Plato and Shankara – parellels


I am sure one can find many parallels in the philosophies of these two – Shankara and Plato. One such is anamnesis – recognition, remembrance, equivalent to pratyabhijña (though it seems that this last comes from Kashmir Shaivism).

Raga – attachment, passion (one of 5 constrictions (kañcuka-s) which when directed to external objects limits the sense of completion in the individual (cf. pancha-kañcuka), which resembles Plato’s Eros, similarly implying a want, a desire of completion or repletion.

“There is an ambiguity about love in its very nature. It is the offspring of Resource, its father, and Poverty or deficiency, its mother… in the Symposium [one of Plato’s Socratic dialogues] Eros signifies a want of which at the same time it is the desire of repletion. So love symbolizes or, better, manifests the actual condition of man as he exists, halfway between ignorance and wisdom.”: ‘Therapeia’- Plato´s Conception of Philosophy, Robert E. Cushman.

                                       (From a chain discussion in ‘Advaita Vision’)

Advertisement

About amartingarcia

General surgeon (retired). Studied Western philosophy at U of Toronto. Afterwards interest turned to advaita vedanta and non-duality for past 20 yrs, plus a long interlude in Sufism coinciding with that period. Now contributing in ’Advaita Vision’ with regular posts and discussions.
This entry was posted in Advaita, philosophy and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s