How the Western Mind Nearly Took an Eastern Turn

The Surprising Affinities Between Greek and Indian Philosophy

Le Char d'Apollon by Odilon Redon — *Odilon Redon, Apollo’s Chariot (c. 1910). Both Plato and the Katha Upanishad compared the human soul to a chariot.*

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 14 August 2026.

Western philosophy and Indian philosophy are presented as two quite separate traditions. Yet go back to their beginnings and the distinction starts to break down. Some of the earliest Greek philosophers held ideas that today we would be more likely to call ‘Eastern’ than ‘Western’.

At almost the same moment in history, Greek and Indian thinkers began asking many of the same questions, and, sometimes, coming up with remarkably similar answers.

How are we to explain these affinities? And if the two traditions began so close together, how did they end up so far apart?

Pythagoras

Pythagoras of Samos (c. 570-c. 495 BCE) was a near contemporary of Anaximander and Anaximenes, as well as the Buddha. He might even have met Thales of Miletus—‘the first scientist’—who, it is said, advised him to travel to Memphis to take instruction from Egyptian priests.

In antiquity, Pythagoras was better known as a philosopher than a mathematician. Although he may have introduced it to the West, the theorem that came to bear his name had been discovered centuries earlier by the Babylonians and Indians. His association with this theorem hints at some kind of Eastern connection.

At the age of 40, Pythagoras left Samos for Croton in southern Italy, where he established a philosophically minded religious community. Unusually for the time, Pythagoras admitted men and women alike. Of the 235 famous Pythagoreans listed by Iamblichus, 17 are women.

The men and women who entered the community’s inner circle were governed by a strict set of ascetic and ethical rules, forsaking personal possessions, assuming a mainly vegetarian diet, and—since words are so often careless and misleading—observing the strictest silence.

In India, at around the same time, the Buddha’s followers were organising into monasteries. The Buddha delivered many of his discourses in the monastery of Jetavana in Shravasti, which had been donated to him by the banker Anathapindada. Buddhist monks could eat meat if it was offered to them, but only after ensuring that the animal had not been slaughtered on their behalf. At her insistence, the Buddha’s aunt Mahapajapati became the first of many Buddhist nuns.

The first Buddhist monasteries served as a prototype for the world’s first residential university at Nalanda, just as Pythagoras’ community served as a model for philosophical institutions such as Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum, and, later, for the monastic life and associated early universities.

Music played an important role in Pythagoras’ community. Pythagoreans recited poetry, sang hymns to Apollo, and played on the lyre to cure illnesses of body and soul. One day, or so the story goes, Pythagoras passed by some blacksmiths at work, and found that their hammering produced especially pleasing sounds. He then noticed that their anvils were simple ratios of one another, one being half the size of the first, another twice the size, and so on.

This insight led to his ‘harmony of the spheres,’ according to which the movements of the heavenly bodies are in a mathematical relationship akin to that between musical notes, and, together, amount to a grand cosmic symphony.

Pythagoras (the name means ‘Oracle among the people’) never divorced religion from philosophy and science, which, even in his day, left him open to accusations of mysticism. No doubt under the influence of Orphism, a mystery religion rooted in pre-Hellenic beliefs and the Thracian cult of Zagreus, Pythagoras came to believe in metempsychosis, that is, in the transmigration of the soul at death into a new body of the same or a different species, until such a time as it became moral.

He himself claimed to have lived four lives and to remember them all in detail: in his first life, he had had the good fortune of being Aethalides, son of Hermes, who had given him the faculty of remembering everything even through death.

Taken together, vegetarianism, asceticism, a mixed community devoted to spiritual discipline, cosmic harmonies, and a belief in the transmigration of souls look rather more like a school of Indian religion than the beginning of Western philosophy.

But similarity does not prove influence. Ideas could have travelled through Persia and the wider networks connecting the Mediterranean with India, or they could reflect a deeper Indo-European inheritance. Or it may all be a simple coincidence. My own suspicion is that these similarities owe something to ideas travelling, indirectly and often imperceptibly, between East and West. Maybe Parmenides can help us figure it out.

Parmenides

After Pythagoras’ death in c. 495 BCE, the Pythagoreans deified him, and attributed him with a golden thigh and the gift of bilocation (being in two places at once).

In India, the first Upanishads, the Chandogya Upanishad and Great Forest Upanishad, had by then already been written. The central vision of the Upanishads is one of pantheism (all is God), with God hidden in nature ‘even as the silkworm is hidden in the web of silk he made’. God is Brahman and the part or aspect of Brahman that is in us is Atman. The aim then becomes to achieve the knowledge and unity of Atman and Brahman, which is wisdom, salvation, and liberation (moksha). When Socrates argued for self-knowledge over knowledge, he made the same turn as the Upanishads.

