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Given the Choice, Who Would You Be in Your Next Life?

The Last Judgement, by Michelangelo.
The responsibility lies with the chooser; God is not responsible. — Republic X

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

Plato concludes The Republic with the myth of Er, a timeless story of death, judgment, reincarnation, and the soul’s freedom to choose its destiny. This fresh retelling and interpretation explores why it remains one of the greatest philosophical myths ever told.

The Myth of Er has had an enduring influence on the Western imagination, shaping, among other things, our inherited ideas of heaven, hell, and moral destiny. Although Plato presents the story as told by Socrates at the end of The Republic, it draws on older Greek and Near Eastern traditions of judgment after death, cosmic order, and the journey of the soul.

The Myth of Er

Er, a soldier from Pamphylia, was slain in battle. Twelve days later, as his body lay on the funeral pyre, he returned to life and told those around him what he had seen in the interval between death and rebirth.

During those twelve days, his soul had journeyed to a strange meadow marked by four openings: two leading upward into the heavens, and two descending into the earth below.

Judges sat in this meadow and assigned souls according to their conduct in life. The just were directed to the right and upward, ascending through one of the openings into the heavens; the unjust were directed to the left and downward, descending into the earth.

At the same time, other souls were returning. Bright, cheerful souls descended from above, having completed a thousand-year reward in the heavens. They spoke joyfully of what they had experienced. By contrast, other souls rose up from below, exhausted and in pain, describing a thousand-year punishment in the depths of the earth.

When Er approached the judges, he was told that he was not to be judged. Instead, he was to observe and later report what he had seen to humanity.

After seven days in the meadow, the souls set out on a further journey of five days, eventually arriving at the Spindle of Necessity.

This was a vast column of light, brighter than anything they had ever seen, extending through the cosmos and holding together the movements of the sun, moon, planets, and stars. The structure of the heavens rotated like a spindle, with concentric circles turning within one another.

At its centre stood Necessity, or Ananke, attended by her three daughters, the Fates. In each of the celestial circles sat a Siren, each producing a single note, so that together they formed a cosmic harmony.

When all the souls had gathered, a prophet announced:

“Hear the word of Lachesis, daughter of Necessity. Mortal souls, you are entering a new cycle of life and death. Your destiny will not be assigned to you, but chosen by you. The one who draws the first lot shall choose first; and the life chosen shall become his fate.”

The souls then came forward in order and selected their next lives from a vast assortment of human and animal forms.

The first to choose, having seen neither reward nor punishment in a way that had truly reshaped him, hastily selected the life of a tyrant. Only later did he discover that this life entailed horrors he had failed to foresee, including the destruction of his own family. His earlier virtue had been habitual rather than reflective; he had never truly understood what made a life good.

By contrast, many of those returning from punishment in the underworld, having suffered greatly, now chose more moderate and balanced lives. But their choices were often driven by fear and aversion rather than understanding.

Last of all came Odysseus, the man of many ways. Having experienced the extremes of fortune and glory, he searched for a long time before finding the life of an ordinary private man, overlooked by everyone else. Delighted with his discovery, he remarked that he would have made the same choice even if he had been first to choose.

Once all souls had chosen, they travelled to the plain of Forgetfulness. There they encamped by the River Lethe. Each soul was required to drink from the river, and in doing so forgot everything it had previously known. Some, still unsteady from desire or confusion, drank more than they needed.

In the night, as they slept, the souls rose upward like stars and were reborn into their chosen lives. At that moment, Er awoke to find himself once again on his funeral pyre.

Interpretation of the Myth

At the beginning of The Republic, Plato’s brother Glaucon challenges Socrates with a stark claim: most people are not just; they merely behave justly when it is advantageous to do so. If they could act unjustly without consequence, they would.

In response, Socrates constructs an elaborate account of justice—not as social convention or reputation, but as something belonging to the inner structure of the soul. Just as health is not merely the appearance of the body but its proper functioning, justice is the harmonious ordering of the self. An unjust soul, however successful it may appear externally, is internally disordered.

The myth of Er comes at the end of this argument, and one of its purposes is to show that justice does, in the end, prevail. Although the just may suffer and the unjust prosper in this life, each soul ultimately receives its due. In this sense, the myth answers Glaucon’s challenge: justice is not merely socially convenient, but intrinsically valuable, because it orders the soul. The myth suggests that such a soul is ultimately rewarded.

But the myth does something more than reassure us that justice is eventually rewarded and injustice punished. It explores something more unsettling: how easily souls can misjudge what is good for them, even after they have seen the consequences of their choices.

