scholar he lectures at rice university lives a great deal of the time here in new york city and he's been involved in in philology and also in art and he has a book that's out recently relatively recently which is you just inform me  companies maybe thirty seven years of continuous research in this area has current next green really interesting book that we want to let you see now and it's called the shape of ancient flawed and what's the subtitle town comparative studies in greek and indian philosophy you see it's really interesting the a comparison between the east and the west in the certain sense and i want to just maybe not parent that occleve but interesting because he's got interested in art there's another book that's out these are both by all worth press here in new york city and this one is called sculpture what now sculpture in the age of doubt sculpture in the age of doubt so you're interested in sculpture and he's right on that so i just want to let people take a look at that that's also out in the bookstores now and thomas walking very much hello pleasure to be here it's a great pleasure to welcome i said i saw you on the television program just recently and was very happy to be able to put this together we want to talk about the connections between ancient greek  indian cultures and that sort of thing but i want to maybe you could could you share a little of your own background were born raised educated that sort of thing sure and then we can get on to some of the content of the book and its implications to the contemporary scene perhaps good idea was born in it involves the knowledge of foreign languages but in particular philology is a way of analyzing texts which try to break them down into parts and find the cracks and gaps reveal the seams where they were put together so that if you're dealing with the c ancient and traditional texts tended to build up over a period of generations with different parts being edited in later this is how the bible came into existence and this is how most engine texts the most extensive ancient texts that we have in came into existence they accumulated over a series of generations studies of the engine bible is this is part of  to break them down into their constituency and see the forces that went into them to make them up i see so how all is a kind of an analytical and critical approach to text where you don't just accept the text as a given  and believe the way it presents itself you are always so skeptical you don't need she is the ability to detect falshood interesting that is to say if you look at a text with the pre supposition that the people who put this text together might in some degree be trying to put something over on and you try to find the cracks in guy apps that show how they put it together and then penetrate into through them to the background knows their new relationship to etymology or trying to understand the evolution of the language itself or the study of language it doesn't incorporate the study of language in broad general terms as opposed to specialized or philology before ologies not exactly a part of the field of linguistics it's i would say it overlaps with linguistics but it is more  and it has implications to offer today i absolutely i mean it's least the general theme of my book which tends to dissolve the traditional barriers between eastern and western cultures and forms of writing about art and sculpture well sculpture right now the world today ok to extremely broad term you know that includes practically any kind of object you know that artists for the last the in the cultural context that we've been in for the last generation or so any object can you regarded as a sculpture you know this is a tradition that goes back to the french marat franco american artist marcel duchamp who or early in the so that sculpture no longer takes its place alongside let's say painting as one of the two media sculpture is like an almost universal term you name you can include any object friends who were artists and when i began teaching friends such as james lee byers and eric or close friends who were artists asked me to write about their work and it st i was skeptical because that wasn't really my field but i exceeded to their requests and i wrote articles about their work which were published in our forum magazine in one thousand nine hundred and eighty two and from then on it just kind of snowballed and i kept getting more and more requires sin i was drawn increasingly into the field of contemporary art ok during these year perhaps twenty years when i've been professionally engaged primarily in the field of devoted the time more time you know i've written a lot of books yes i can see this is the book that i've devoted more time and effort to than any other far where you've got thirty seven years behind brooks because you had that interest all  reincarnation ism was found in both places in almost identical forms down to details whereas it's not found anywhere else in the world in exactly that form way to me as did the greeks reincarnation is now you see with you see there was a generation of ancient cultures which included classical greece and ancient india which is said some days what are we talking about and we are we know where we are geographically to the indian subcontinent and in the in the greek and we're talking classical we're talking what years and that's well and as we go on i want to try to present to you my idea that there are five different historical layers involved but this malta this cultural interchange although to keep period is about then you see a later generation of culture is a rower which included for example christian and islamic co actor right right they had a different orientation they tended to renounce the doctrine of reincarnation as a result because western culture has grown up primarily as a christian culture we've tended to ignore the fact that the ancient greek philosophers virtually all believe in reincarnation as are the engine videos legally and do include within the christian judeo seems the tradition seems to start with the persian religion judaism christianity and islam are one continuous thread running the history of religion and culture which continue to affect us today out today of all it's still dominant but you got this pill you talk about to compare the indian in the n t and the greek on six hundred b c to two hundred and eighty did you say about that period what you're looking at right now i wonder if we could possibly want to go into that detail because at the summit you were particular the five layers you're talking about are strata but what about prior to that what about the indo european thing and then the language and that and then also could i just do it is not a softening the other day spencer wells do you have the know how i don't know spencer wells a geneticist he did a program on television he got such great things on television but he was tracing genetic markers and he said that we're coming a big movement of people fifty thousand years ago went up and