Gymnosophists

This work is a revisionist reading on the impact of the historical meeting of Alexandrian philosophers with Indian ascetics in Gandhāra during the far eastern campaigns of Alexandros of Macedonia (356–323 BCE). A comparative
re-examination of Greek and Indian sources yields new evidence that situates the religious identity of the Indian gymnosophist Kalanos in early ascetic traditions of Buddhism in NW India that upheld the practice of ritual suicide by immolation on specific occasions during the later part of the fourth century BCE. It supports previous research on the Hellenistic period that philosophically links Pyrrhon of Elis (c.360–c.270 BCE) with Indian Buddhism through his encounters with Kalanos and on the basis of shared soteriological conceptions and practices.

This work focuses on the Graeco-Roman sources which describe the remote space inhabited by the Brahmans, the Indian sages who met Alexander the Great. The aim of the research is to illustrate: a) the impact of the descriptions by Greek authors who employ the topos of the spatial remoteness of the Brahmans from the Western world; b) how the same theme becomes even more evident in the late antique sources up to the medieval texts, among which a passage from John of Salisbury’s Policraticus constitutes a relevant part of the investigation.

The main aim of this study is the transmission of the image of the “naked philosophers” (gymnosophistai), identified with the Brahmans, from Hellenistic authors to late antiquity. The earlier descriptions have the double purpose of, on the one hand, defining the cultural distance separating the gymnosophists from what the classical world was, or felt to be; and on the other hand, of idealizing Indian wisdom, according to an entirely intellectual Greek model. Moreover, gymnosophists appear in the Alexander Romance, where they meet the Macedonian king, as emblems of a utopian community living in the state of nature. In a group of Christian texts from late antiquity, known as the “Indian treatises”, we find descriptions of Alexander’s encounter with the Brahman philosopher Dandamis/Dindimus. The latter is represented in a positive light as a symbol of “renunciation of the world”.Finally, in some writings by the Church Fathers, though the nudity of the Indian sages is either justified or glossed over, the wise men still embody the cultural pattern of inclusion/exclusion of otherness previously elaborated by Greek thought.

Les récits de la vie d’Alexandre le Grand insistent dès l’Antiquité sur ses voyages en Orient et notamment sur un prétendu voyage en Inde qu’il n’a en réalité jamais effectué. Décrit avec toujours plus de complaisance dans les récits historiques puis les romans, jusqu’au Moyen-Âge, ce voyage en Inde est prétexte à la description d’animaux hybrides et de peuples sauvages. Au XIIIe s. l’auteur anonyme du Roman d’Alexandre en prose a développé ces passages et les a complétés de manière à insister sur l’interaction du Macédonien avec le « paysage humain » qu’il visite. Par une série de tests  infligés aux peuples rencontrés, Alexandre progresse dans sa compréhension des frontières de l’humain. Être hybride par sa naissance, selon une légende perpétuée par le roman, c’est aussi sa propre inhumanité qu’Alexandre découvre au terme de son périple.

The Greek identification of certain Indian people as philosophoi at the end of the fourth century bce provides unique information about the meaning of the term philosophia, especially with respect to its reference to a certain kind of "way of life" (bios), at the time of its greatest maturity (at the start of the Hellenistic period). The Indica of Megasthenes, an ambassador to northern India after the death of Alexander, is our most important evidence; fragments from earlier works by Nearchus and Onesicritus, intellectuals in Alexander's cortege, provide corroboration. This essay argues that late classical Greeks did largely think of philosophia as a way of life.

This article [written in German] presents the first critical edition (based upon twelve mss. and six medieval works) of the so-called Epistula Bragmanorum ad Alexandrum (Ep. Bragm.), a fictitious letter sent by the Indian Gymnosophists to Alexander the Great advising him not to attack their island. To support their argument, they describe their simple and virtuous way of living; they have nothing Alexander would want to take.
The accompanying study tries to place the Ep. Bragm. in the tradition of the Alexander Romance and in the context of epitomes and Christian encyclopaedias. There are numerous similarities and correspondences, especially with the Collatio Alexandri et Dindimi. The Ep. Bragm. actually has the form of an introduction to an epitomized version of the Collatio.

The meetings with Indian gymnosophists (γυμνοσοφισταί) or 'naked philosophers' are one of the most popular motifs from the stories of Alexander the Great. The accounts of these meetings are preserved in Strabo, Plutarch, Arrian, Diogenes Laertius, and some later sources. These descriptions have been repeatedly analysed by previous scholars. However, most researchers focused on the problems of cultural differences and overlooked the issue of intercultural relations. They have often considered these descriptions in a dichotomous perspective. Therefore, the aim of this study is reconsideration of these accounts in the broader context of relations between the Greeks and the Indians with particular emphasis on the following issues: the communication problems, which occurred between the Greeks and the Indians, the relation between the asceticism in India and the Cynic philosophy in Greece, the relation between the Buddhist and early Indian sceptical thought and Greek philosophy. Because the study of these problems can lead to a biased search for influences, way of looking at them proposed in this paper is the so-called middle ground.