The problem Plato is concerned with is not only moral weakness, but moral blindness. Even a thousand years in heaven or hell does not guarantee wisdom. Some souls, having endured punishment, choose more carefully; others, despite every opportunity to learn, repeat their mistakes. Experience alone is not enough. Suffering may teach caution, but only philosophy teaches understanding.

Within this framework, justice is not simply about behaving correctly, but about forming a soul capable of recognising what is truly good. Without such understanding, even freedom of choice can become dangerous. The tyrant’s error lies not merely in his lust for power, but in his ignorance about the kind of life he is selecting. His failure is epistemic before it is moral.

Yet reward and punishment alone are not enough. The deeper concern of the myth is the formation of character. We do not choose wisely merely because we have suffered, nor because we have prospered, but because we have learnt to distinguish appearance from reality and the merely desirable from the truly good.

Odysseus, at the end of the myth, provides the final illustration. Having experienced the extremes of human life, he passes over lives of power and renown to choose that of an ordinary private man. It is one of the most quietly profound moments in Greek literature. The greatest of heroes no longer seeks greatness, but peace. His choice suggests that wisdom lies not in acquiring more, but in learning what is enough.

In the end, the myth of Er is less a literal description of the afterlife than a meditation on justice, character, and choice. Plato affirms that justice is ultimately rewarded, but he also insists that reward alone is not enough. A good life depends not merely on receiving one’s due, but on acquiring the wisdom to recognise what is truly worth choosing.

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Why Rebirth Is Worse Than Death

The wheel of Samsara
The wheel of samsara has a curious parallel in Greek mythology: the wheel of Ixion.

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.

Whenever I tell people that I’ve written a book on Indian thought, the conversation often turns to reincarnation. ‘How wonderful,’ said a neighbour, ‘if people never really die.’

I replied, ‘Actually, reincarnation, even into a higher station, is a kind of punishment. The aim is not to come back. The aim, you might say, is to have a proper death.’

In Indian thought, the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth is called samsara. The problem is not that we die, but that the cycle goes on. Liberation—moksha in Hindu traditions, nirvana in Buddhism—consists in escaping it.

The wheel of samsara has a curious parallel in Greek mythology: the wheel of Ixion. For trying to seduce Hera, Ixion, king of the Lapiths, was bound to a winged, fiery wheel that spins for all eternity in Tartarus. In both traditions, the horror is not death, but to be unable to come off the wheel.

Even Hindus and Buddhists sometimes forget this, and hope, modestly, to be reincarnated into a slightly easier life, perhaps with a faster Wi-Fi. The principle bears explaining, and one way to do that is through the prism of Buddhist thought.

The Doctrine of Dependent Origination

The Buddha was struck by human suffering and spent years trying to understand its causes and the means to overcome them.

An early insight that led to his enlightenment is the Doctrine of Dependent Origination, according to which life is a continuous process of change, with every instance of change having manifold causes and effects. This means that all things are conditioned by other things, so that all things are interconnected.

Suffering arises from a craving for permanence; but all permanence is an illusion that, in time, can only lead to pain and disappointment.

The other, brighter side of the coin is that, if all things are conditional, and subject to change, then so too is suffering.

The Doctrine of Dependent Origination extends even to the self. Buddhism famously denies the existence of an eternal, unchanging soul or atman. What we call the self is a changing constellation of causes and conditions—body, consciousness, sensations, perceptions, dispositions…

But if there is no enduring self, what is reincarnated? The Buddhist answer is not a soul or substance, but a causal continuity. One life gives rise to another rather as one flame might light another. The second flame is neither the same flame nor entirely another.

The Four Noble Truths

It is said that, upon enlightenment, the Buddha understood the Four Noble Truths, which he outlined in his first sermon in the deer park at Sarnath:

  1. Suffering (dukkha) is inherent in all life.
  2. The cause of all suffering is desire.
  3. There is a natural way to eliminate all suffering.
  4. The Noble Eightfold Path is that way.

The first truth, dukkha, acknowledges the unsatisfactory nature of existence. The second truth, samudaya (origin), attributes a cause to this suffering, namely, desire. The third truth, nirodha (cessation), posits a state that is free from suffering. And the fourth truth, marga (path), points to the method for achieving that state.

Although usually translated as ‘suffering’, dukkha refers more broadly to the inherently impermanent and unsatisfactory nature of all things, including the pleasant ones—for, really, it is on account of them that we suffer most.

Nirodha is also referred to as nirvana (‘blown out’, as in a candle), indicating that, rather than a positive state, nirvana is more of a negative state of absence of desire. Nirvana is the state of wishing for nothing, not even nirvana—a state akin, in that respect, to the deepest sleep, or death.

