greece, the final frontier? 155
imagined Indian wise men.^114 The holy women—Semnaí—who remain
virgins, may either be Buddhist or Jain nuns.^115 Semnoí is at the same
time a formal rendering of Middle Indic samaa “an ascetic” and
a folk-etymological interpretation of the latter (Greek semnós carries
the same meaning “venerable” as the Sanskrit term arhat indicating
the highest rank in Buddhist monastic hierarchy). Then, in the third
instance, Clemens mentions a group called Samanaîoi living among the
Bactrians.^116 Again samaas, and here it is more likely the Buddhists
speci cally who are intended, although Hindu sects had also spread
to Central Asia.^117 Clemens’ inability to connect these different pieces
of information with each other and to distinguish between Jains and
Buddhists, makes it doubtful that Clemens knew a lot about a separate
religious entity called “Buddhism” in India, let alone in the West. In
general, however, a typical religious disposition would make a Christian
much more receptive to doctrinal differences in foreign groups than a
pagan Greek would be. He would also be less slavishly bound to the
classical literary Graeco-Roman tradition, which had established as the
great authorities on India the Alexander-historians and Megasthenes,
neither of whom clearly refers to Buddhism as a separate sect or religion.
Sylvain Lévi considered this traditionalism as one of the main reasons
for the silence on Buddhism in classical literature.^118 In this connec-
tion, one possible pre-Christian reference to Buddhists, that has gone
unnoticed till now, should be mentioned. The Pedanoí are an Indian
community about whom Nicolaus Damascenus, a Greek historian and
philosopher of the rst century BC, says that they have no hereditary
of ciants, but choose the wisest man among themselves to preside over
their religious activities.^119 With the name of this community one may
compare Middle Indic padhna, pahna, Sanskrit pradhna “principal,
chief, head, leader” and conclude it does not so much refer to a people,
as to their pastor. Indeed, each Buddhist community of monks elected
its own abbots in rotation.
(^114) Cf. Christol 1984, p. 39; Karttunen 1997, p. 58.
(^115) Benz 1951, pp. 181–182.
(^116) Stromata 1.75.71.4.
(^117) Litvinskij 1998, p. 178.
(^118) Lévi 1891, pp. 212–213; cf. Halbfass 1988, p. 15.
(^119) Handed down by Paradoxographus Vaticanus, Admiranda 5.42 (43) and Johannes
Stobaeus, Anthologia 3.9.49.