there was an incubation period in kazakhstan and that the people of the europe and to the east and even over into america can be traced by the genetic markers on the y chromosome that he was following and that he could get a sense of the way people moved and so forth but that was a core area in a certain sense for a long period of time many many many thousands of years  but how did the people come to be and what about this thing called the indo european pin that is now the languages and what does that tell us in terms of the ancient pattern of distribution of the human you know the human groups and family well now that you bring up the theme of audience of what i see as the five for storage goal layers that accumulated into this remarkable concurrence of the ancient greek and indian traditions and one thing you know you had this thing christian thing and you went into the nd century and so you've got this greek tradition the hell of it tradition and the indian tradition and how does that fit in nest with the day a christian tradition that really doesn't mater i but not connected really interesting there's a lot of controversy about the there continues in iran and in spots here and there in india but real way when we talk about the connection between ancient greek and indian philosophy is the theme of the very little to do the grieco indian tradition involving the idea of cyclical time and reincarnation ism and so forth seems to go back to the late bronze age seems to be rooted in the ancient have the phenomenon of the into european people in the indian subcontinent in that and what dates are we talking about and that into civilization does that account is that part of the connection with the greco connection and how does that all fit together and i hope i'm not trying to i don't want and metalworking and transportation technology such as the wheel and the sale and international trade and diplomacy all of that is all of those are constituents of what we call civilization is that an ancient civilization in terms of the sub continent cultural centers they were contemporaneous with the indus valley but they were not technically what you know the way historians use the term civil was a shift it can seem a little time of the indus valley cultures it seems there were not any other urbanized and literate culture in that you were in were all and there were a lot of other cultural forms in india but they were not urbanized and literate yeah and we're not sure what the language is i think i saw a reference in dravidian culture and that the language seems to be related to the languages of south india which are today known as dr video down and that would have been korea indo european and then  valley culture or civilization thrived from around three thousand dollars to around two thousand and then it seems to have been terminated by climatic and topographical changes to specifically changes in the courses of certain rivers and which made the centers such as more one hundred daro uninhabitable and the people moved on you know and it's at about that time shortly after two thousand be seen the consensus is yeah and they all seem to go back to a common ancestral language which is known as proto indoeuropean and the proto window european culture is most commonly thought to have been located on the step north of the black and different groups which commenced a period of wandering because during the untold centuries that they lived on the step they had been nomadic pastoral peoples and no i would say all had been other words  the domestication of the horse but in any case so having crossed the caucasus mountains and now finding themselves in this is known of what we call civilization urbanization literacy metallurgy and so on this  o european group since they were broken up into different subgroups which wandered in different directions and in peeping with their nomadic heritage or habits they seem to have wandered for some centuries maybe seven or eight centuries before one fragment of this group ended up descending down the balkan peninsula and becoming the greek soon inhabiting the lower part of the balkan peninsula and another fragment of this group who became known as but there's a lot of controversy about whether those really were indo european speaking peoples because there are they were pretty literate so there's no telling what language they speak but they really i've got this literacy things study down i mean they're really it's really an interesting science and really fascinating and he said that there may have been his few i don't know how the hell they could come up with a thing but there could have been as few in horrendously difficult situations as ten who came across the  what many people believe in these two groups at the time of the original migration they must have spoken to either the same language or closely related dialects in the same language ok but then there ensued this period of seven or eight hundred years of quasi i know magic wandering before they settled down in their new homes in greece on the one hand and north west india or modern day pakistan on the other and during those seven or eight hundred years veda which is the st great document of the sanskrit language you know is regarded as having been kind of finalized or froze and although possibly not written down nevertheless finalized in a certain form between european linguistic way and you know there was this famous idea that you're language to a certain extent dictates the way you think and feel gas something to say well you know you would think about you would know about this yeah i think no doubt less so than the f for example that indo european languages place a very heavy emphasis on the noun would lead to a could lead to a situation where peoples who spoke those languages tended to think that things had real boundaries and definitions beginning of the real content of my book ok sorry so i just let you go so that after these did also interest everyone i know it's not so fascinating we should have several hours after these two groups separated after the migration for down from the step both of them seem to have spent a significant amount of time in the ancient near east where they picked up significant influence from ancient especially from ancient  there's a lot of evidence which is reviewed in the rd chapter of this book both the greek and indian numerology is of the cyclicity of time came from enc may have had a myth of cyclical time which then disseminated or diffused into both greece and india interest so this type of thing would be the nd layer st there was there in the european origin then there was a common origin then comm the rd layer of these five layers of commonality between these two monumentally great ancient culture is was in the later years that we're talking about talking about the th century b c this was in this was the persian empire this was the socratic philosophy originated in the th century b c ok in the th century b c east greece was conquered by the persian empire and out into it and in the