I welcome you with deep joy and great warmth to this Eighth International Seminar on Neoplatonism and Indian Thought, on behalf of my colleague Prof. Baine Harris, eminent Professor of Philosophy at Old Dominion University in the USA, who is the Director of the International Society for Neoplatonism Studies (of which I am only the President of the Indian Chapter). He is unable to be present, though he was all set to get here when his doctor advised that he was not to travel. His message to the participants will be in your Hands.

I welcome you also on behalf of all the co-sponsoring organisations in India: first and foremost the Indian Council of Philosophical Research, which has given us a major grant and done the lion's share of the organising work; the other organisations which have helped us with the funding and facilities: the Manavata Mandir in Hoshiarpur, the All India Association for Christian Higher Education, the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, and the Sarva Dharma Nilaya; the other organisations which have helped in various ways: the Indian Philosophical Congress, the Akhil Bharatiya Darshan Parishad, the International Society for Indian Philosophy, and the Jamia Millia Hamdard. Without all that help this seminar could hardly have taken place. There are so many persons I would like to thank by name in all these organisations, but I fear any such attempt is bound to turn out to be invidious.

I should pay a special tribute to Dr. Girija Vyas, Deputy Minister of Information and
Broadcasting, who has from the beginning been a member of the Indian chapter of the International Society for Neoplatonism Studies. She is the honorary chairperson of the Organising Committee and despite the many demands on her time and the
fluctuating state of her health, given of herself graciously and generously to the work of organizing the seminar. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Prof. R. Balasubramaniam, the Chairman, Prof.Bhuvan Chandel, the Member-Secretary and Dr. Ranjan K Ghosh, the Director, of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research. They made my work easy in so many ways.

I may be permitted to make a few comments at the opening of this seminar, which I hope you will discuss some time in the course of this seminar and see if they have any relevance to our topic: Neoplatonism and India Thought

I. Greater Interaction Of Cultures In Antiquity

Today we are used to neat compartmentalisations like Indian philosophy, Western philosophy, Chinese philosophy, etc. They have of course some validity for many today, since it helps the division of the academic handling of philosophy. We have often been able, with or without adequate historical justification, to imagine these regional cultures and geographically localized philosophical traditions as developing more or less independently of each other, with only occasional contacts or influences.

Paradoxically, however, in classical antiquity, there were no such watertight barriers between cultures. There were no copyright laws, no passports and visas, and people travelled comparatively freely, though not effortlessly, taking their time, and if the philosopher could survive the rigors of travel, which was often regarded as part of a spiritual discipline, he stayed in the land of arrival and taught, while mastering the system of thought prevailing there.

The earliest library-based examples of this cross-cultural fertilisation of scientific-philosophical-religious (the three were hardly separable those days) reflection centred around the great library of Nineveh in Babylon (sacked in 612 B C) in Asia, and the Museum in Alexandria in North Africa, established in the 3rd century BC and lasting till the 6th century at least.

Alexandria was the home of what we mistakenly regard as a branch of western philosophy, and perhaps less wrongly call Neoplatonism; in fact it is more correct to call it a new Oriental religio-philosophical way of experiencing and articulating Reality with many internal variations, many Asian adaptations with substantial changes in the original Alexandrian creation. Plotinus was no westerner, but an Egyptian from Lycopolis in Egypt; Porphyry was no westerner, but a hellenized Syrian, and if we believe his story, Plotinus‘ teacher Ammonius Saccas was no westerner, but an Egyptian from Alexandria who was also an Indophile. Iamblichus was no westerner, but from Chalcis in Coele-Syria. Why call Neoplatonism a Western system, and then try to see if there are any "Oriental" influences to be traced in it?

Both Nineveh and Alexandria were, in Toynbee's picturesque language, cultural "round-abouts" where you could approach from one direction and proceed in a
variety of other directions. Toynbee particularly refers in his A Study of History (Part IX, Chapter xxx) to two "numeniferous regions" which have generated several world religions: the Oxus-Jaxartes or Sindhu-Ganga Basin, and the Greater Syrian or West Asian or Eastern Mediterranean region. Both these regions were cultural-religious "roundabouts" and were able to give birth to and spread abroad several universal religions: Zoroastrianism, Original Buddhism, Jainism, Mahayana Buddhism, and post-Buddha Hinduism on the one hand, and Judaism, Christianity and Islam on the other. The Tigris-Euphrates basin participated in contacts with both roundabouts, the Central Asian and the west Asian and often served as a link. Alexandria in the 3rd century was certainly no stranger to either Buddhism or Brahmanism.

