Review article
https://doi.org/10.31337/oz.79.3.6
Dualism in Ancient Greece and India: Plato and Jainism
Tonći Kokić
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Split, Split, Croatia
Abstract
There is an apparent similarity between the dualism of ancient Greece and Indian Jainism in regard to features involving the relationship between body and soul. In ancient Greece the pinnacle of dualistic teaching was achieved in Plato’s description of two worlds in which eternal ideas reside, namely, the soul (psychḗ) which at the moment of death is separated (chōrismòs) from the body (sṓma) dwelling in the visible world. In Jainism, the soul (jīva) is considered substantially different from material bodies which are composed of particles (aṇu): the soul is a kind of immaterial substance (dravya), while all else is material (pudgala). In Plato’s and Jainist dualistic teachings we find a possible solution to one of the more difficult problems in this approach to dualism: an explanation of the contradictory union of two incommensurable types of being, soul and body, namely, the existence of a unique substance uniting the immortal and the mortal, the imperishable and the perishable (in the Greek doctrine it is clay, pēlós; in Jains it is a very fine substance, karmic dirt, karmavaraṇa). In both doctrines there is recognition to a certain degree of a separate intermediate stage between two incarnations or rebirths and the possibility of the recalling of absolute knowledge. Explanations of the structure and genealogy of these teachings and their interrelationship range from the possibility of a transmission of learning to a synchronous emergence, or simply an acceptance of occurrences in the same general pattern of the historical sequence of ideas and concepts.
Keywords
Plato; Jainism; dualism; jīva; karma; psychḗ; pēlos
Hrčak ID:
318399
URI
Publication date:
2.7.2024.
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