https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Fragments_of_Parmenides
http://philoctetes.free.fr/parmenides.pdf
https://thedawnwithin.com/on-parmenides/
https://www.stillnessspeaks.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/ParmenidesOnReality.pdf


The thing that can be thought and that for the sake of which the thought exists is the same; for you cannot find thought without something that is, as to which it is uttered. And there is not, and never shall be, anything besides what is, since fate has chained it so as to be whole and immovable. Wherefore all these things are but names which mortals have given, believing them to be true—coming into being and passing away, being and not being, change of place and alteration of bright colour.

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Translations vary but all point to a considerable depth of insight. I will translate myself if/when my Greek gets good enough. 

Yes! Well spotted! The cultural significance seems to elude many people.

You might be interested in this paper:

https://www.academia.edu/473335/Parmenides_road_to_India

I think you have to sign up to download the paper but it is free.

Parmenides’ road to India
by Ferenc Ruzsa
Summary
Parmenides‘ philosophy is unique in the history of ideas in Europe, but it has a
striking parallel in India, from about the same age. The unchanging Absolute,
called ‗Being‘ or ‗Existent‘ś the depreciation of everyday objects as mere ‗names‘ś
and the construction of the empirical world out of elements called ‗forms‘ are all
found in the first text of the Sadvidyā (ChƗndogya Upaniṣad VI. 1-7). Comparing
details and taking into consideration other old Indian material this paper tries to
prove that convergence of thought or parallel development is out of the question –
there must have been actual contact. Also it suggests that the most probable
scenario is that Parmenides travelled to India, learned the language and some
important philosophical texts, and brought them back to Greece.

 Nice! (edit: though I just don't believe Parmenides is unique at all, but has had a massive influence on man y aspects of western culture, that are just currently distorted and forgotten. I also do n't believe the Parmenides just travelled to india story at all.)

People may be interested in checking out Peter Kingsley's work on this, too... "In the dark places of wisdom" is about Parmenides. 

I think there was enough exchange going on between Greece and India to explain it without a physical visit. The Buddha himself mentioned Greece in a talk so it's not surprising for some ideas to be shared. 

Why couldn't these similarities simply be because if one pays attention closely enough, they discover the nature of their reality? 

I prefer that version than diffusionism/perennialism ;)

(edit: This was in response to Chris' above message, "Why couldn't these similarities simply be because if one pays attention closely enough, they discover the nature of their reality?")

They could be, but one wonders why these discoveries (Parmenides and the Buddha) both happened at around 500 BCE. If they were independent discoveries, which happen every time a person looks carefully at experience, it would be natural to find the same discovery scattered throughout history and geography in cultures that were not in contact with each other. When the same discovery happens in two communicating cultures at around the same time, memetic spread, in the same manner as technologies like iron and chariots, will be the first assumption. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_Age

Remember that agriculture appeared independently in seeral places across the world. Cultivating the mind and seeing the nature of reality seems to be on an even more fundamental/universal basis, in my view. You wrote "If they were independent discoveries, which happen every time a person looks carefully at experience, it would be natural to find the same discovery scattered throughout history and geography in cultures that were not in contact with each other" : well this is what happened, many other cultures have had the insights expressed by Parmenides and e.g. the Heart Sutra, including before these people existed, beyond these two figures. Even the Buddha clearly stated he just rediscovered an "Ancient path" (see SN 12:65 — " It’s just as if a man, traveling along a wilderness track, were to see an ancient path, an ancient road, traveled by people of former times. He would follow it. Following it, he would see an ancient city, an ancient capital inhabited by people of former times, complete with parks, groves, & ponds, walled, delightful. He would go to address the king or the king’s minister, saying, ‘Sire, you should know that while traveling along a wilderness track I saw an ancient path.... I followed it.... I saw an ancient city, an ancient capital... complete with parks, groves, & ponds, walled, delightful. Sire, rebuild that city!’ The king or king’s minister would rebuild the city, so that at a later date the city would become powerful, rich, & well-populated, fully grown & prosperous. In the same way I saw an ancient path, an ancient road, traveled by the Rightly Self-awakened Ones of former times. [...])



