tified with the self, picked out of these texts some 30 to 40 generations later
by highly abstract Advaita philosophers, is only one of many elements in a
morass of competing and, for the most part, pluralistic worldviews. The
non-Vedic sages in the same period make themselves the center of debate by
transmuting these world ingredient discussions onto the level of coherent
systems of abstract concepts. Rivals at the time of the Buddha propound
various cosmologies of four elements, or seven; still further unification occurs
by focusing on a thread that runs through all the world components, karma
or fate. Gautama Buddha captures the center of the attention space by sys-
tematizing the various world ingredients into a chain, grouping together psy-
chological and physical elements into the aggregations (skandas) which make
up the world of experience. There is now an antithesis between a world-tran-
scending “ultimate ingredient” (nirvana) and the constituents of the world
itself, bridged by rising to the level of a master concept, causality, ordering the
relations of constituent parts.
The center of action in the intellectual community has now shifted to an
abstract philosophical discourse, even if it remains surrounded for centuries
longer by mythology in the Buddhist sutras, the Hindu Puranas and epics.
Metaphysical and eventually logical and epistemological issues arise, leading
into the second of our sequences. Cosmological issues however can also con-
tinue for a long time, and in some respects the world ingredient sequence is
never outdated. There is a borderline between world ingredient cosmology and
more analytical metaphysical questions; for a long period the chief Buddhist
and Hindu schools—the various factions of Abhidharma scholasticism, of
Samkhya and Vaisheshika—proceed from systematizing lists of world ingredi-
ents. In another direction, the search for world ingredients takes the form we
may call empirical science (although not its rapid-discovery version); doctrines
such as the chakra scheme of medical physiology and systems of astrological
divination mix explanations of the material world with occultism and magic.
In Greece, mythologies are systematized into a pantheon by Homer and
Hesiod. The nature-function gods are already a cosmological classification
system, and Hesiod’s genealogies are a version of causal sequence among world
elements. The discussion that breaks out in the generation of Thales now
directly expounds the originating or primal elements by reinterpreting myths
or postulating basic substances. The lineup of competing ingredients, as in
India, is conceptually motley: water, air, fire, number, the unbounded, together
with various notions of natural transformations in the vein that “all things are
full of gods.” Three generations after Thales there is a break to abstract
metaphysical conceptions with Heraclitus and Parmenides, leading into the
epistemological sequence.
The Greeks traverse the cosmological sequence rapidly, arriving at the802 •^ Meta-reflections