The thought of Plotinus is Hindu. Eusebius in his biography of Socrates, relates an incident recorded in the fourth century B.C. in which Socrates met a Brahmin in the agora or the market place. The Brahmin asked Socrates what he was doing. Socrates replied that he was questioning people in order to understand man. At this, the Brahmin laughed and asked how one could understand man without knowing God. The Socrates conception of freedom and virtue is that of the Upanishads. Socrates defined virtue as knowledge. Virtue is character, the realization of the essence of man. Know thyself, which is exactly the same as the Upanisadic command, Atmanam biddhi. In the Gita, knowledge or wisdom is defined as character. Virtue, comes from the Vedic word vira (hero, man). Greek philosophy began in Asia Minor and Greek writers refer to the travels of Pythagoras, and others, to the East to gain wisdom. According to his biographer Iamblichus, Pythagoras traveled widely, studying the esoteric teachings of the Egyptians, Assyrians, and even Brahmins. According to Gomprez, It is not too much to assume that the curious Greek who was a contemporary of Buddha, and it may be of Zoraster, too, would have acquired a more or less exact knowledge of the East, in the age of intellectual fermentation, through the medium of Persia. Pythagorass theorem discovered in India in 800 BC according to renowned historian Dick Teresi. author and coauthor of several books about science and technology, including The God Particle. He is cofounder of Omni magazine and has written for Discover, The New York Times Magazine, and The Atlantic Monthly. Two thousand years before Pythagoras, philosophers in northern India had understood that gravitation held the solar system together, and that therefore the sun, the most massive object, had to be at its center. Our Western mathematical heritage and pride are critically dependent on the triumphs of ancient Greece. These accomplishments have been so greatly exaggerated that it often becomes difficult to sort out how much of modern math is derived from Greece and how much from...the Indians and so on. Our modern numerals 0 through 9 were developed in India. Mathematics existed long before the Greeks constructed their first right angle. On the other hand George Cheverghese Joseph (author of The Crest of the Peacock: Non-European Roots of Mathematics) points out that the early Indian mathematics contained in the Sulbasutras (The Rules of the Cord) contain their own version of the Pythagorean theorem as well as procedure for obtaining the square root of 2 correct to five decimal places. The Sulbasutras reveal a rich geometric knowledge that preceded the Greeks. (source: Lost Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science - By Dick Teresi p. 32). For more on Dick Teresi refer to chapter on Quotes301_320).
Posted on: Sun, 03 Nov 2013 08:13:04 +0000
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