Gymnosophists

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Gymnosophists

Gymnosophists is the name (meaning "naked philosophers") given by the Greeks

Ancient Greece

The term Ancient Greece refers to the period of History of Greece lasting from the Greek Dark Ages ca. 1100 BC and the Dorian invasion, to 146 BC and the Roman Republic conquest of Greece after the Battle of Corinth ....
to certain ancient Indian philosophers

Indian philosophy

The term Indian philosophy , may refer to any of several traditions of Eastern philosophy that originated in the Indian subcontinent, including Hindu philosophy, Buddhist philosophy, and Jain philosophy....
who pursued asceticism

Asceticism

Asceticism describes a life-style characterized by abstinence from various sorts of worldly pleasures often with the aim of pursuing religious and spirituality goals....
to the point of regarding food and clothing as detrimental to purity of thought (sadhu

Sadhu

In Hinduism, sadhu is a common term for an ascetic or practitioner of yoga who has achieved the first three Hindu Puru?artha: Kama , artha , and even dharma ....
s or yogi

Yogi

A yogi is a term for a male practitioner of various forms of spiritual practice. In contemporary english language yogin is an alternative rendering for the word yogi....
s).

The Digambar

Digambar

Digambar , has many different meaning and associations throughout Indian religions. Many representations of deities within these traditions are depicted as sky-clad....
Jain monks

Jain muni

Jain Muni or simply Muni is the term often used for Jain monks.A Jain monk does not have a permanent home and does not have any possessions....
in India even now remain unclothed; they have been identified as the gymnosophists by several researchers, .

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Gymnosophists is the name (meaning "naked philosophers") given by the Greeks

Ancient Greece

Indian philosophy

Asceticism

Sadhu

In Hinduism, sadhu is a common term for an ascetic or practitioner of yoga who has achieved the first three Hindu Puru?artha: Kama , artha , and even dharma ....
s or yogi

Yogi

A yogi is a term for a male practitioner of various forms of spiritual practice. In contemporary english language yogin is an alternative rendering for the word yogi....
s).

The Digambar

Digambar

Digambar , has many different meaning and associations throughout Indian religions. Many representations of deities within these traditions are depicted as sky-clad....
Jain monks

Jain muni

Xuanzang

Xuanzang [602 ? - 664] was a famous China Buddhist monk, scholar, traveler, and translator that brought up the interaction between History of China and History of India in the early Tang Dynasty period....
mentions having come across Digambar Jain monks in Taxila

Taxila

Taxila is an important archaeological site in the Punjab province of Pakistan. It dates back to the Ancient Indian period and contains the ruins of the Gandhara city of Takshashila an important Vedanta/Hinduism and Buddhist centre of learning from the 6th century BCE...
during his 7th cent. CE visit to India, in the same Punjab region where Alexander encountered the gymnosophists.

Ancient accounts

The term is first used by Plutarch

Plutarch

Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus , c. AD 46 ? 120 ? commonly known in English as Plutarch ? was a Ancient Rome historian , biographer, essayist, and Middle Platonism....
in the 1st century CE, when describing the encounter of Alexander the Great

Alexander the Great

Alexander the Great , also known as Alexander III of Macedon was an ancient Greeks King of Macedon . He was one of the most successful military commanders of all time and is presumed undefeated in battle....
with ten gymnosophists in Punjab.

He (Alexander) captured ten of the Gymnosophists who had done most to get Sabbas to revolt, and had made the most trouble for the Macedonians. These philosophers were reputed to be clever and concise in answering questions, and Alexander therefore put difficult questions to them, declaring that he would put to death him who first made an incorrect answer.
—Plutarch, Life of Alexander, "The parallel lives," 64.

Diogenes Laertius

Diogenes La?rtius , the biographer of the Greece philosophers, is supposed by some to have received his surname from the town of Laerte in Cilicia, Asia Minor, and by others from the Roman Empire family of the La?rtii....
(ix. 61 and 63) refers to them, and reports that Pyrrho

Pyrrho

Pyrrho , a Greek philosopher of classical antiquity, is credited as being the first Skeptic philosopher, and the inspiration for the school known as Pyrrhonism founded by Aenesidemus in the 1st century BC....
of Elis, the founder of pure scepticism, came under the influence of the Gymnosophists while travelling to India with Alexander, and on his return to Elis, imitated their habits of life; however, the extent of their influence is not described.

Strabo

Strabo

Strabo was a Ancient Greeks history, geography and philosophy....
says that gymnosophists were religious people among the Indians (XVI,I), and otherwise divides Indian philosophers into Brahman

Brahman

Brahman is a concept of Hinduism. Brahman is the unchanging, infinite, Immanence, and transcendence reality which is the Divine Ground of all matter, energy, time, space, being, and everything beyond in this Universe....
s and Sramanas (XV,I,59-60), following the accounts of Megasthenes

Megasthenes

Megasthenes was a Ancient Greece traveller and geographer. He was born in Asia Minor and became an ambassador of Seleucus I of Syria to the court of Sandrocottus of India, in Pataliputra....
. He further divides the Sramanas into "Hylobioi" (forest hermits, c.f. Aranyaka

Aranyaka

The Aranyakas are part of the Hinduism sruti , the four Vedas; these religion texts were composed in Late Vedic Sanskrit typical of the Brahmanas and early Upanishads; indeed, they frequently form part of either the Brahmanas or the Upanishads....
) and "Physicians."

