Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece
The ancient Greeks owed a lot to the Indian Philosophy. The Macedonians or the Greeks were the followers of the Egyptinas, who were influenced by the teachings of the Jain. Gymnosophists. The religious history of the Greek, too, show signs of the prevalence of Jain doctrines in their country. Before Alexander was returning back from India after a near revolt in his army he became a follower of a Digambar Jain Acharya and used to sit with him and gain knowledge. He asked the Acharya if he would like to go to Athens with him. The Acharya refused and gave permission to Muni Kalyan of his sangh to go with him. In the city of Athens a temple was constructed and the foot prints of Kalyan Muni were installed as the great teacher of Alexander. Even now it is said that the temple though in ruins still exist with the foot prints of Kalyan Muni. Greek philosophy like Pythogoras, Pyrrho and Plotinus were the chief exponents of the Indian philosophy having gained knowledge from Kalyan Muni.

Of these Pythogoras visited India in the sixth century B.C. and was initiated by the Brahmins and Sramanas in the temples of Ellora and Elephanta and was given the initial title of Yananacharya, or the Lonian teacher. He proclaimed the immortality of Soul and the Doctrine of Transmigration in the manner of the Jains. He advocated and passed a simple life, punctuated with the rules of asceticism- the vow of silence, holding an important place in Jain asceticism being one of them. He condemned meat diet and also use of bens of combination because it becomes the breeding soil of an infinity of microscopic germs which ae destroyed in the process of digestion.

Likewise parrho also seems to have propagated Jain doctrines in Greece. Lacrtius refers to the Gymnosophists and asserts that pyrrho of Elis, the founder of pure scepticism came under their influence and on his return to Elis imitated their habits of life. Pyrroho’s scepticism seems to be a corrupt form of the Jain Doctrine Syadvada, and even the ancient Dionysian’s cult of Greece betrays signs of Jain influence divine, while the body is merely its prison-house, and that it gains unsuspected powers once it is free from the trammels of the body.” The ancient Greeks worshipped nude images like the Jains and their mythology also advocates the self-same teachings of Soul’s potential immortality flesh.

Another visible feature of the spread of Jainsim in Greece is the shrine of Shramanacharya, the naked saint at Athens. Prof .M.S. Rama Swamy Aiyangar rightly remarks that Budhists and Jains Sharmanas went so far as Greece, Rumania, and Norway to preach their respective religions.

source: partly through peepintojainism.com