Truly there are two primal spirits, twins ...
In thought and word, in act they are two:
the better and the bad.
Thus spake Zarathustra, founder of what Mary Boyce calls “the oldest of the credal (as opposed to ethnic) faiths”, which has been known variously as Mazdaism, Magism, Parsism, “the Persian religion”, and Zoroastrianism. According to a Greek story Pythagoras sat at the feet of the prophet in Babylon, circa 600 bc, but most scholars now think that he must have been around much earlier. Professor Boyce on “the origins of Zoroastrian philosophy” is the first of 48 scholarly essays that make up this latest philosophical leviathan from Routledge. They have been arranged ‐ rather “artificially”, as the editors admit ‐ into six sections, which deal with Persian, Indian, Buddhist, Chinese, Japanese and Islamic philosophy. The editors have supplied a brief introduction to each of the sections. All the contributions end with lists of references or suggestions for further reading. The final 90 pages are devoted to a glossary and an index. A “companion encyclopedia” seems to be a work that aims at being both comprehensive and friendly. The designers have covered the book in swathes of saffron and turquoise, giving it a psychedelic look.
A large proportion of the 49 contributors are professors or research fellows at universities in various parts of Asia. A chapter on “Buddhism in Sri Lanka and south‐east Asia” is co‐authored by the late Trevor Ling and Padmasiri de Silva, who teaches at the National University of Singapore. D.J. O’Connor, who edited a famous Critical History of Western Philosophy[1], contributes the chapter on Avicenna. Oliver Leaman, co‐editor of the Routledge History of Islamic Philosophy and History of Jewish Philosophy (both 1996), writes here on “Islamic philosophy since Avicenna” and on “Logic and language in Islamic philosophy”. Ninian Smart profiles The Buddha. A Buddhist legend maintains that the “buddha‐to‐be” lived as a god in heaven before he appeared in human form, but “gods cannot attain nirvana ... because their glorious life does not permit them to realize the urgency and nature of duhkha (unsatisfactoriness or suffering). It is only humans who can gain the ultimate”.
Exponents of “Lokayata materialism” regarded talk about gods, invisible worlds, and the afterlife as “the product of fantasy or an invention of deceitful priests in order to gain comfortable livelihoods out of a credulous populace”; in their rejection of inference as a source of knowledge they showed an affinity with the thinking of Locke and Hume (“Non‐Orthodox Indian philosophies”). Mao Zedong wrote that “man’s knowledge ... at any given stage of development is only relative truth”, but he seems to have been “prepared when it actually came to disagreement to assert the ‘absoluteness’ of his ‘relative truth’ against others” (“Mao Zedong and ‘Chinese Marxism’’’). The Chinese sage Zhuangzi (369‐286 BC) tried to dissuade his followers from giving him an elaborate funeral by telling them “I will have heaven and earth for my coffin” (“Daoism in Ching philosophy”). D.T. Suzuki expressed the logic of Zen in the formula “A is A because it is non‐A” (“Buddhism in Japan”).
I found what I read of this work fascinating and enlightening, not least on Zoroastrianism. John Hinnells, editor of the New Handbook of Living Religions[2] reports that the Parsi community around Bombay turn out “countless books”; there is a saying “Charity, thy name is Parsi; Parsi thy name is Charity” (“Contemporary Zoroastrian philosophy”). According to an old Iranian myth heaven‐bound souls were met at a bridge by a beautiful girl, who then acted as their guide. Zarathustra taught that what met people there was:
their own daéná, the hypostasis of an inner self which they had made beautiful or ugly by their own conduct, and which then took them up to heaven or down to hell.