same century northwest india where many important elements of indian of the same polity they existed under the same government the government of the persian empire they had constant intercourse in the persian imperial centers the st chapter of my book goes into this material in detail that there were  diplomats are to sins merchants physicians philosophers court decisions people of all different professions and all different levels of society were gathered from the bounds of the persian empire into the great centers of the persian imperial power and it was commerce all the way from the indus to the east and greece not at that time no probably not at that time that comes in  the th layer but in the rd layer you see this is the period now what i devote several chapters in book to and is the idea that through the medium of the persian empire a very significant amount of indian ideas came into greece and really more or less precipitated what we call pre socratic philosophy really in other words i see it that period i see india being the source and greece as being the receiver always i know and i get especially harold because you see in our western tradition we've come to regard the pre socr that is bloated and kind of new and they've got a big commitment to this idea of a core set of values that are really going to be brought to all the world and are ours that we will bring to the world and there's a certain kind of non dialectic quality to say understanding of the world hard for western scholars to accept the idea that pre socratic philosophy was in large part disseminated from india you know because you see the colonial agenda required that the western coloniz nations in the seminal absolutely that they be the beginning and that they be bestowing the gift of civilization on these non western and to be frank about it non white skinned people because it does seem and this is something else that is discussed in detail in the st and last chapters of the book and it does seem that the colonial project ural colonialism when the western  there's a famous passage in which he said that nonwhite peoples have contributed nothing to civilization but the civilization is entirely the product of white people yeah so i think this was perceived as a justification for the colonial project out of the white man's burden the white man's burden was to carry civilization to nonwhite peoples and force them to carry their law share of the burden of civilization a bit like some contemporary foreign policy initiative it certainly does to me it certainly does now let me since of whether certain ideas natively developed in greece or whether they natively developed in india or whether they natively develop in both places and the general conclusion yes that i've come true in a number of chapters is that there are to lead to a cyclical view of time because this in force is the idea of oneness because things keep happening over and over again same way and the idea of the cyclicity of time tends to bring with it the idea of reincarnation or in syria in the end the idea of the transformation of the elements into one another in a cyclical way this body of ideas i call the moaners and complex in my general conclusion in the st nine or chapters or so of the book is that the monism complex was diffused from india into is the alexandrian empire ok when i was starting in our around three hundred and thirty b c the macedonian led coalition conquered the persian empire right and they went into prominent in buddhist became very prominent in the development of buddhism there's a lot about this in the book so that it after the alexandrian concord as we had this situation where there were greek and north west india some of which seem to have lasted for as long as maybe four hundred years and they were parts of the indian community at the same time that they maintain contact with the eastern mediterranean and with their greek roots so that at this time there would have been a nd major period of intercourse i mean it seemed likely that there were for example in these greek settler colonies in bactria north west was regarded as a kind of a nonsense syllable that suggested the way people who didn't speak the barbarian yeah yeah yeah so that during the alexandrian period and its aftermath where there was this gre dynasty called the youth the demon dynasty that actually maintained significant power in not only bactria but northwest india and even north central india for a period of a couple  sail from only one of the red sea ports for india every year there was another red sea port so if we doubled maybe five hundred dollars ships a year and going from the graeco roman world into india and coming back with indian goods and you know all of the ship captains whose names are known were greek and greek books went along this route and in this period this is the period you see the alexandrina roman period the th and th layer general direction of diffusion seems to have been from india into the ground world yeah but starting with the alexander in period and culminating in the roman empire the shape of direction reverse influence began to go from western philosophical schools into indian philosophical and one can trace this very closely into many chapters in the latter half of this book are devoted to that but here's the interesting thing is that see the early period when the direction of diffusion was primarily from india into agrees what seems to have travelled were these major idea such as monet ism cyclicity and reincarnation and so on which maintained their position as central topics of philosophy of the content of philosophy for a one thousand years templates like but then in the later period when  s deep contents were developed this seems to have been when the formal process ease of logic and dialect they were diffused from the eastern mediterranean into india and one can see them appearing  in indian schools at certain times and converting of the the methodology again there's a lot of detail about this in the book so in other words in terms of the general shape of this thousand year long diffusion process i see it as essentially a kind of circular st there was this major input from india into greece and then there was this major input back from greece from greek or roman culture into india and diverse period the input from indian to greece was primarily concerned with the content of philosophy in the nd period the period of diffusion from the greek or roman world back into india was primarily concerned with essential to the western tradition all the way down to heidegger and maybe beyond and yet at the same time the formal methodologies developed by the graeco roman schools and have maintained their primacy you both in in a world where the neo liberal thing has been taken over by the neoconservatives now and they're going to go alleviate leo straus and this kind of thing that they have a philosophy that seems their mission as one of bringing a certain kind of rooted seminal values to this whole world that they're going to impose does