6 - Plato and yoga

Summary

Plato and South Asian yogic traditions espouse various soteriological goals – divinisation, nirvāṇa, the identity of ātman and brahman, and yogic aloneness (kaivalya) – but their prescribed methods for attaining them present striking similarities. In addition to right living and right beliefs, meditation and contemplation are valorised as essential means for the deconstruction of the empirical person. While the importance ascribed to such practices is widely recognised in South Asia, the prominent intellectualism of the Platonic dialogues and of Plato scholars has obscured the existential centrality of the practice of inwardness and tranquillity for philosophers who aspire to ‘become as like god as possible’ (Theaet. 176b1–2). The goal of this chapter is to highlight this dimension of the Platonic way of life by demonstrating affinities with South Asian meditative praxis.

Platonists and Indian yogins embrace a way of life that integrates cognitive and affective aspects of human nature on a path that eliminates ignorance and suffering through the purification and simplification of consciousness. In Pierre Hadot's formulation, Greek thinkers practised the art of living as

a concrete attitude and determinate life-style, which engages the whole of existence. The philosophical act is not situated merely on the cognitive level, but on that of the self and of being. It is a progress which causes us to be more fully, and makes us better. It is a conversion which turns our entire life upside down, changing the life of the person who goes through it. It raises the individual from an inauthentic condition of life, darkened by unconsciousness and harassed by worry, to an authentic state of life, in which he attains self-consciousness, an exact vision of the world, inner peace and freedom.

I shall begin with the general principles that underlie Indian yogic practices.

• The highest knowledge cannot be conveyed via the written word, but rather must be transmitted orally, or even in silence, from teacher to pupil in conjunction with the practice of meditation.

• Psychology is equivalent to cosmology: the hierarchy of states of consciousness parallels precisely the basic structure of the cosmos.