The common origin approach to comparing Indian and Greek philosophy
The common origin approach to comparing Indian and Greek philosophy
This chapter focuses on two kinds of similarity between the two cultures that relate to their shared Indo-European origin. One is a series of correspondences between the journeys to the next world in the Odyssey and in the Kausitaki Upanishad. The other arises from a critique of the Indo-European 'trifunctional ideology' found by Dumézil in Greece and India. The total of three and category of socila function are both too restrictive for a worldview. Dumézil's triadic structure should be replaced with a pentadic one, in which the triad acquires at the bottom what is undesirable and at the top something transcendent. A pentadic structure is found in, for axample, the philosophy known as Samkhya and in the Greek set of five elements.
Keywords: Triadic, Pentadic, Indo-European, Dumézil, Odyssey, Kausitaki Upanishad, Samkhya, Elemets
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