This is the reverse of my neighbour’s fantasy of reincarnation. The object is not to secure an endless succession of lives, but to extinguish the craving that drives the wheel.

Wisdom and Liberation

If the cause of dukkha is desire, the cause of desire is ignorance—pointing to knowledge or wisdom as the way forward. With proper perspective, there would be no desire, and so no suffering—and no (re)birth, which is the outcome of desire, and the source of all suffering. ‘Rebirth’ is a misleading term: had it been called ‘re-death’, people would look upon it very differently.

Does this mean that people ought to refrain from having children? No, insofar as being born is an opportunity to escape being born. The purpose of life is to provide us with an opportunity to escape it, by achieving wisdom. Otherwise, we shall have to try again, and again. It is said that on the night of his enlightenment, the Buddha remembered hundreds of thousands of his former lives. The world is either an aberration or created for the edification or purification of soul or consciousness. Creation is, maybe, God’s form of exercise.

Unfortunately, wisdom is hard to attain, because it runs counter to everything we have learnt and everything we love, including the thing we love most, our self. On top of that, it confronts us with everything we fear, not least death and impermanence. For these reasons and more, it takes long practice and training to attain wisdom, and even longer practice and training to hold on to it in the face of temptation, fragility, and adversity.

Coming Off the Wheel

With desire firmly under control, everything becomes a lot better and a lot easier. In an absence of desire, why lie or steal, or be envious or greedy? Or why be anxious, or angry, or depressed? The opposite of envy is not merely an absence of envy, but shared joy and admiration. The opposite of greed is not merely an absence of greed, but decency and generosity. The opposite of anger is not merely an absence of anger, but compassion. The opposite of anxiety is not merely an absence of anxiety, but tranquillity. The opposite of depression is not merely an absence of depression, but wisdom.

Seen in this light, reincarnation is not a promise that saves us from death. It is the problem from which wisdom is meant to save us. The aim is not to live for ever, nor even to return in happier circumstances, but to become wise enough at last to step off the wheel—and, as I told my neighbour, to die once and for all.

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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.

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Why the Ancient Indian Doctrine Is Far More Profound Than ‘What Goes Around Comes Around’

Konark Sun Temple wheel of dharma (karma)

The stone wheel of the Konark Sun Temple, Odisha, India.

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 12 August 2026.

Why do good people suffer while bad people prosper?

It is one of the oldest problems in philosophy and religion. Every civilisation has wrestled with it. If the universe is just, why do the virtuous endure hardship, while the vicious flourish? Why are some people born into privilege while others are burdened from the very beginning?

The Indian traditions developed one of history’s most striking answers: karma.

Today, karma is widely misunderstood, even by Indians themselves. It is often confused with fate or destiny, or reduced to the cliché that ‘what goes around comes around’. Both are misconceptions. Properly understood, karma is a law of moral causation by which our modes of engagement come to determine our station and situation.

According to Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and several other Indian religions, every instance of thought, speech, and action is a cause, and every experience an effect. Reward and punishment are not arbitrary. Instead, the universe is governed by an intricate web of causes and consequences extending beyond a single lifetime.

Good karma is often referred to as punya (‘merit’), and bad karma as paap (‘demerit’). Even if punya does not immediately seem to pay off, it does in the longer term. This is why karma is closely tied to samsara, the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth—with future births conditioned by the accumulated balance of punya and paap.

Although karma is fundamentally individual, it can also, in certain circumstances, be transferred. The Kaushitaki Upanishad describes a rite in which a dying father passes his karma to his son, declaring, ‘Let me place my speech in thee… Let me place my breath in thee…’, with the son replying, ‘I take thy speech in me… I take thy breath in me…’

More ordinarily, the paap of a living or deceased person may be mitigated by the prayers, rituals, or pilgrimages of others.

Justice Beyond This Life

Why should justice extend beyond a single lifetime? Because a lifetime is simply too short. Vice and virtue do not always seem to receive their due. But over many lives, the moral balance can finally be restored.

Some ancient Greeks arrived at a strikingly similar solution. At the outset of Plato’s Republic, the sophist Thrasymachus argues that it is not the just but the unjust who flourish, and that the tyrant, being the most wicked of people, is also the happiest. At the end of the Republic, in the Myth of Er, Plato turns to reincarnation to guarantee that the genuinely just always come out on top, with each soul choosing its next life according to its accumulated store of wisdom. In this, as in much else, Plato was influenced by Pythagoras (d. 495 BCE), who, like the Indians, believed in the transmigration of the soul.