(edited twice)

Martin, I would guess that this insight, this deeper-than-normal version of reality, has indeed been "discovered" time and again by many cultures worldwide. It takes a bit of work to see it, of course, but stories describing similar things appear all over at various times in history. I don't find the periodic confluence surprising. It could be due to cross-communication in this case, but then again, maybe it's not.

Interesting, free book related to all this: History of non-dual meditation methods.

I am skeptical of parallelism and our contemporary cultures affinity for it. I think this idea that everybody gets to invent everything equally is often a useful way to explain away cultural connections through history that we don't yet have sufficient evidence for. It's a useful way to round out patchy maps. I accept a certain amount of parallelism does actually happen but in my empirical observation of reality diffusion of information is much more prevalent.

I think that (pitchforks out) the life story we have regarding the Buddha is mostly makey uppy. I have always thought it likely that he had a teacher and that there were other people around teaching this stuff. Maybe parallel developments, maybe diffusion but I do have a strong suspicion that there have been people around exploring this stuff for a considerable amount of time. The Buddha did a great job of formalizing the practice and then that got written down and institutionalized and preserved. His life story and the various approaches he attempted does read a bit like “here are all the contemporary approaches to life which do not lead to the end of suffering”

That being said, there must be some neurological circuitry that underpins awakening, that can be accessed by the investigation of suffering, so I thiink you can make a reasonable argument that certain humans will have stumbled upon this down the centuries. 

How many times might the dharma have popped up without it being carried down to us in an unbroken lineage? 

Throughout Plato's work he is very clearly lamenting the loss of something very important. Basically the loss of what people like Parmenides were doing. Socrates is most likely an attempt by Plato to resurrect these guys in dialogue. Which, y'know, indicates to me there was a broken lineage there. I think it was clear to Plato that something had been lost. An aspect of the "pre-socratic" wisdom had not been transmitted and thus the Greeks were losing their way. This is another aspect of the work of someone like Plato that we tend to gloss over. 

  
Peter Kingsley looks cool. He was referenced in Theurgy Theory and Practice, which is a far more academic work than the title lets on. Super interesting. I’ve picked up a few of kinglseys pdfs. 

Greek is a profoundly dynamic and phenomenologically useful language. The only languages I have seen that have the same depth of phenomenology when it comes to describing altered states are Sanskrit and Pali. These are people who knew their altered states. This is an iimportant point to make because we are still struggling to integrate the information that we have textual and archaeological evidence that there was drug fuelled sex magic at the heart of the mystery traditions. The same practices that influenced people from Pythagoras down to Marcus Aurelius. 

A book worth giving an honorable mention is Hellenic Tantra by Gregory Shaw. I despise the title, only because the word has been stretched so broadly at this point it barely means anything, but the work itself is rather awesome. He’s attempting, I believe correctly, to recontextualise the Theurgic practice of people like Iamblichus as something similar to eastern Tantric practices. I think the title comes from some academic who was insulting his work and he decided to just roll with it.


Olivier, I can't seem to access that book. 404

Hi Bahiya

I think Siddharth Gautam acknowledged the idea that understanding of suffering and achieving the end of suffering had been and will be accomplished by many people, independent of any teacher or teaching - including himself.

He calls such people pratyeka Buddhas. The defining characteristic being that such individuals figure it out for themselves but due to a lack of motivation do not build their own schools or lineages, and do not actively seek to teach. Thus they dont have a pedagogy, let alone a pedagogy that survives millenia.

If such a person were to create a pedagogy hypothetically, there is no reason that it will even resemble Gautam's pedagogy in atleast its superficial presentation.

It's interesting to me that this fits with the Indic tradition of rishis and other people with the time and the motivation going off by themselves to meditate, perform austerities, and generally work things out by themselves. When the Buddha said that others had figured this out before him, that was very much in keeping with the culture and the cosmology of that place and time. This contrasts with the various monotheistic traditions which are more about divine revelation. 

Just a few questions:

1. Do you really believe that deep knowledge of reality is an invention?
2. Is the ability to discover the deeper truth of reality a cultural phenomenon, or is it related to being human?