I just thought it would be good for us to keep these simple facts in mind, when we proceed to discuss the question about who influenced whom and how. Great
Religious-philosophical traditions take shape in cultural roundabouts, and not in isolated cultures.

II. Neoplatonism As Basically Religious -Philosophical

Unlike us children of the European Enlightenment, the ancients never made the distinction between religion and philosophy so watertight as we try to make it. There was no attempt in the pre-modern period at founding a philosophical system without some presuppositions and basic assumptions drawn from some tradition or other, such as we modern sophomores try to do and fail dismally.

Take the Indian tradition. On what rational or nontraditional basis can we establish the doctrines of Karma and Transmigration, so fundamental and so central to Hindu, Buddhist and Jain Indian thought since the 8th century BC? The origins of this Karma-Transmigration framework are not traceable in any tradition, Indian, Pythagorean or Alexandrian.

Similarly in Greece, even Plato inherited a tradition, which certainly included Pythagoras and all the Pre-Socratics as well as Socrates himself. Attempts
have been made to depict Plato as a nonreligious philosopher, and Socrates, Plato's Guru and Ideal as a secular prophet. This still prevailing view of Plato and Socrates is easy to disprove, because it is not true. Plato depicts Socrates as an initiated ‘Mystic' in the Symposium, initiated, presumably into the Orphic Mystery religion, by Diotima, the Priestess of Mantinea. One cannot understand Plotinus without going back to the speech of Diotima in Plato's Symposium, nor can we understand either Plato or Socrates without reading and rereading that speech, about which W. Hamilton, in his introduction to Plato's Symposium has this to say:

"Diotima describes it in terms borrowed from the mysteries, partly, no doubt, because it is a gradual progress comparable to the stages of an initiation, and partly because the final vision is a a religious rather than an intellectual experience, and, like the culminating revelation of a mystery religion, is not to be described or communicated." (Plato, The Symposium, Penguin Classics, 1951/59, p.24)

Permit me to quote just one little passage from that Diotima speech:

"This beauty is first of all eternal, it neither comes into being nor passes away, neither waxes nor wanes; it is...absolute, existing alone with itself, unique eternal, and all other beautiful things as partaking of it, yet in such a manner that, while they come into being and pass away, it neither undergoes any increase or diminution nor suffers any change."
(ibid. pp. 93-94)

I need not labour the point further. We children of the European Enlightenment will have to lay down many of our prejudices before we can read Plato or Plotinus with some deeper perception. Religion and Philosophy were never so easily separable, neither in the Indian tradition nor in the Greek or Alexandrian or West Asian traditions. It is true that some tried to separate them in many traditions, but with no great success.

III. Seminar And Dialogue

I wish to make just one other point at this stage. And that is something which rises out of what my cochairman, Prof. John Mayer said last evening. In this Seminar, our primary purpose is not so much the pure advancing of academic scholarship, but a genuine common search for that wisdom which illuminates and redeems us out of our present darkness. That illumination will come only as we come out of our cultural isolation and seek to learn, from each other, from our own deeper selves, and from the common fount of truth, wisdom, beauty and goodness. We have, in this Seminar also, occasionally to stop purely discursive and critical thinking in which we stand outside the Reality we are trying to understand, and, in Heideggerian terms, to wait in the clearing to hear the Call of Being.

Religion, which produces both dogma and ritual in abundance, can by dogma and ritual obscure Being. But so can Philosophy. It is easy for Philosophy to slip into the critical-discursive and stay there. That is what has happened to most philosophy, in India as well as elsewhere. Both Religion and Philosophy, either separately or together, have acted as divisive forces.

I see a great need in India as well as elsewhere in two different directions; both of which are important.

First intellectuals in general are looking for a way to transcend the demeaning parochialisms of ideologies and religions; they would yearn with all their heart for something which touches their deepest core and gives their lives some significance, in this increasingly hopeless welter of violence and confusion, terror and mindlessness, religious hatred and fanatic politics, to find some meaning for their own personal existence. The "secular" ideology has gone sour for too many people. The religions sometimes scare them with their fanaticism and narrowness.