In the Catholic tradition, heaven serves much the same moral purpose as karma. The soul of the newly deceased is judged and sent to heaven, hell, or purgatory. Then, there is also a Last Judgement that takes place after the Second Coming of Christ and the resurrection of the dead.

In the Letter to the Galatians, St Paul warns: ‘Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.’

According to the Old Testament, punishment might even be extended to subsequent generations, that is, to future selves: ‘The Lord is long-suffering, and of great mercy, forgiving iniquity and transgression, and by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation’ (Numbers 14:18, and repeated almost verbatim in Exodus 34:7).

Whether through repeated rebirths or a final judgement, all these traditions share a common conviction: justice must ultimately prevail.

The Philosophy of Karma

Karma serves the same purpose as Eden in providing the major motivation to live a moral life. But it serves other purposes too, such as accounting for the existence of evil, rationalising rebirth (which could also operate independently of karma), and providing a soteriological goal of final liberation.

In determining our circumstances and even our temperament, karma may constrict our options, but it does not deprive us of choice and deliberation, enabling it to condone social inequities and the caste system while at the same time affirming human freedom.

The importance of karma, and the degree of freedom and determination within it, have long been debated in and between the Hindu schools.

But even if karma theory is not literally true, it is at least metaphorically true. Being good does pay off, if only in peace of mind and mental health.

In which case, is karma theory a firm basis for morality, or an appeal to naked self-interest?

One way around this problem, which has been taken, is to broaden the scope of karma to include thoughts as well as actions, so that the system becomes impossible to game.

Doing the right thing for the wrong reason is not the same, and does not feel the same, as doing it for the right reason. According to the Great Forest Upanishad, the truly virtuous act is the one that is desire-less. More than two millennia later, Immanuel Kant would arrive at a remarkably similar conclusion with his Categorical Imperative. Like the Stoic archer, one must concentrate on doing the right thing, to the best of one’s ability, without being attached to the outcome. For it is from attachment that life and misery arise.

The Buddhist Solution

The Buddha had another way around the problem, which is to deny the metaphysical distinction between the self and others so that helping others is the same as helping oneself.

Aristotle makes a similar if more circumscribed move in the Nicomachean Ethics, when he says that there is no conflict between helping a friend and helping oneself insofar as a perfect friend is like another self.

When we are good to another, we are good to all, including ourself, because the distinction is an illusion, and karma travels.

If we have no self, why did the Buddhists not altogether give up on karma and samsara?

In part, because karma can still operate in the absence of a Self, or Atman, with future incarnations being conditioned by the sum of all the karmic actions that have been put into the world.

The Deeper Insight

Whether or not one believes in reincarnation, the deeper insight of karma remains compelling.

Every person—their parents, their teachers, and their parents and teachers—is the embodiment of every karmic action that has ever gone before. Our every action reverberates to the end of time. 

Our every kindness changes the person who receives it, and our every cruelty does the same. Those people, in turn, shape others.

We inherit the moral world created by all those who came before us, and leave behind the moral world that our successors will inherit.

Thus, karma is not merely a mystical doctrine, but a profound truth about what it means to be human.

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The Uncanny Parallels Between Plato and the Upanishads

Le Char d'Apollon, by Odilon Redon
Know the Self as the rider in the chariot, the body as the chariot itself; know the intellect as the charioteer, and the mind as the reins. —Katha Upanishad

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.

Coming to Indian philosophy after having written three books on Greek philosophy, I have been struck by the parallels. And I have been asking myself: are the similarities between Greek and Indian thought the result of direct or indirect communication, or are they the result of a common source or common grammar (Sanskrit being closely related to Greek)? Or are they rather a universal product of the human mind?

The possibility of contact cannot be dismissed. By Plato’s lifetime, the Persian Empire had brought the Greeks and Indians within the same vast political and commercial sphere. Ideas, like goods and people, could travel great distances. But possibility is not proof, and there is no evidence that Plato himself encountered the Upanishads.

Introduction to the Upanishads

‘Upanishad’ means something like ‘hidden connections’, ‘secret teaching’, or ‘esoteric doctrine’, literally, ‘a sitting at (the feet of the teacher)’. Although part of the Vedas, the Upanishads tend to take a dim, if diplomatic, view of what went before. ‘Of what use,’ asks the Svetashvatara Upanishad, ‘is the Rig Veda to one who does not know the Spirit from whom the Rig Veda comes?’ By a strict definition, there are around 108 Upanishads, but the first dozen are the most important.

Like the writings of the pre-Socratic philosophers, some of these mukhya (major) Upanishads are in prose, others are in verse.

