Jain Journal 1967 04

Author(s): Jain Bhawan Publication
Publisher: Jain Bhawan Publication

Page 97

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JAIN JOURNAL
the picture of a typical oriental seer far removed from the Greek rationa. lism. Sheldon Cheney has nicely said that Pythagoras was "at once the most spiritual of Greek philosophers and the most philosophical of Greek religious leaders."
Pythagoras was born on the Island of Samos about 580 B.C. and was the most active about 530 B.C. when he gave his name to an order of scientific and religious thinkers. He adopted freely from the mystery faiths of Greece but he adopted much more from many other sources, mostly from the Ionean teachers such as Thales and Anaximander and spent about twenty years with Egyptian seers. He may have gone as far as Babylon and India. The historically important part of his career begins with his migration to Crotona, a Dorian colony in southern Italy about the year 530 B.C. According to tradition, he was driven from Samos by the tyranny of Polycrates. At Cretona, he established his school and brotherhood from which Pythagorianism spread all over the colonies and even to the mainland of Greece.
The Pythagorean brotherhood had much in common with the Orphic communities which sought by rites and abstinences to purify the soul of the believer so that it would escape from the "wheel of birth". Conduct (cāritra), not faith or learning, was the test of membership. The basic aim of the brotherhood was consonance with God for which the strict observance of rules of abstinence and conduct was the most inescapable means. The school at Crotona was perhaps the earliest residential university in Europe.
The Pythagorians were, however, the supporters of aristocracies which created many political enemies against the brotherhood. It was this which in the end led to the dismemberment and suppression of the brotherhood. The first reaction was led by Cylon which resulted in the retirement of Pythagoras to Metapontum where he remained until his death in 496 B.C. The order was, however, powerful in Magna Graecia until the middle of the fifth century B.C. when its meeting-houses were sacked and burned and the order was violently trampled out. Those who survived from these stormy events moved out elsewhere carrying with them the teachings of their master. For a time, the noted Pythagoreans, Lysis and Philolaus in particular, lived at Thebes and it was the latter who wrote, according to tradition, the first systematic exposition of the Pythagorean system. Later, some of the Pythagoreans returned to Italy where Tarentum became the chief seat of the school. A split, however, occurred in the school, there being mathematicians, on the one