On arrival in India, European travellers were astonished when they noticed that the modern ‘Brahmins’ – the Hindu priest caste, custodians of the Sanskrit scriptures – were the direct descendants of the ancient ‘Brachmanes’ encountered by Alexander the Great 2,000 years earlier. When the erudite Italian aristocrat, Pietro della Valle, encountered naked, dreadlocked, ash-smothered ‘Yogis’ with painted foreheads on his travels to India in the 1620s, he affirmed with confidence that ‘There is no doubt but these are the ancient Gymnosophists so famous in the world … to whom Alexander the Great sent Onesicritus to consult with them’.1 For travellers and readers alike – brought up on the primordial antiquity of the Bible – this was a disorientating realisation.
Merchants were excited by the trade in Indian diamonds, cotton and spices but thinkers all over Europe became obsessed with unlocking the jealously guarded secrets of India’s strange and wonderful religions.2 Missionaries were having a tough time getting Indians interested in Christianity, but Europeans at home were fascinated by Hinduism. Inevitably, Christian writing about India was distorted by religious bigotry and underwritten by Europe’s nascent political agenda, but some seventeenth-century travellers examined Indian culture with remarkably open minds and even downright admiration. Enthusiastic descriptions were full of fantasies and projections too, but some aspects of Indian culture managed to penetrate the barriers of inter-cultural communication.3 Readers at home developed such an insatiable craving for genuine Eastern knowledge that ideas taken from Indian philosophy were incorporated into debates about religion, science, history, human nature and ethics. At times, Hindu culture appeared so awesome that it shook Europe’s self-centredness to its core.
The seventeenth-century ‘discovery’ of Indian vegetarianism was an astoundingly fertile cross-cultural encounter, but it was built upon an ancient history of passionate curiosity. Even before Alexander the Great reached India in 327 BC, its vegetarian philosophers were renowned in the ancient Greek world.4 According to the historians whom Alexander took on his military expedition, the moment the Greek army arrived in the ancient university town of Taxila (now in Pakistan), Alexander despatched his messenger Onesicritus to find the famous ‘gymnosophists’, or ‘naked philosophers’. In a legendary episode, which came to epitomise the meeting of East and West, Onesicritus came across a group of Brahmins sunning themselves on the outskirts of town. They burst into laughter at the sight of his hat and extravagant clothing, and derided his attempts to understand a translator’s rendition of their transcendent wisdom with the caustic comment that it was like ‘expecting water to flow through mud’.5 Eventually one of them was prevailed upon to deliver a potted summary of Indian philosophy. Onesicritus was immediately struck by the similarities between Indian and Greek thought. In amazement, he told the Brahmins that like them Plato had taught the immortality of the soul and that their key doctrine of vegetarianism had been advocated in Greece by Pythagoras, Socrates, and even Onesicritus’ own teacher, Diogenes.6
Although there are significant differences in their respective moral systems, it is nevertheless an extraordinary coincidence that roughly contemporaneous seminal Indian and Greek philosophers, the Buddha and Pythagoras, both taught that a soul’s reincarnations depended on behaviour in previous lives, and that it was wrong for people to eat animals. Faced with this enthralling correlation, European matchmakers fantasised about possible explanations for centuries; even today it remains one of the unsolved mysteries of world religion.7 It was well known in ancient Greece and Rome that Pythagoras had travelled to Egypt and Persia in search of philosophical knowledge, and many, then and later, found it irresistible to imagine that he must have reached India.8 Lucius Apuleius (AD 124–c.170), author of The Golden Ass, announced that the ‘pre-eminent race called Gymnosophists’ had indeed taught Pythagoras ‘the greater part of his philosophy’.9
Pythagoras was believed to have launched Hellenistic philosophy, introducing the interlinked seminal concepts of the immortality of the soul through reincarnation or ‘metempsychosis’, the notion that all living things are kindred, and the corollary that it was wrong to cause suffering to animals.10 Pythagoras wrote nothing down, but his doctrines became the basis of Plato’s philosophy. It became a staple belief among Platonists that the Greek philosophical tradition owed its origins to India. Even those who thought the Egyptians were the first to invent philosophy could agree, since Egypt was widely believed to be an ancient Indian colony.11
Tracing Greek philosophy back to the Brahmins was a theory of inestimable significance. Despite cavils from Aristotle, it put the ideal of vegetarianism near the heart of ancient philosophy and enticed generations of travelling philosophers to drink at the original fountain of knowledge in India. Philostratus (AD 170–245) wrote a semi-fictional biography of Christ’s first-century neo-Pythagorean rival, the legendary magical man-god and abolisher of sacrifices, Apollonius of Tyana.12 Following in Alexander’s footsteps to visit the Brahmins of Taxila, Apollonius defended vegetarianism, saying that the earth ‘grows everything for mankind; and those who are pleased to live at peace with the brute creation want nothing’, while carnivorous men, ‘deaf to the cries of mother-earth, whet their knife against her children’. ‘Here then,’ explained Apollonius, ‘is something which the Brahmins of India … taught the naked sages of Egypt also to condemn; and from them Pythagoras took his rule of life.’13 Joining the dots between similar ethical systems, Apollonius posited Indian vegetarianism as a mandate for re-establishing harmony with the natural world. He was unambiguous: the basis of Pythagorean vegetarianism was Indian and the Brahmins were the fount of all true philosophy.
Plotinus (AD 205–70), the founder of Neoplatonism and principal Western proponent of metempsychosis, tried and failed to get to India to meet the Brahmins,14 but his vegetarian star-pupil Porphyry (AD c.234–305) did the next best thing. Porphyry read the now lost account by the pagan convert to Christianity Bardesanes of Edessa (AD 154– c.222), who had interviewed a group of Indian ambassadors in Mesopotamia as they made their way to the court of the sun-worshipping homosexual-orgiast Emperor of Rome, Elagabalus.15 In his seminal vegetarian treatise, On Abstinence from Animal Food, Porphyry championed the Brahmins for living on the natural products of the earth. ‘To eat other food, or even to touch animate food,’ explained Porphyry, ‘is thought equivalent to the utmost impurity and impiety.’ Eating meat was not technically against the law in India, Porphyry explained, but the Brahmins believed that abstinence from flesh was the purest diet (mirroring the arguments being made by ascetic flesh-abstaining Christians).16
Porphyry’s vituperative detestation of the Christians, and Apollonius’ stalwart rivalry with them, did not help to ingratiate the Brahmins or vegetarianism to Jerusalem’s new religion. The Church fathers had much to say about abstinence from flesh, so the vegetarian Brahmins presented them with complex doctrinal questions. Was Indian vegetarianism