullett ISBN 978-1-4744-1099-1 Edited by edinburghuniversitypress.com Richard Seaford Universe and Inner Self in Early Indian and Early Greek Thought EDITED BY RICHARD SEAFORD Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: www.edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organisation Richard Seaford, 2016 © the chapters their several authors, 2016 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10.5/13 Times New Roman by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 1099 1 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 1100 4 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 1101 1 (epub) The right of Richard Seaford to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Contents Acknowledgements v Notes on contributors vi Abbreviations viii Introduction 1 1 The common origin approach to comparing Indian and Greek philosophy 12 Nick Allen 2 The concept of ṛtá in the Ṛgveda 28 Joanna Jurewicz 3 Harmonia and ṛtá 40 Aditi Chaturvedi 4 Ātman and its transition to worldly existence 55 Greg Bailey 5 Cosmology, psyche and ātman in the Timaeus, the Ṛgveda and the Upaniṣads 71 Hyun Höchsmann 6 Plato and yoga 87 John Bussanich 7 Technologies of self-immortalisation in ancient Greece and early India 104 Paolo Visigalli 8 Does the concept of theōria fit the beginning of Indian thought? 118 Alexis Pinchard iv Contents 9 Self or being without boundaries: on Śaṅkara and Parmenides 134 Chiara Robbiano 10 Soul chariots in Indian and Greek thought: polygenesis or diffusion? 149 Paolo Magnone 11 ‘Master the chariot, master your Self’: comparing chariot metaphors as hermeneutics for mind, self and liberation in ancient Greek and Indian Sources 168 Jens Schlieter 12 New riders, old chariots: poetics and comparative philosophy 186 Alexander S. W. Forte and Caley C. Smith 13 The interiorisation of ritual in India and Greece 204 Richard Seaford 14 Rebirth and ‘ethicisation’ in Greek and South Asian thought 220 Mikel Burley 15 On affirmation, rejection and accommodation of the world in Greek and Indian religion 235 Matylda Obryk 16 The justice of the Indians 251 Richard Stoneman 17 Nietzsche on Greek and Indian philosophy 265 Emma Syea Bibliography 279 Index 303 Acknowledgements The astonishing similarities between early Indian and early Greek thought have long attracted great interest, but seldom the collaboration that is required for a real advance in explaining them. This volume contains most of the papers delivered at a conference at the University of Exeter in July 2014, as part of the project ‘Ātman and Psychē: Cosmology and the Self in Ancient India and Ancient Greece’. The conference, and the project as a whole, were funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, to which we are most grateful. The conference consisted of days of lively discussion between Indologists, Hellenists and others: interdisciplinary discovery at its best. Another outcome of the project will be a monograph by myself. I would like to thank Richard Fynes for his help with Sanskrit, and Edinburgh University Press for their enthusiastic efficiency. Richard Seaford Exeter, January 2016 Notes on contributors Nick Allen qualified in social anthropology at Oxford, after studying classics and medicine, undertaking fieldwork in Nepal. From 1976 to 2001 he taught Social Anthropology of South Asia at Oxford, publishing on the Himalayas, kin- ship theory and the Durkheimian Tradition. Since the 1980s he has also worked on Indo-European Cultural Comparativism. Greg Bailey, formerly reader in Sanskrit, is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Program in Asian Studies, La Trobe University, Melbourne. He has published translations and studies of the Gaṇeśa Purāṇa, Bhartṛhari’s Śatakatrayam and books on the god Brahmā, early Buddhism, contemporary Australian society and many articles on Sanskrit literature. Mikel Burley is Associate Professor of Religion and Philosophy at the University of Leeds. His publications include Classical Sāṃkhya and Yoga: An Indian Metaphysics of Experience (2007), Contemplating Religious Forms of Life: Wittgenstein and D. Z. Phillips (2012) and Rebirth and the Stream of Life: A Philosophical Study of Reincarnation, Karma and Ethics (2016). John Bussanich is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico. He co-edited with Nicholas D. Smith The Bloomsbury Companion to Socrates (2013). He is the author of The One and its Relation to Intellect in Plotinus: A Commentary on Selected Texts (1988) and of articles on Socrates, Plato and the Neoplatonists. Other research interests include comparative philosophy, and phi- losophy and mysticism in South Asia. Aditi Chaturvedi is a doctoral candidate in Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, writing a dissertation on the role of harmonia in Plato’s metaphys- ics and ethics. Notes on contributors vii Alexander S. W. Forte and Caley C. Smith are doctoral students at Harvard University. Alexander’s dissertation is on metaphor in the Homeric poems. Caley’s dissertation examines mimetic performance in the Ṛgveda and its impli- cations for the social project of the early ritual and the redaction of the text. Hyun Höchsmann has studied philosophy, art history and literature at the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität in Munich and the University of London. She has taught at the Juilliard School of Music, the American University in Cairo and East China Normal University in Shanghai. Her publications include On Chuang Tzu (2001), On Philosophy in China (2003) and Zhuangzi (2006). Joanna Jurewicz is a professor in the Oriental Studies Department of Warsaw University. She uses an interdisciplinary methodology of philology and cog- nitive linguistics to analyse ancient Indian texts. She is the author of Fire and Cognition in the Ṛgveda (2010), of Fire, Death, and Philosophy. A History of Ancient Indian Thinking (2016) and of many articles. Paolo Magnone teaches Sanskrit Language and Literature at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart as well as Oriental Religions at the Higher Institute for Religious Sciences (both in Milan). His research interests include thematic studies in the epico-purāṇic literature; the philosophy of the Upaniṣads and Sāṃkhya–Yoga in the light of the commentators; comparative studies in Ancient Greek and Indian philosophical thought. Matylda Obryk is a visiting professor of Classics at the Northeast Normal University in Changchun, China. After studying classics and philosophy in Kraków and Jena, she obtained a PhD from the University of Cologne, with a dissertation published as Unsterblichkeitsglaube in den griechischen Versinschriften (2012). Alexis Pinchard is ‘professeur agrégé’ of philosophy at the Lycée Militaire d’Aix-en-Provence (France) and associate member of the CNRS, UMR 7528 ‘Iranian and Indian Worlds’. His PhD dissertation was published as Les langues de sagesse dans la Grèce et l’Inde anciennes (2009). His research focuses on the connection between ancient metaphysics, ancient soteriology and comparative linguistics. Chiara Robbiano is Assistant professor of Philosophy at University College Utrecht. Her PhD dissertation (Leiden) on Parmenides was published as Becoming Being (2006). She publishes
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