In reading through Durant’s series The Story of Civilization I come across numerous places where I notice ideas that are common in other cultures than the one he’s discussing. Right now I’m reading his analysis of Plato’s metaphysics and I came across this,
“The soul is the self-moving force in man, that is part of the self-moving Soul of all things. It is pure vitality, incorporeal and immortal. It existed before the body, and has brought with it from antecedent incarnations many memories which, when awakened by new life, are mistaken for new knowledge. All mathematical truths, or example, are innate in this way; teaching merely arouses the recollection of things known by the soul many lives ago. After death the soul or principle of life passes into other organisms, higher or lower according to the deserts it is earned by its previous avatars. Perhaps the soul that has sinned goes to a purgatory or hell, and the virtuous soul goes to the Islands of the Blessed. When through various existences the soul has been purified of all wrongdoing, it is freed from reincarnation, and mounts to a paradise of everlasting happiness.” page 517I don’t know if you are aware of what is taught in Buddhism but this seems to be very close to what they say. You have Plato referring to reincarnation, karma and Nirvana. I’m not an expert on Plato or Buddhism but they seem very close.
A couple of thoughts on how this could be. How do these two people separated by thousands of miles and hundreds of years come up with the same ideas?
One is simple logic. Plato wrote in the fourth century BC, I believe Buddha was in the sixth or seventh century. There’s plenty of time for the ideas of Buddha to have been passed along by word of mouth or organized missionaries so that Plato in Greece could have actually heard what Buddha was saying in India.
A second idea is that God himself revealed this to both persons. This doesn’t make a lot of sense because a God who is focused enough to reveal something this detailed to a human being would be teaching them to ignore his existence. It’s kind of like a saddle maker making a lot of great comments about the new Model T.
The third is one that is discussed by Hugh Ross. Ross said that one reason he became a believer in the Bible was because the things that he was reading there were beyond the imagination and the conception of human beings. I would suggest that such ideas as being espoused by Plato and Buddha or just the common ordinary ideas that a philosopher would come up with when he has time on his hands.
Durant, Will. The Story of Civilization: Part 2, The Life of Greece. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1939,1966.
homo unius libri
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Comments are welcome. Feel free to agree or disagree but keep it clean, courteous and short. I heard some shorthand on a podcast: TLDR, Too long, didn't read.