Although it is the philosophy and poetry that are retained, the content of the Upanishads is very diverse. The Upanishads fit into the Vedic tradition, and, like older layers of the Vedas, may include mantras, rituals, creation myths, lineages of teachers, historical narratives, and the like. At their best and most original, they take the form of a philosophical dialogue, not unlike those of Plato, with named interlocutors presenting and debating various viewpoints.

For example, in the Great Forest Upanishad (which is the oldest Upanishad, dating from around or before the sixth century BCE), the sage Yajnavalya engages in philosophical debate with, among others, his wife Maitreyi, the sage Gargi (another, rare, woman), and King Janaka of Videha—who salutes Yajnavalya with ‘namaste’. In the Chandogya Upanishad, the sage Uddalaka Aruni—the guru (teacher) of Yajnavalya—engages in debate with his son, Svetaketu.

Yajnavalya, Uddalaka, and Svetaketu are among the first philosophers in recorded history.

Brahman and Atman

This being philosophy, there is a tendency to abstraction, to reach ‘at the truth behind the truth’ (satyasya satyam).

The central vision is one of pantheism (all is God) or panentheism (all is in 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).

These ideas are neatly encapsulated in this passage from the Mundaka Upanishad:

As rivers flowing into the ocean find their final peace and their name and form disappear, even so the wise become free from name and form and enter into the radiance of the Supreme Spirit who is greater than all greatness. In truth who knows God becomes God.

Parallels With Parmenides and Greek Philosophy

The student of Western philosophy might be reminded of the pre-Socratic Parmenides (d. c. 400 BCE), who, in his poem, On Nature, 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’.

These verses from the Katha Upanishad could credibly have been penned by Parmenides:

Who sees the many and not the one, wanders on from death to death. Even by the mind this truth is to be learned: there are not many but one. Who sees variety and not unity wanders on from death to death.

To bolster the philosophy of Parmenides, his student and lover Zeno of Elea produced a set of paradoxical arguments, including the famous Achilles and the Tortoise, designed to undermine ordinary assumptions about motion, space, time, and plurality.

Just as Plato (d. 348 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.

Already, Greek and Indian thought appear to be circling around the same fundamental problem: are the change and multiplicity presented to our senses real, or are they merely manifestations of something single, eternal, and unchanging?

Parallels With Plato

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. The philosopher, says Socrates, who is soon to drink of the hemlock, aims at truth, but his body is constantly deceiving and distracting him:

The body keeps us busy in a thousand ways because of its need for nurture… It fills us with needs, desires, fears, all sorts of illusions and much nonsense…

Absolute justice, absolute beauty, or absolute good cannot be apprehended by the senses but only by pure thought, that is, by the mind or soul. Thus, the philosopher seeks as far as possible to separate the soul from the body. As death is the complete separation of body and soul, the philosopher aims at death and can be said to be almost dead.

This idea of the soul being waylaid by the body is also found in the Maitri Upanishad, which was written at around the same time as the Phaedo:

The human soul rules the body; but the immortal spiritual soul is pure like a drop of water on a lotus leaf. The soul is under the power of the three constituents and conditions of nature and thus it falls into confusion. Because of this confusion the soul cannot become conscious of the God who dwells within and whose power gives us power to work.

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.

In the Phaedrus, Socrates, having established its immortality, compares the soul to a chariot with a charioteer and two winged horses. Whereas the chariot of a god has two tame horses, that of a mortal has one tame horse and one unruly one, which is the cause of much hardship for the charioteer.

This passage from the Katha Upanishad appears almost to be elucidating Plato’s chariot allegory:

Know the Atman as the Lord of a chariot; and the body as the chariot itself. Know that reason is the charioteer; and the mind indeed is the reins. The horses, they say, are the senses; and their paths are the objects of sense. He who has not right understanding, and whose mind is never steady is not the ruler of his life, like a bad driver with wild horses.

The two allegories are not identical. Plato divides the soul between charioteer and horses, whereas the Katha splits differently. Yet both arrive at the same extraordinary image: human life as an exercise in charioteering, in which the mind must somehow govern forces that threaten to derail us.

The Form of the Good

For more than two millennia, Western philosophers have been poring over Plato’s elusive Form of the Good. Plato himself devised three interconnected allegories (the sun, line, and cave) merely to point at it. But I can tell you what it is in just one word: Brahman.

Both Brahman and the Form of the Good point beyond the changing world of appearances towards an ultimate principle upon which truth and reality depend. Just as Brahman stands behind the multiplicity of the world as its ultimate ground, so the Form of the Good stands beyond the other Forms as the source of their intelligibility.

Plato even has a theory of reincarnation, leading us to suppose that he must, in a previous life, have been a Brahmin.

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Indian Mythology and Philosophy and The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle.

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