Appendix - 5. (428).
Indian philosophers tried to explain the interaction between soul and body in the same way. They enclosed the soul within a subtle form called linga, linga-jarira. Between this subtle form and the crude body, they imagined a connecting ring, a tenuous body, servant of the five organs. This was the teaching of the school of Kapila. Henry Colebrooke, in his Saggio sulla Filosofia degl'Indú, describes the teaching of the Vedanta school:
| The soul is enclosed in a body as in a
container, or rather in a series of containers. The first and innermost
intellectual container (vijnanamaya), composed of the rudimentary part
(tanmatra) or of simple uncombined elements, consists of the intellect
(buddhi) united to the five senses. The next container is the mental one (manomaya) where the interior sense (manas) is joined to the previous container. A third container, called the organic or vital container, consists of the organs of action and the vital faculties. These three containers or shells (kosa) constitute the subtle form (sucma sarira or linga sarira) which waits for the soul in its transmigrations. The internal basic element confined within the most intimate container is the causal form (karana-sarira). The fatty body (sthula-sarira) which encloses the soul from birth to death in each stage of its transmigrations is composed of the densest elements formed by the combinations of simple elements in the proportion of four-eighths of the characteristic, dominant element and one-eighth of each of the other four. In other words, because the particles of many elements are divisible, they are in the first case divided in half; one of these halves is subdivided into quarters, the other is combined with a part (the quarter of a half) of each of the four others. It thus constitutes the dense, mixed elements. The exterior container, which is composed of elements combined in this way, is the alimentary container (annamaya), and as the seat of enjoyment is called the dense body. The organic form assimilates the combined elements received through nutrition. It separates out the finest parts and rejects the bulkiest: earth becomes flesh, water blood, and inflammable substances (oil and fat) marrow. The fattiest particles of the first two are disposed of as excrement and urine; the particles of the third kind are laid down as bones. The finest or most delicate particles of the first part nourish internal sense; those of the second feed the respiration, and those of the third maintain speech. |
This extraordinary coincidence with the Greek hypotheses shows either that philosophy must naturally arrive at such a hypothesis because it lacks the correct concept of subjective ens, or that Greek philosophy derives from Indian, perhaps through Pythagoras who, according to Laertius, Clement of Alexandria and Aelianus, travelled in India, or that Indian philosophy is more recent than is thought. Ward suspects that Indian writings are not older than 500 BC, and depend on the Greek. According to Ward, Gautama would be a contemporary of Pythagoras.
| Return to Chapter Ref: |