With my respects to the Venerable Nyanatusita Thera

Of the fifth and sixth centuries B.C., Rapson states that “at no period in early history,probably, were the means of communication by land more open or the conditions morefavourable for the interchange of ideas between India and the West.” 13“This may account,” according to Rawlinson, “for the influence of Indian ideas upon thedevelopment of Greek philosophy.” 14“It is not too much,” says R. Garbe, “to assume that the curious Greek (Pythagoras) whowas a contemporary of the Buddha, and, it may be, of Zoroaster, too, would haveacquired a more or less exact knowledge of the East, in that intellectual age offermentation, through the medium of Persia. It must be remembered in this connectionthat the Asiatic Greeks, at the time when Pythagoras still dwelt in his Ionian home, wereunder the single sway of Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire.” 15“Herodotus, like Plato and others, attributes all wisdom to Egyptian sources … TheGreeks were deeply impressed by the great antiquity of Egyptian civilization, its loftytemples, and its closely guarded religious mysteries … Unfortunately, it is extremelydoubtful whether the Egyptians did actually believe in transmigration … It is morelikely that Pythagoras was influenced by India (re transmigration) than by Egypt.Almost all the theories—religious, philosophical and mathematical—taught by thePythagoreans were known in India in the sixth century B.C., and Pythagoreans, like theJains and the Buddhists, refrained from the destruction of life …” 16“Alexandria in the first century A.D. was the second city in the Empire. In the height ofher glory, she must have resembled Venice in the full tide of her prosperity. Themercantile shipping of half the ancient world tied up at her quaysides, and scholarsfrom the four quarters of the earth met and disputed in the Museum and made use ofthe vast stores of literature in her great libraries. The Alexandrians were essentiallycosmopolitan. They had none of the contempt for the 'barbarians' of the old Greekstates, and a large proportion of the population, like the Athenians, 'spent their life innothing else, but either to tell or hear some new thing.' A Buddhist monk from Barygazawould receive the same attentive hearing as did St. Paul at the hands of the Areopagus,and the medium was Hellenistic Greek, lingua franca from the Levant to the Indus. TheMilindapañhá mentions Alexandria as one of the places to which Indian merchantsregularly resorted, and Dio Chrysostom, lecturing to an Alexandrian audience in thereign of Trajan, says: 'I see among you, not only Greeks and Italians, Syrians, Libyans,and Cilicians, and men who dwell more remotely, Ethiopians and Arabs, but also13 Rapson, E.J. ed., Ancient India, The Cambridge History of India, Volume 1, Cambridge, 1922, pp.87–8814 Rawlinson, H.G., “India in European Literature and Thought, " in The Legacy of India, by G. T.Garratt, The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1937, p. 415 Ibid, note (Probably from The Philosophy of Ancient India, by Richard Garbe, The Open CourtPublishing Company, Chicago 1897)15 Rawlinson, op. cit., p. 56