In the long passage of De abstinentia, IV, 2–18, Porphyry mentions a series of “groups” (ἔθνη) as examples of abstinence from animal food: the ancient Greeks of the “golden age”, the Lacedaemonians of Lycurgus’ era, the Egyptian priests, the Essenes among the Jews, the Magi among the Persians and the gymnosophists among the Indians. Such an association does not seem at all accidental, since Porphyry refers to a tradition in which these communities have similar habits of life, including the prohibition of eating meat and drinking wine, sexual abstinence, absence of diseases and wars, separation from the civil sphere, devotion to the sacred. All these elements constitute the specific connotation of a human existence that evokes the “time of the origins”, substantially a paradisiac dimension, far from history. It is a deliberate symbolic shift. This brief research will investigate the reasons and the deep meaning of the connection based on utopian life traits.

Dans son Policraticus (achevé en 1159), Jean de Salisbury décrit les Brahmanes comme une population si innocente qu’Alexandre le Grand n’aurait pas été capable de les vaincre. Cette description est la première version connue de l’Epistula Bragmanorum ad Alexandrum. La comparaison entre juifs et Brahmanes permet de comprendre comment, dans la pensée politique de Jean de Salisbury, le meilleur royaume possible est un royaume où le roi n’a jamais gouverné et le peuple a toujours vécu en accord avec la loi de Dieu. Cet article se propose de retracer les sources des Brahmanes de l’Antiquité jusqu’à l’époque de Jean de Salisbury, afin d’éclaircir leur rôle dans le Policraticus et de comprendre si les conclusions de Jean découlent de la lecture des auteurs qui l’ont précédé.

Lien : https://journals.openedition.org/ccm/5014?lang=fr

In his Policraticus (finished in 1159), John of Salisbury describes the Brahmans, a people so innocent that Alexander the Great would not have been able to defeat them in battle. This description is the first known version of the Epistula Bragmanorum ad Alexandrum. The comparison between Jews and Brahmans make clear that, in the political thought of John of Salisbury, the best kingdom is one where kings never ruled and people always lived following God’s law. Herewith, an attempt is made to retrace the sources of the Brahmans from Antiquity up to John of Salisbury's time, to clarify their role in the political theory outlined in Policraticus, and to understand to which extent John’s conclusions come from his reading of previous authors.

Link: https://journals.openedition.org/ccm/5014?lang=en

The episode of Alexander’s interview with the gymnosophists has come down to us in several versions, among which the one in Plutarch’s Vita Alexandri is the most renowned. In this connection, the question arises whether the solutions given by the naked philosophers to the puzzles propounded by Alexander can be shown to reflect genuine Indian doctrines. Challenging Dumézil’s reply in the affirmative, the author contends that they cannot. While most questions and answers are scarcely relevant to the investigation, as being of little (if any) philosophical import, the analysis concentrates on the more significant ones, and especially on the solution offered to the question as to which of the two — day or night — came first. According to Dumézil, the gymnosophist’s answer reported by Plutarch, i. e. that the day came first, by one day, reflects the vedic doctrine of the primeval cosmogonic role of Dawn and Light. Against this may be argued in the first place that such doctrine does not enjoy any prominent status in the Vedas themselves — quite to the contrary, it stands up disadvantegeously to many all-important texts, such as the Nāsadīyasūkta, which assign the primeval status to Darkness — and cannot therefore be regarded as being specifically Indian any more than its opposite. Secondly, it is shown that the Greek tradition is at great variance on this very point, to the extent that all logically conceivable solutions (i. e., precedence of day by one day / day by one night / night by one day / night by one night) are represented in some version or other. This inconsistency appears to stem from the fact that no particular doctrine (Indian or whatever) was envisaged; according to the present author, we have reason to believe that the gymnosophist’s reply was rather meant to set off by means of a paradox the sheer impossibility of a solution (all four alternatives being equivalent to that effect). This interpretation is reinforced by the gymnosophist’s own remark confessing the aporetical nature of his reply, and finally by a further recourse to paradox — this time a variant of the well-known “paradox of the liar” — which the author lays bare in the otherwise inexplicable dénouement of the anecdote.