Of the Sarmanes, the most honourable, he says, are the Hylobii, who live in the forests, and subsist on leaves and wild fruits: they are clothed with garments made of the bark of trees, and abstain from commerce with women and from wine.
—Strabo XV,I,60.

Of the Sarmanes (...) second in honour to the Hylobii, are the physicians, for they apply philosophy to the study of the nature of man. They are of frugal habits, but do not live in the fields, and subsist upon rice and meal, which every one gives when asked, and receive them hospitably. (...) Both this and the other class of persons practise fortitude, as well in supporting active toil as in enduring suffering, so that they will continue a whole day in the same posture, without motion.
—Strabo XV,I,60.

Philo mentions the Gymnosophists twice in the course of listing foriegn ascetics and philosophers who are, in his estimation, "prudent, and just, and virtuous" and therefore truly free:

And among the Indians there is the class of the gymnosophists, who, in addition to natural philosophy, take great pains in the study of moral science likewise, and thus make their whole existence a sort of lesson in virtue.
—Philo Judaeus, Every Good Man is Free, 74.

But it is necessary for us...to bring forward as corroborative testimonies the lives of some particular good men who are the most undeniable evidences of freedom. Calanus
Calanus (person)

Calanus was one of a group of ascetics encamped near Taxila at the time of Alexander the Great Invasion of India. Upon Alexander's invitation he joined him in the city and later accompanied him back to the west....
was an Indian by birth, one of the gymnosophists; he, being looked upon as the man who was possessed of the greatest fortitude of all his contemporaries, and that too, not only by his own countrymen, but also by foreigners, which is the rarest of all things, was greatly admired by some kings of hostile countries, because he had combined virtuous actions with praiseworthy language.
—Philo Judaeus, Every Good Man is Free, 92-93.

In the 2nd century CE, the Christian theologian Clement of Alexandria

Clement of Alexandria

Clement of Alexandria , was the first notable member of the Christianity of Alexandria, and one of its most distinguished teachers. He was born about the middle of the 2nd century, and died between 211 and 216....
distinguishes the Gymnosophists, the philosophers of the Indians, from the Sramanas, "the philosophers of the Bactrians":

Philosophy, then, with all its blessed advantages to man, flourished long ages ago among the barbarians, diffusing its light among the gentiles, and eventually penetrated into Greece. Its hierophant
Hierophant

The role of the hierophant in religion is to bring the congregants into the presence of that which is deemed holy. The word comes from Ancient Greece, where it was constructed from the combination of ta hiera, "the holy," and phainein, "to show." In Attica it was the title of the chief priest at the Eleusinian Mysteries....
s were the prophets among the Egyptians
Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt was an Ancient history civilization in eastern North Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile in what is now the modern nation of Egypt....
, the Chaldea
Chaldea

Chaldea , "the Chaldees" of the King James Version of the Bible Old Testament, was a Hellenistic designation for a part of Babylonia, mainly around Sumerian Ur, which became an independent kingdom under the Chaldees....
ns among the Assyrians
Assyrian people

The Assyrian/Chaldean/Syriac people are an ethnic group whose origins lie in the Fertile Crescent, their Assyrian/Syriac homeland today being divided between Northern Iraq, Syria, Western Iran, and Turkey's Southeastern Anatolia....
, the Druids among the Galatians
Galatia

Ancient Galatia was an area in the highlands of central Anatolia in modern Turkey. Galatia, an ancient region of Asia Minor, was named for the immigrant Gauls from Thrace , who settled here and became its ruling caste in the 3rd century BC....
, the Sramanas of the Bactrians
Bactrians

The Bactrians were an Indo-European people originally of Bactria, situated in what is now Afghanistan, southern Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.Several important trade routes from India and China passed through Bactria and, as early as the Bronze Age, this had allowed the accumulation of vast amounts of wealth by the mostly nomadic population....
, and the philosophers of the Celts, the Magi
Magi

File:Adoracao_dos_magos_de_Vicente_Gil.jpgMagi is a term, used since at least the 4th century BCE, to denote a follower of Zoroaster, or rather, a follower of what the Hellenistic civilization associated Zoroaster with, which was – in the main – the ability to read the stars, and manipulate the fate that the stars foretold....
among the Persians, who, as you know, announced beforehand the birth of the Saviour, being led by a star till they arrived in the land of Judaea, and among the Indians the Gymnosophists, and other philosophers of barbarous nations.
—Clement of Alexandria Stromata
Stromata

The Stromata is the third in Clement of Alexandria's trilogy of works on the Christian life. Clement entitled this work Stromateis, "patchwork," because it dealt with such a variety of matters....
1.15.71 (ed. Colon. 1688 p. 305, A, B).

The quatrain in the "Utopian language

Utopian language

The Utopian language is the constructed language of the fictional land of Utopia. It is found in an addendum to Thomas More's Utopia , written by his good friend Peter Giles....
" created by Peter Giles

Peter Giles

Peter A. Giles is a bass player and vocalist....
for Thomas More

Thomas More

Saint Thomas More was an English lawyer, author, and statesman who in his lifetime gained a reputation as a leading Renaissance humanist scholar, and occupied many public offices, including Lord Chancellor ....
's Utopia
Utopia (book)

Utopia, with the subtitle On the best state of a republic and on the new island of Utopia , is a 1516 book by Sir Saint Thomas More....
uses gymno?ophaon as "philosophy".

Gymnosophists

Ancient accounts

See also

External links