PYTHAGORAS OF SAMOS.

 

     Pythagoras was born in 582 BC and died in 500 BC. He is from a small Greek island known as Samos in the Aegean Sea. Samos was a very affluent Greek settlement and was well known then. During the time of Pythagoras Samos came under a tyrant Polycrates which made Pythagoras migrate to a city named Crotone around 530 BC. 

Before Socrates, Pythogoras was the most famous of all Greek Philosophers. 

Every child of today is familiar with the Pythogoras Theorem in Geometry over 2500 years after he was dead and gone. 

Pythagoras said that the origin of everything is numerals and without numerals there is no World. Today this may look absurd to us, but then, have our ancestors not said that everything came from “OM”. 

Amazingly the British did more research to discover Indian culture than Indians themselves. Arthur Anthony Mc Donnel wrote “A History of Sanskrit Literature” which was published in the year 1900. In that he said that it is highly probable that Pythagoras visited Persia through which he has imbibed Indian thought.   

In his book, he detailed several striking parallels between Pythagorean and ancient Indian thought. He said that the doctrine of transmigration of souls was never there in Greek thought and was brought in by Pythagoras suddenly, and had no indigenous explanation. The mathematical formulations for the Pythagorean Theorem, the philosophical assumption of 5 elements, and specific religious beliefs like taboo against eating beans had existing parallels in 6^th century BC India.

Pythagoras established a society in Crotone where the members lived together like  a family, wore the same type of clothes and had strict discipline just like in our Buddhist Sangha’s of that time. 

Pythagoras said Soul is everlasting and it does not perish. So every life form that is born dies and is again reborn as human or animal. Souls have afterlife. However, in this cycle if one goes around with good moral and ethical principles, then in some of the afterlives the soul would cease to have an afterlife. Now, this is much too close to Indian philosophical thought, so little wonder that Mc Donnel speculated that Pythagoras had a brush with Indian thought. 

Pythagoras postulated that the world is formed by dyads. He has defined 10 such dyads but does not deny other dyads. 

Greeks never had the concept of zero which India had at that time. So they did their addition, subtraction, division & multiplication through Geometry. 

Pythagoras ultimately said gave one number to everything; humans had one number while horse had another and so on for everything. Even feelings have been given numbers. 

This may look absurd to us but BAG Fuller in his “History of Philosophy” says that we need not think it to be so. The modern Physics and Chemistry rely completely on mathematics and even the definition of the elements is through numbers.  So, to that extent, if there are no numbers, there is no world.

Pythagoras assumed that the earth is not flat but is spherical. He said (as many others did) that Earth is the center of the Universe and the Moon, Sun, Planets and stars orbit it. He went on to say that these bodies while orbiting so make musical sounds. We may consider this absurd but again that was what he said. 

Western philosophy has 2 very important branches; 1. Materialism & 2. Idealism. While, Thales and other Greek philosophers were the originators of materialism, Pythagoras was the originator of Idealism. A war is on between the 2 basic systems for centuries and would continue to rage on.