From the tenth century onwards, Muslim theologians would frequently associate two positions with the ‘Barāhima’ (a designation commonly reserved for the Brahmans of India). Some of the Barāhima rejected the idea that God would have sent prophets to humanity on the grounds that they were perfectly capable of distinguishing right from wrong by the means of reason alone. Other members of the Barāhima claimed to recognise a limited number of early prophets, such as Adam, Seth, and Abraham, whilst rejecting the legitimacy of all subsequent claimants.

The doctrinal stances associated with the Barāhima raise a number of intriguing questions. How did Brahmans (if that’s who the Barāhima do in fact designate) come to be specifically associated with prophecy-denial? And how did they become spokespeople for two seemingly conflicting stances – one that rejected all prophets and one that rejected only some? Much ink has been spilled by modern scholars in attempts to reconcile the varied and multitudinous data on the Barāhima. Relevant material dating from the pre-Islamic era, however, has remained largely unexplored.
This paper will consider the relationship between early Arabic representations of the Barāhima and the varied accounts of the ‘Brahman-Gymnosophist’ that emerged over the course of Antiquity and Late Antiquity. It will argue that the conflicting positions on prophecy attributed to the Barāhima may in fact echo earlier dualities that emerged across Greco-Roman and Christian literature, where Brahman-Gymnosophists not only served as emblems of theological and moral insight in its organic and unmediated state, but also as guardians of a chain of prophetic revelation that extended back to antediluvian times. It will also address the possible mechanisms by which these earlier narratives may have been transmitted and reinvented during the formative centuries of Arabic scholarship.

This conference talk (given in German) has tracked the origins - historical and philological - of Joachim Camerarius' hitherto neglected "Libellus gnomologicus". Published without a printed date, its date (May 1569) can be concluded from secondary sources: letters from Camerarius himself, and from Andreas Dudith(ius) and a handwritten note from Johannes Sambucus on a Vienna manuscript. Some further topics have been dealt with in this talk, too (i.a. Agapetus, Georg Mehl von Strehlitz, Camerarius' visit to Vienna in autumn of 1568 etc.).
A printed version is planned to appear in the series "NeoLatina", published by Narr Verlag (Tübingen), prospectively in late 2016.

In the Martyrium Polycarpi pagans are depicted as special addressees of the testimony given by Christian martyrs. In accordance with the universal pagan ideal, the martyrs are characterized by uncompromising scorn for death and inflexible resistance to suffering. There are important indications that, when depicting Polycarp’s attitude during his fiery execution at the stake, the author of the Martyrium Polycarpi referred to the ideal represented by Indian gymnosophists, who in imperial times were revered as an unsurpassed example of unyielding tolerance to pain caused by fire. Such an allusion is all the more probable in the light of the possible reference that the author of the Martyrium Polycarpi made to Lucian’s De morte Peregrini.

Recorrido crítico por la figura y la obra de Megástenes, diplomático y etnógrafo griego, autor de una obra titulada Indika de la que sólo conservamos fragmentos. Esta obra contenía el relato más importante, tanto desde el punto de vista literario como desde el punto de vista histórico, de la etnografía griega sobre la India, y siguió constituyendo en el Antigüedad la fuente principal de la literatura sobre la India. Esquema del capítulo: Testimonios y fragmentos. Traducciones. Estudios generales. Datos biográficos. Obra. Alcance filosófico: Naturaleza idílica y modelo antropológico. Aspectos mitológicos y religiosos. Sociedad. Filosofía: brahmanes y garmanes (sarmanes). El episodio sobre Alejandro y los sabios de la India.

פיטר ש' לנרד, 'אל גבולות הכוח והחכמה: לאופיה הספרותי של שיחת אלכסנדר עם החכמים העירומים', בתוך: אליעזר פאפו ואחרים (עורכים), דמתה לתמר: מחקרים לכבודה של תמר אלכסנדר, איל פריזנטי ח-ט / מכאן טו (תשע"ה), עמ' 327-355
Peter Sh. Lehnardt, 'Toward the Borders of Power and Wisdom:
Literary Aspects of the Dialogue of Alexander with the Gymnosophists', in: Eliezer Papo et  al. (eds.), Dameta leTamar: Studies in Honor of Tamar Alexander, El Prezente 8-9 / Mikan 15 (2015), pp. 327-355

Alexander the Great has always been surrounded by philosophers, in his life. His teacher was taught Aristotle, he had a very famous encounter with Diogenes ("Only stand a little out of my sunshine!"), he met the Gymnosophists and one of these, Calanus, followed him in his journey from India back to Babylon. The dialogues between the Conqueror and these philosophers constituted a considerable part of the great exempla in the topos of the relationships between king and wise men: starting from the facts related by the official historians of Alexander, we can see a complex re-elaboration of the situations, of the words, of the dialogues and of the teachings that were given to the king.