JMHO, there are ideas and inventions that are common in the world due to communication, travel, and the like. Then there are discoveries, like the deep understanding of reality that awaits people who put dedicated effort into examining the self to find out what reality is. I don't think this discovery requires communication or travel among cultures.





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Yeah, so you do seem some similarities with how like animals evolve across the earth (eyes have evolved a couple different times independently for example), and with some technology like the bow and arrow was independently reinvented as well. However, I would strongly caution against using those as positive examples in that case, because these are mostly solutions that are solving a material/physical problem (like how all cars kinda look the same these days cause all the manufactures use the same wind tunnels).

I think the same spiritual transformations get rediscover by monks and meditators and what not across the world. But at the end of the day, the things like DO, 5 aggregates, and all the Buddha's spiritual teaching are empty - meaning in this sense they are just *one* framework for making sense of everything. And if you look at the spiritual scene of the Buddha, it's clear he managed to communicate his mystical revelations in the preexisting Indian framework. (Right, but contrast this with say Jesus, who talks about inner demons for example). But there's no reason to suspect that other traditions will use similar language or concepts at all.

In fact, I'd argue the opposite. I think that because the language and concepts are so familiar, that itself is evidence that it is probably Buddhist in origin. Like we know Buddhism made it to Greece at some point pretty early, and we also know Buddhism was empirically very good at spreading around the world. And if Parmenides was actually the one outlier guy talking about all of this, I think its more likely he was copying his homework.

Specific methods are one thing, but let us not confuse the various  maps available for the actual territory. There are likely to be many ways to find the nature of reality. The territory is the human mind; raw and untouched by ideas and cultures. How the mind interacts with stimuli, how what we experience arises. That's what this is about. 

We all have mind. Everything comes from that, independent of location, time, culture, ideation.

This is a good point, and one that I hadn't thought of before. Buddhism has, indeed, proved to be a very robust and infectious meme. One of the reasons for this could be because it is "true," which is to say because it comports well with observations. In that way, it could be like a discovery that was soon popularized, like [edit: the laws of] gravity. 

 I have often said before that there seems to be an innate neurological component to awakening. Which is my way of saying that it's there whether or not Buddhism or the Buddha, or anyone else, ever existed. 

So I can agree that the capacity for awakening is innate and not dependent on teaching I just also think it is difficult and unlikely that many could arrive at it without some culture, some lineage or some assistance in doing so. 

The greater context of pointing at someone like Parmenides and saying "This looks like the dharma" is that Parmenides is a hugely significant philosopher and of massive importance to people like Plato and therefore the ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Christians, the Jews and so on. That the only surviving text from the man considered to be the "Father of logic" and/or "The father of metaphysics" is for all intents and purposes a non-dual (well, you know what I mean) revelation is really a rather beautiful thing. It's not important to me in the sense that he got it from the Buddha or the Buddha got it from him, it's important to me because, well it's cool, but also because it allows us to see grains of deep insight in the bedrock of western culture. And... most importantly, and there are many more people getting on this particular train, it allows us to more broadly recontextualize Greek philosophers and their works, as it seems they may not all be as dualistic as we have been interpreting them. 

For years there has been a subtle disregard of the archaeological and textual evidence that a lot of these philosophers were doing drug fuelled magic rituals. Which, y'know, communicates a willingness to engage in sense experience as a means to gain insight into the truth of reality, as opposed to reliance on pure reason. Which is, once again, cool, but also important philosophically because it's not how we've been interpreting them and it's not generally been the focus of Western philosophy. I have a decent understanding what people mean when they use the word "reason" but is it the same thing that someone like Parmenides meant when "Wherefore all these things are but names which mortals have given, believing them to be true".
 

History of Non-dual Meditation Methods in Spanish...

Maybe find the english vertsion directly here, it should be accessible... You'll like it!

When you start looking at western culture through the lense of "oh, it always contained stuff as deep as Parmenides, it's not just this one guy in asia 2500 years ago", then you start to see so many clues...
 

Absolutely, Bahiya. Once the nature of our deep reality is discovered, communication and teaching are the keys to distribution and replication. 

So I suppose it really is the western Dhamma then through and through