In the summer of 327 BC, Alexander the Great led his army towards India. The army was bloated with booty from years of campaigning, most recently in Afghanistan, so bloated that before reaching the Khyber Pass Alexander destroyed his own loot and the loot of his friends – and ordered his men to do the same. The invasion had to be seen to have higher aims than just self-enrichment.
Like many large-scale butchers of humanity, Alexander took great care to burnish his public image (see 336 BC: Alexander meets Diogenes (who is not in the least impressed), and asserted that his empire was of great benefit to those who submitted to his rule. Carried along in his court were various tame philosophers who were expected to portray the course of conquest in a high-minded rhetorical frame. The philosophers included three big hitters: the renowned sceptic Pyrrho; Anaxarchus, who is supposed by some to have recommended that Alexander be worshipped as a god (Cicero says Anaxarchus subsequently annoyed a tyrant who had him pestled to death in a large mortar); and Onesicritus, a former pupil of Diogenes.
After a rebellion against Alexander by a local Indian prince, Plutarch records that he interrogated 10 wise men who had apparently encouraged the rebellion. These men were obviously regarded by the natives as holy and, disconcertingly, travelled about in the nude.
Alexander gave the strange men 10 questions to answer: getting one wrong question meant they all would die. The 10 questions and answers became famous and may belong originally to the realm of proverbial wisdom. Number 3 is one of the best known: ‘what is the craftiest animal?’; the answer being ‘the one that has not been found by man yet’. Alexander was impressed with the answer, rewarded the 10 men and gave them their freedom, and asked Onesicritus – as a follower of Greece’s most eccentric sage, he must have seemed appropriate – to find out more (some sources say Alexander actually executed these annoying sages, but packing them off with gifts is more typical of what Alexander wanted people to think of him).
The name given by the Greeks to these wandering holy men was ‘gymnosophist’, from ‘gymnos’, naked, and ‘sophist’, knowledge, but establishing just who these ‘gymnosophists’ actually were turns out to be not an easy question to answer definitively. Though sometimes also referred to as ‘Brahmans’ by Greek contemporaries and later historians it now seems very likely that the gymnosophists were either Ajikvas or Jains: these and other long-established religious groups such as Buddhists had many sects, but were usually both ascetic and vegetarian, and believed that violence was counter-productive.
The Greeks were fascinated by the parallels between these holy men and their own traditions. Greeks too liked nudity if it was among young men, especially at athletic exercises or contests, and Onesicritus was able to tell the holy men that many Greeks back home held the same or similar beliefs: 200 years previously Pythgaoras had taught the transmigration of souls, and had been a vegetarian (indeed Onesicritus’ own master Diogenes had been a vegetarian). Pythagoras and Indian wise men such as the Buddha had been contemporaries (and were also contemporaries of Zoroaster, Lao-Tzu and Confucius among others – it was a heady age), so naturally people theorised that ideas had moved from east to west or west to east, but possibly all were drawing on older beliefs and practices (see c.264 BC: Ashoka meets Nigrodha).
What Happened Next
After an unprecedented mutiny from his men (possibly still sore at having had to destroy their loot) Alexander headed home in 325 BC, but didn’t make it. He died of fever in Babylon in 323 BC. The philosophers returned home with confirmation of an ancient parallel world in which men thought much the same as men in civilised Greece. As Tristram Stuart says in The Bloodless Revolution (2006), the impact of Indian religious and philosophical traditions on the west was to deepen much later, and the traditions were highly influential on Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire and Rousseau. Vegetarianism, for example, could by the 17th century be seen as a way of life with a long philosophical tradition behind it.
The gymnosophist approach to clothes (seen as a bad thing) made a surprising comeback in the late 19th and early 20th century, with a growing interest in naturism in the west, an interest that grew despite the differences in climate between India and Europe. The movement inspired a lot of dippy (in every sense) movies showing happy, naked young Aryans throwing beachballs at each other, but actually seems to have began among Brits living in India, who in 1891 founded a group called ‘the Fellowship for the Naked Trust’. The founder of the wiccan religion, Gerald Gardner, was a prominent member of the New Gymnosophist Society, and established a club in the 1920s especially for wiccan gymnosophists where they could perform their rituals ‘sky-clad’, a term borrowed from Indian ascetics. Such western interpretations of gymnosophy (for better or worse) laid the foundations for the hippy era of the 1960s.