The idea that Greek philosophy derives its origin from India turns up every now and then. In particular the thinking of Pythagoras and Plato has been thought to contain traces of wisdom learnt from the East by the Greeks, although decisive evidence for such influence is hard to find. Even some of the ancient Greeks themselves believed that philosophy had originally been practiced by the peoples of the East and imported into Greece from there. This is apparent from the very first sentence of Diogenes Laertius’ Vitae philosophorum, which states that “some people” (ἔνιοι) claimed that “barbarians” were the first to practice philosophy and counted the Indian gymnosophistai among the examples of such early philosophers. Diogenes himself does not agree but, after a brief discussion, asserts that “philosophy started with the Hellenes”.

However, at the same time it is Diogenes who provides crucial textual evidence for a possible dependence of a certain Greek philosophical school on the wisdom of Indian sages. In the section on Pyrrhonism/scepticism (9.61) we are told that Pyrrho of Elis, the founder of that school, with his teacher Anaxarchus belonged to Alexander’s entourage. Reportedly, they followed the Macedonian army all the way to northern India and met with Indian gymnosophists and magi. According to Diogenes (or his source, Ascanius of Abdera), this “led him [Pyrrho] to adopt a most noble philosophy” (Hicks’ translation).

In the book under review here, it is Christopher I. Beckwith’s ambition to show that the gymnosophists whom Pyrrho met with were practitioners of an early variety of Buddhism and that the philosophy that Pyrrho began teaching after his return to Greece had been decisively influenced by what he experienced among the Gandhāra philosophers.