Platonic Philosophy Is Indian Philosophy

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Hellenic and Hellenistic Papers Series · 10 pages

A ten-page compilation from Helena Petrovna Blavatsky with an introductory note by Boris de Zirkoff, opened by an abstract and train of thoughts and closing with suggested reading from this series. The title-page illustration is the Gandabherunda commissioned by a general of the Western Chalukya Empire. Note that the link to this page on the section list contains a stray non-breaking space between the two halves of its wording; the wording itself has been left exactly as it stands.

The argument is that Platonic philosophy is the most elaborate compendium of Indian philosophy, and it is developed through a series of particular readings rather than by general assertion. God, in the formula given, is neither Truth nor Intelligence but the Father of both. The eagle-headed men and animals with human heads of the old monuments are read as pointing to the descent of animals from man rather than the reverse. Metempsychosis and transmigration are said to imply the reincarnation of the spiritual soul from one human body to another, and Plato to have referred to reincarnation and karma in mythical terms. The key philosophical point follows: that divine causality cannot be a personal and therefore finite and conditioned godhead, no more with Plato than with the Vedantins, because he treats his subject teleologically. Xenocrates is then introduced as less reticent than Plato and Speusippus in expounding the soul — for whom science was the object of noumenal thought rather than of research in the phenomenal world, and who referred to the World-Soul as the androgyne principle Father-Mother, designating its male element the last Zeus, or Third Logos, and entrusting to that World-Soul dominion over everything subject to change and motion.

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