The student of Western philosophy might be reminded of Parmenides (c. 515-c. 440 BCE), who was still young when Pythagoras died. In his poem, On Nature, Parmenides contrasted the Way of Truth to the Way of Opinion. Through a chain of strict a priori deductive arguments from premises deemed incontrovertible, Parmenides argued that, despite appearances (the Way of Opinion), the universe must consist of a single undifferentiated and indivisible unity, which he called ‘the One’—comparable, of course, to Brahman.

In both East and West, we are asked to distrust the multiplicity presented by the senses and seek, behind it, a deeper and indivisible reality. As the Katha Upanishad puts it: ‘Who sees the many and not the one, wanders on from death to death.’

Plato, who might be considered the great systemiser of Western philosophy, was heavily influenced by both Pythagoras and Parmenides.

Plato

In the Metaphysics, Aristotle says that Plato’s teachings owed much to those of the Pythagoreans; so much, in fact, that Bertrand Russell upheld not Plato but Pythagoras as the most influential of all Western philosophers. Pythagoras’ influence is perhaps most evident in Plato’s mystical approach to the soul and in his emphasis on mathematics, and, more generally, reason and abstract thought, as a secure basis for the practice of philosophy.

Just as Plato (c. 427-c. 347 BCE) leaned upon Heraclitus and his theory of flux (‘No one ever steps twice into the same river’) for his conception of the sensible or phenomenal world, so he leaned upon Parmenides for his conception of the intelligible or noumenal world, which he rendered as the ideal, immutable realm of the forms.

Plato’s Phaedo, in which Socrates discusses the immortality of the soul with a pair of Pythagorean philosophers, is essentially an Upanishad in both form and content. Socrates argues that the forms cannot be apprehended by the senses, but only by pure thought, that is, by the mind or soul. Thus, the philosopher seeks in as far as possible to separate soul from body. As death is the complete separation of soul and body, the philosopher aims at death, and can be said to be almost dead.

Although the Phaedo is at the root of Western psychology, philosophy, and theology, it is also deeply Eastern in advocating supreme detachment and ego suppression or disintegration as the route to salvation.

In the Meno, Plato argues that learning is really recollection (anamnesis): the soul already possesses knowledge, and philosophical enquiry merely helps it to remember. Socrates demonstrates the point by questioning an uneducated slave boy until he works out a geometrical problem for himself. The truth, it seems, is not simply out there waiting to be discovered, but somehow already within us—a thought that sits remarkably well with the Upanishadic turn inward towards Atman and self-knowledge.

Underlying Plato’s theory of recollection is the idea that the soul existed before birth. Across the Phaedo, Phaedrus, and Republic, he repeatedly returns to the transmigration of the soul through successive lives, with its fate after death depending upon how it has lived. In the Myth of Er at the end of the Republic, the dead are rewarded or punished before choosing their next lives and drinking from the River of Forgetfulness prior to rebirth. Odysseus, having learnt from the sufferings of his former life, chooses the quiet life of an ordinary man—which he found easily, because neglected by everybody else. The parallels with the Indian doctrines of reincarnation and karma are difficult to miss.

I’ve kept the most striking parallel for last. In the Phaedrus, Plato compares the soul to a chariot with a charioteer and two winged horses. The divine chariot has two tame horses, while the human chariot has one tame horse and one unruly one, making the charioteer’s ascent towards truth a constant struggle. The Katha Upanishad reaches for the very same image. This time, the body is the chariot, the Atman or true self its lord, reason the charioteer, the mind the reins, and the senses the horses. A person without understanding is ‘like a bad driver with wild horses’.

Stoicism

Centuries later, the Stoics, who were influenced by Plato, would once again develop ideas that seem remarkably close to Indian philosophy—especially, this time, Buddhism.

Both traditions warn against attachment and the tyranny of desire; both seek freedom by changing our relation to events rather than controlling events themselves; and both loosen the boundary between self and others in favour of a wider identification with humanity—or even with life as a whole.

In both East and West, then, philosophy could mean something much more demanding than thinking clearly or holding the right opinions. It was a discipline of the self: a way of transforming consciousness and attaining freedom.

Over time, however, philosophy and spiritual practice drifted apart in the West, while in India they remained more closely entwined. The Western tradition retained much from Pythagoras, Parmenides, Plato, and the Stoics—mathematics, logic, metaphysics, rational argument—but gradually lost much of their conception of philosophy as a spiritual practice and path to liberation.

The great difference between Eastern and Western philosophy may therefore lie not so much in how they began, but in what happened to them afterwards.

Had that other strand prevailed, the division we now draw between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ philosophy might look very different.

Perhaps the Western mind did take an Eastern turn. It just didn’t stay the course.