India and Ancient Greece

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India in ancient Greece !

Many scholars have asserted that the Greeks borrowed heavily from India. According to Greek tradition, Thales, Empedocles, and others traveled to the East to study philosophy. The mystical resemblances and parallels at times are too close and too frequent to be purely coincidental. Features which are attributed to an Indian origin are much in character with Indian thought and alien to Greek attitudes.

Enfield says: “India was visited by Pythagoras, Anaxardes, Pyrrho, and others, who afterwards became eminent philosophers in Greece.” There are authorities who suggest that Plato had found his way to the bank of the Ganges. (source:

E. Pococke has asserted that Greek civilization, not accepting its language, is a local variation of an Indian culture taken to Greece by early colonists from India. India in Greece.

(source: India in Greece – By Edward Pococke London. 1852)

James Princep author of Essays on Indian Antiquities. London, 1858, is recorded to have observed that “Greek was nothing more than Sanskrit turned topsy-turvy.”

(source: D.S. Mahalanbois, “A New Light on Plato” Modern Review, August 1963, p. 142.)

Talking of Plato’s mysticism, Strutfield says that “India, always the home of mystical devotion, probably contributed the major share.”

(source: Mysticism and Catholicism p. 74.).

Hopkins says “Plato is full of Samkhyan thought worked out by him but taken from Pythagoras. Discussing the historical genesis of Greek antiquity,

J. P. Mayer observes: ” Egyptian, Persian and Indian cultural influences were absorbed into the Greek world from very early times.” (source: Political Thought, The European Tradition, p.7)

Sir William Jones has pointed out, “it is impossible to read Vedanta or the many fine compositions in illustration of it without believing that Pythagoras and Plato derived their sublime theories from the same fountain with the Indian sages.”

(source: Hindu Phenomenon – By Girilal Jain South Asia Books 1998 ISBN 8174760105 p- 35-36)

H. T. Colebrooke, the great Orientalist, states significantly that “a greater degree of similarity exists between the Indian doctrine and that of the earlier than the late Greeks.” He goes on to conclude that Greek philosophy, especially between Pythagoras and Plato, was indebted to Indian thought. (source: Royal Asiatic Transactions. I.)

A contemporary scholar of Western political thought, John Bowle, briefly but categorically declares that Plato was influenced by Indian ideals.

(source: A New Outline of World History. p. 91).