I have posted quite a few articles on the antiquity and the influence of Sanatana Dharma over world Religions and Culture of great civilizations of Mankind.
Whether it is Maya,Incas,Polynesian,Minoan, Sumerian, Egyptian or Greek, one can find the influence of Hinduism.
Let us see how Hinduism is present in the Greek Religion, Culture,Literature and Philosophy.
I have posted earlier the connection between Poseidon and Varuna and Shiva.
The Aitreya Brahmana speaks of the movement of the Sun to its stating point.
In Greeks,
Stesichorus(5) and Mimnermus speak
of the Sun's traveling over the ocean in a cup.
Mimnermus says: "For a delightful hollow couch bears
him over the wave, a couch forged by the hand of
Hephaistus, made of precious gold, winged, which
bears him sleeping over the water's surface, hurrying
him back from the land of the Hesperides to the land
of the Ethiopians."
(Fr.10 Diehl, Anthologia Lyrica Graeca (3d
ed; Leipzig: 1949). See also Stesichorus Fr. 6
Diehl)
In the early Vedic thought, the primary or the first principle has been Water.
This thought is reflected in the Iliad XIV 201 and 246.
Similarity of Gods.
Vedic Dyaus is Zeus,
Varuna,Ouranos, Poseidon,
Agni becomes Ignis in Latin drawn from Greeks with modification, and
Ushas is Eos
Asvini Devatas,Dioscur.
The Concept of Ra, Law of Nature, Cours of Things is the Dike of the Greeks.
”
The Hindu conception of .Rta, the law of
Nature, or "course of things," has the same scope as
the Greek dike,(13) and a saying of Heraclitus,'The
sun shall not transgress its bounds,"(14) might have
been written with .Rg Veda I.24.8 and I.160.1 in
mind.
In the more imaginative view of the Upani.sads,we
find that a personal god, Prajaapati ("lord of
creatures"), draws forth from himself all existing
things, or, in mother passage, (20) divides himself
into male and female and producer all creatures by
this self-division. One might adduce here the similar
Chinese doctrine of yang and yin, the principles of
expansion and contraction by which the world is
formed from chaos. Empedocles stems to be expressing
similar idea or, rather, combining it with the
equally ancient doctrine of primordial strife, also
found in the Upanishads:
In a passage of the Rig Veda, Vac is praised as a divine being. Vac is omnipotent, moves amongst divine beings, and carries the great gods,
Mitra, Varuna, Indra and Agni, within itself. The doctrine of Vac teaches that "all gods live from Vac, also all demi-gods, animals and people.
Vac is the eternal being, it is the first-born of the eternal law, mother of the Vedas and navel of immortality."
Vedic Aryans attached such great importance to the spoken word that one who could not correctly pronounce Sanskrit was
called barbar (meaning stammering).
Philosophy.
Anyone who studies the Hindu theories of
perception and cognition as set forth in the Nyaaya,
Vai'se.sika, and Saa^mkhya systems and then turns to
the fragments of Empedocles cannot but be struck by
the similarity of their theories.
Empedocles is keenly conscious of a sort of "fall
of man" and affects to remember past births as plant
and animal, boy and girl.(28) The way by which the
original bliss may be gained, from which he is now an
exile,(29) is by asceticism, the Hindu method. He
advises meditation, for by this means all truth shall
be revealed and even supernormal powers attained.(30)
In the end, the soul of the righteous ascetic regains
its divinity--a counterpart of the Hindu belief in
reincarnation and mok.sa. See, in particular,
Empedocles, B.146 (Diels): "At the end they became
seers and bards and chiefs and physicians among
mortal men, and finally they blossom forth as gods
highest in honor."
There may even be an echo of the monism of the
Upani.sads in Empedocles, which, like many other
features of his philosophy, seems to have been
mediated through Orphism. In the Maa.n.duukya
Upani.sad I.7 we find a list of the qualities of the
One, which has resemblances to Fr. B17 (Diels) of
Empedocles as quoted above.
A distinct tradition of mysticism runs through
Orphism, Pythagoras, and Plato which is as unlike
anything in Greek thought as it is like the Hindu
mysticism of the Upani.sads. There is a distinct break
with rationalist humanism and with the healthy
unreflecting extraversion of the seventh and sixth
centuries. Instead of Homer's "Themselves he made a
prey to dogs,"(31) we have a complete shifting of
emphasis from the physical to the spiritual, from the
temporal to the eternal. Reality is not now what is
perceived by the senses but what lies beyond them.
The soul lives an in
Citation. http://buddhism.lib.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-PHIL/marlow.htm
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