it have relevance in terms from these ancient like connections and so forth well what lessons do we draw from this ancient experience that have relevancy to the do a political pattern as we look out on our world today well i do think there's a lot a lot of connection and relevance but you see one major difference is that the ancient greek colonies that were left in india were as you said settler colony they were not simply in there to exploit the economic resources and then get out they were in there to become a part of the community and contribute to a constructively permanently where is the british empire head banished and yeah sure hearts again they all had a contempt for the idea of going native in other words they were anti assimilation west india they converted to buddhism is a matter of fact several of the great teachers of ancient buddhism who were responsible for converting tens of thousands of people were greeks greek teacher administration keeps saying that they respect islam and so on and then they regarded as a religion in a culture of peace and civilization and so on still i do wonder one has to have the feeling that their basic assumption is that western civilization is the superior model of civilization i don't think it's any doubt right in the end that it is you are no the british called there are colonial enterprise in the nonwhite world and civilizing mission yes that's right it also and i think  whereas to us alone and whereas as you can see i feel that the indian tradition was also not only contributed a great deal to the west but also was very influenced by the greeks and it also contributed to a global context that it might be good for us to be able to have a greater appreciation of the significance of a system's way not only in name of justice but in the name of the efficiency and the need for there to be a sense of the participation of a whole lot of diversity in terms of the operation of the human the idea of the civilizing mission in a revival of the colonial project in a somewhat disguised form you know and as such it does have a lot to do with the subject matter of my book you know that the neo conservative view it hands upon the idea that the great insights of the greek tradition were inherited exclusively by the west by us yeah that's us yeah and in fact what my book argues is not only that they were in part planted from bed in fact they were disseminated back injury and yeah also so that this idea that we are in a position where we are morally justified in launching so called civilising missions into the nonwhite world right seems to doesn't resonate with what's needed is to fundamentalist market fundamentalism is one thing that's another thing that we're getting to influence that it but to lay upon it this idea that you have an ethic that grows out of some sort of  inherently to us only kind of view of the world we use the term usually democracy we use the term that really is a very complex kind of mixture of different kinds of influence and so forth and it's got a certain kind of arrogance to it that i think probably has something to do it a certain level with people who are objecting to that singular unilateral a view of the world and not simply people who are envious of our freedom and prosperity you know  imminent and comes back and blow back with terrorist things of what they were being confronted with all over the world who try to impose our view of the geopolitical notions of our of our of our system as inherently right for everyone i agree with  are major problems it's a major problem and has roots in the in your work of i'm as they absolutely know do we have any minutes left yet we have about five maybe i or four to have let me bring over forty five you bring up one last topic that  very interesting to me and that is the fact that for centuries the western attitude toward indian philosophy has been that it was not really philosophy it was religion or superstition it was not really philosophy you know hey girl said that the western world had come up with the real true philosophy and what passed for philosophy in the non western world was simply types of superstition and root religion  that for several centuries the reality of the history of indian philosophy which is every bit as great as the history of greek philosophy or perhaps of western philosophy as a whole the reality of indian philosophy was excluded from  history of philosophy are going to end in our history of philosophy courses in now after the toward the end of the colonial period which in the euro colonial period officially ended in one hundred and seventy six when the portuguese pulled out of east timor anyway starting in the sixty's western historians of philosophy began to give increasingly recognition to indian philosophy there was a period in the sixty's and seventy's when a book about the history of philosophy might have one chapter on indian philosophy you know there'd be a chapter on descartes is an individual but no then one shot in the whole of india right yeah that's right but recently i've noticed that in books which attempt to comprehensively present the history of philosophy throughout the entire world believe there's much more attention being given to indian thought that is encouraging i think courage and that's international that's international and now it is in books of that sort indian philosophy is given at least as much really and sometimes it's given more edward it should be because the body of texts is much greater all right that's good and that's part of the reality as it were that's part of the and that's a very nice kind of template for us to write out and your book that seems to me to save of ancient thought and let me show people  local bookstore you can always contact all worth press right and all were amazon dot com or amazon dot com they have a name all right they actually have a handsome discount all right as and that's by dr thomas intellectuals and but also the implications of that to the modern world with thank you very much for that and your coming and we really appreciate your coming into our pleasure i'm glad you called me here not at all your pleasure to have had his present from about to come back again next week one more time thomas thanks very much for coming and for the marvelous work thank you see you next week so is it really is good i'm looking forward to reading it i haven't had it's a big book it's huge another big fat tome home has to have been yeah but it's a lot of work goes into the work of love you've been really engaged in your i never expected to make a cent off me and i probably never will and yet i see it meant it remained a continuous thread of my life for thirty seven years and now it's come to fruition it had it seems perhaps we all are but it was a very interesting book is recommended by all and i really thank you for the work that went into doing put together a very important subject in a real and i'm glad about the sculpture thing i want to time to i want to try and see if i can get together with david and i'd love to